cool hit counter

Are Toyota breaking the Google Webmaster Guidelines?

By James | June 8th, 2007 | Black Hat, Search Engine Optimisation, Google

It might not be malicious, but whilst looking at the Toyota website today I noticed that they may well be breaking the webmaster guidelines (albeit not as blatantly as BMW did).

Their homepage re-directs using javascript (presumably for tracking purposes) but looking at the source, just under the javascript you may notice the following:

<body bgcolor=”#ffffff” >
<br>
<a href=”sitemap.html” style=”color:#FFFFFF”>Site Map</a>
<a href=”fleet_sitemap.html” style=”color:#FFFFFF”>Fleet Site Map</a>

For any of you not fluent in HTML, this means that they have put a link to their sitemap, but in the same colour as the background - which essentially makes it invisible.

Google clearly states the following in their guidelines:

“Avoid hidden text or hidden links”, which is defined as: “Using white text on a white background.”

I can’t see any other reason for Toyota doing this apart from for the search engines’ benefit and whilst it may not be stuffing keywords, it’s still a little naughty….

I’d be interested to see if bending the rules like this will end up getting the car manufacturer banned and wonder why it hasn’t been picked up so far.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

Comments

  1. By Sherwood | June 8th, 2007 at 1:23 pm

    They are indeed - and those sitemaps are keyword-filled, too.

  2. By Craig | June 8th, 2007 at 1:43 pm

    Instead of using server side redirects based on requested URL, they use Javascript for it, which also means that without Javascript enabled, no page!

    But, if one has Javascript disabled they wouldn’t even see the hidden links, of course, so they aren’t really hidden if there is effectively no page.

    As for the CSS hidden links in the initial page after Javascript rewrites almost the entire page, they seem to end up in the footer of the page, which is gray, so they are no longer hidden.

    Is what they are doing an attempt to deceive? I doubt it.

    Is what they are doing smart? Not at all. :-()

  3. By Vygantas | June 8th, 2007 at 2:14 pm

    Good Find, I am bit tired of “big” companies doing nasty things.

  4. By pat | June 10th, 2007 at 7:38 am

    Guidelines? did someone say guidelines????

    HMmmm good catch. It was great meeting you i Seattke, we rock.

  5. By Ciarán | June 11th, 2007 at 7:07 am

    Hi Pat,

    This was actually written by my colleague James. Maybe you should get in touch with Toyota, see if they need ‘walking’ though the guidelines!

    Ciarán