Even though my Jetta is a source of joy on a near daily basis and the 1.6 liter engine purrs as though it's come fresh off the assembly line, from time to time, I do look at the useful cars from VW's Czech-Brand. It seems that they have finally decided to relaunch their rather antiquated web-appearance. While the design of the new website might be quite pleasing, they made a number of mistakes when it comes to the sites implementation of SEO, which I want to look at more closely in this post, so that others will not repeat them. First, we take a look at the domain's Visibilityindex:



Since the beginning of 2008 there has not been much of a change, sometimes the rating went up a little and then it went down a little, again. All this changed last week: Skoda lost 60% of its visibility - from nearly 6 points down to 2,3 points. If we take a look at the reasons behind this drop, it soon becomes apparent that the relaunch hit the whole website. Besides the few generic search-queries for which skoda.de was formerly in the Top-10 („gebrauchtwagenbörse“ [second-hand car marketplace] from 9 to 19) it is mostly the traffic-strong Brand-keywords that took a dive. The domain fell from position 1 to 11 for „skoda octavia“. When we take a look at the current, daily results for the keyword, we can see that it is still falling: Position 90. We can expect the Visibilityindex to down dramatically once again when the next update comes around. A good example of how the website-operators did not concern themselves with the requirements that the searchengines put forth, can be seen with the switch from „skoda.de“ to „www.skoda.de“. Additionally, with the relaunch, they also added some hurdles which makes it hard for even the most benevolent crawlers to gain access to the content.

Session-IDs
At first, I could not believe it myself, but the people at Skoda seem to think that they cannot forgo the use of session-IDs when presenting cars. Searchengine-crawlers do not get a different treatment, which means that Google has a number of pages with that parameter in its index:


For searchengines, this yields a number of problems: with every new session-ID that the crawler gets fed, every page on the domain gets a new URL, which leads to duplicate-content problems. The calculations for the internal linkage is also affected by this because new links will turn up all the time while the old ones will have vanished.

Pagetitle, choice of words
When your product is commonly known as “Skoda Octavia”, how would you fashion the title of the page depicting that product? Well, Skoda seems to use a rather unconventional method: the title of every page on the domain starts out with “Skoda Auto Deutschland GmbH” and only then will they use variable titles. This means that once we get down to the product-level, you get a title that does not feature “Skoda Octavia” in that order – not once on the whole domain:

And as if that would not be enough, it seems that they also have a problem with putting the correct product-name into the actual text on the page. It might be due to some kind of corporate-design-guidelines when they write: “ŠkodaOctavia Limousine” - yes, exactly, without the space. As a result, Google is unable to correctly match the query, which can be nicely seen when you look at the site's cache.

JavaScript, Flash, 404-status-code
While the first two problems were surely the initial reasons behind the dismal Visibilityindex-ratings, there are a number of other problems with the site that make it hard for searchengines to get to the content. The sitemap for example, which usually is a good starting-point for crawlers to discover the contents of a site, is written in JavaScript and therefore invisible to searchengines. Large parts of the website are dominated by a large Flash-area – the text in that area is usually unreadable for searchengines and will therefore not become part of the evaluation. Another problem is the fact that every URL on the domain will return the statuscode “200”, which means “everything is fine”. This becomes especially apparent with the (nonexisting) robots.txt file, but also tempts others to push non-existing pages into the Googleindex ;-)

It is going to be interesting to see how Google will deal with the domain in the coming weeks. Seeing that Google did not start crawling only yesterday and that they also learned that people will make every possible mistake that can be made, the Google-crawler can deal with most of the mistakes rather well and will usually figure out what the website-operator actually wanted to accomplish. I think that this might happen with Skoda – the domain is just too well linked to as that Google will keep ignoring them indefinitely.