A UK SEO

Dead Set is a five part TV series running on E4 this week. It follows the Big Brother house in the middle of a zombie outbreak in the United Kingdom. Ok, whats this to do with SEO?

At the end of the show there were no credits which is rather strange for a TV show. Instead a URL is listed on the screen – www.deadsetcredits.com it was on for all of one second. So if you didn’t catch the URL your going to search in Google for “dead set credits”, “dead set end credits”, but the Dead Set website doesn’t appear at all in the listings.

If your going to advertise online make sure your website ranks for the URL your going to display on the TV and all the variations, without the www’s just the domain, with spaces, without spaces etc. So why doesn’t the Dead Set Credits site rank?

To start www.deadsetcredits.com 301 re-directs to www.e4.com/deadset/credits.html so Google’s not going to index the page. Google has yet to index www.e4.com/deadset/credits.html but when it does they they should start to rank well inheriting the strength of www.e4.com.

But… Google might have a problem with that page. It’s a flash page with the credits scrolling up the page. If you check the source.

<div id="flashcontent">
<h1>Dead Set - E4.com</h1>
The official website of Charlie Brooker's E4 horror series <a href="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer" class="getflash">Get Flash Player 9 to View Deadset</a>
<a href="index2.html" class="htmlversion">html version</a>
<a href="http://www.e4.com" class="gotoe4">e4</a>
</div>

and that H1 is styled up

#flashcontent h1 {
text-indent: -1000000px;
}

So technically the text is hidden (placing the H1 far to the left of the screen), as that text doesn’t appear in the flash file that’s being played it’s breaking Google’s guidelines. If you have a flash file on your site you can place ”hidden” text in the page providing the text is the same as the text in the flash file (you should also do this using the noscript tag and not css styling).

Anyway I fully recommend watching Charlie Brookers Dead Set, I’m a fan of zombie movies and Charlie Brooker, a truly great combination!

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