People in Spain, mostly people from the Spanish SEO community, knew the practices of AC Hotels optimizing their webpages. For some reason, nobody mentioned it before the ban. After I post my last article, many of them started saying that they knew about illegal techniques used to optimized pages, but still, very few actually mentioned what were those illegal techniques. Anyway we have seen comments of people literally bashing the hotel chain for “spamming” google, comments which have not been always fair to the chain. For my part, investigating this issue after the ban was a pain as AC Hotels quickly changed the structure of its websites to get back on Google . So if I wanted to back up those theories of illegal practices of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), we had to look at the usual cache systems of Msn, Yahoo, and of the “memory of the web“.

Finally Telendro came up with a proof (a screenshot) of the cloaking. I did my own search and finally found out a similar version of the cloaking Telendro was talking about.

Definition of cloaking: Although there is a lot of debate concerning its definition, the one who has the power to ban or penalize should be the one we should listen to. So Google says:

• Quality guidelines – basic principles

Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”

I actually found it in archive.org. I have changed a little bit its source so people can see the links (without being redirected to the flash site). If you click on the screenshot below it will send you to the html of their cloaking page, full of keywords, cross linking (to their other websites) but also to 2 sites owned by their web designer/SEO company! (I also removed the link of the flash content).

This is the version for the Search Engines (click to see html source):

And here is the version for normal visitors:

• Why does Google remove sites from the Google index?

However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text in such a way that it can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in removal from our index.

Flash is not SEO friendly but flash can be indexed by Google. If you are not really convinced please try this command:

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&q=filetype%3Aswf+%22ac+hotels%22&btnG=Search

As a matter of fact, Google is able to read and index .swf files. Unfortunately, in practice, Google’s indexing and browsing of .swf is far less than successful and SEO companies need to use tricks to index entire flash website. One those technique is to create a html site for the spiders when the actually see the flash version. That is what AC Hotels also did:

Matt Cutts ( aka Googleguy) says:

• “If all of your content and menus are in Flash, search engines may have a harder time following the links. If you feel strongly about using Flash, just make an HTML version of the page available as well. The search engine bots will thank you. Your users will thank you. Feel free to block the Flash version from the crawlers with a robots.txt file, since you don’t need your pages indexed twice“.

Conclusion:

This “case” is a good concrete example for other websites. I think what’s interesting here is to understand what they did wrong and why Google penalized them. The SEO company of AC Hotels websites has reacted pretty fast since the websites are now back into Google index. On the other hand ranking in Google is not only a matter of design as you can rank well by getting a lot of external backlinks to your site.

Having a flash site, AC Hotels chose to use SEO tricks to get a good ranking and they have been penalized for this; we should not blame them for playing with Google rules since it is not always easy to understand what is allowed or not. It’s often that I see that websites that rank better are the ones who use those tricks. Everyone wants to be first in Google; so you always have to push the limits of optimization since your competition also does it. What’s the problem with this approach? You don’t know where the limits are! Where is the boundary between optimization and spamming. AC Hotels did it pretty well until they got banned and now they have to adapt themselves and change their SEO strategy.

I am definitely not the one who would blame them; I personally think they should follow Googleguy’s opinion about having two versions of the site (flash and html) with only one ranked version in Google.

Related posts:

• AC Hotels has been banned from Google!

A lot of companies do not have a clue why they have been banned or penalized from Google index. That’s why I will approach the case of “AC HOTELS” from different angles that respect the following assumption: “Banned from Google= Not Spidered, Not Ranked, Not Indexed”

• Are they still present in Google index?

Let’s see if AC HOTELS website is still indexed in google database with the simple command site:www.ac-hotels.com (same thing for the second website site:www.ac-hoteles.com)

As you can see (click the link for a bigger image) the response from Google is negative. Google does not have information about those sites besides (part of) their backlinks.

• Are still present in Yahoo and Msn?

Having a look at (the highly recommended) Yahoo “Site Explorer“, the same type of query reveals that their two official websites are indexed and it also gives us a list of all their backlinks (=inlinks).

Yahoo Site Explorer says:

• AC-Hotels.com: Pages indexed: 26 / Inlinks for this url only (except from this domain): 2,576
• AC-Hoteles.com: Pages indexed: 9 / Inlinks for this url only (except from this domain): 2,001

Msn Search says:

• AC-Hotels.com: 16 pages / 4,533 Inlinks
• AC-Hoteles.com: 20 pages / 1,176 Inlinks

This screenshot shows us that there are very few pages of AC Hotels indexed in Yahoo and MSN (some of them do not exist anymore) . The good is that Yahoo gives us more information about the backlinks network of the site; this information is helpful in order to understand the “banning issue”. It really seems that Google, for its part, has decided not to index those 2 domains anymore for some reasons.

Why AC Hotels website has been banned by Google?

First of all let’s have a look at the 2 websites carefully.

It doesn’t take long to understand that the 2 sites are not “SEO friendly“! Indeed there are both developed with the exact same structure using Flash! This is a basic mistake of websites that totally rely on flash. Flash may look good for the visitors, but unfortunately Search Engine Spiders (automated crawlers like googlebot) are still not able to read precisely (or browse easily) Flash content. In this case googlebot does not see anything, not a single link or word.

Note: Google is able to read flash BUT it needs advanced SEO techniques to be able to position well a flash site in search engines. Most of the time webmasters reproduce the entire website in pure html “behind” the flash content just for the love of spider bots.

If Google missed the Flash content, it did not miss the Meta Keywords and Meta tags proposed by the page that loads the flash; keywords and meta descriptions are shown below:

Note: Those are the exact same keywords and meta descriptions for the two sites that also have the exact same title: “AC Hotels: Hoteles AC en España, Italia y Portugal”

Note2: It seems that AC Hotels is currently making changes to their sites, the Meta Description has been reduced as shown below:

So guess what: Google sees all those keywords in the meta tags but unfortunately the spider is not able to locate any occurrence of those keywords in the content of the website (it’s a big no no!). People who put keywords into the meta tag that had nothing to do with the content of their site are severely penalized by Google.

The same applies for the following subdomains that redirect the visitors to the same flash frame with different keywords but still with no content for the spiders:

hoteles.barcelona.ac-hotels.com
hoteles.granada.ac-hotels.com
hoteles.madrid.ac-hotels.com
hoteles.sevilla.ac-hotels.com

A quick look at Alexa tells us that 4% of the traffic comes from directorio.ac-hotels.com. This subdomain does not use any flash file; it is a basic directory of hotels that spiders will sure understand and indexed. The use of the directory is obvious! There is no browsable sitemap on the rest of the site, thus there was a real need to optimize and help users (and spiders) to find the right path to the content. Interlinking webpages is not an abuse if it is done properly; according to Google it can be done if it really helps to guide the visitors to navigate the website..

Now let’s have a look at the IP who hosts those 2 main websites of AC Hotels. A reverse IP lookup gives us the full list of domain names hosted by the same IP; a total of 92 domain names all owned by AC Hotels.

A quick overview of those websites brought to my attention the fact that they all have the exact same structure, with a flash integrated into a frame and a background that are both hosted on www.Ac-hotels.com Same approach, same results! Spiders can’t crawl the content of the sites thus almost none of those sites is indexed in Google. I said “almost” because hotelcuzco.net is the only site from the 92 that is still indexed by google…

Is there any duplicated content? Indeed and it is a major SEO error; Ac-hotels.com, org, biz, info Ac-hoteles.com, net, org, biz, info and ac10hotels.com have the exact same content (meta keywords, description, content)! Ac-hotels.com has been penalized for not being able to determine a central main site inside a network of domain names to the eyes of search engines. For google it is duplicated content as Google think people intends to position as many webpages as possible in the pages of results to get better visibility. Also, the website of each hotel from the chain get the exact same structure and link back to Ac-hotels.com. That explains why every single hotel website has been penalized too.

Solutions?: Using the permanent 301 redirections on those 10 sites to the main site; and providing a different readable structure of each website, so Googlebot can notice they are indeed all different.

As a matter of fact Google intensively struggle against duplicated content since the beginning of 2006 and those 10 websites are no exception in Googlebot’s eyes.

Page rank? Even if google does not indexed anymore AC-Hotels.com, the domain name still has a Page Rank of 6/10 and a page rank of 4/10 for the asp page that run the Flash content. Usually Page Rank updates take a lot of time, so we can easily predicts that next update will show a 0/10.

AC-Hotels.com’s websites still have backlinks and still have a PR (as of 19/3/07) ; however we saw a lot of indicators that explain why Google algorithm has taken the decision to ban or penalize AC Hotels’ websites (duplicated content between domains, keywords stuffing, no spider friendly content, excessive inbounds linking from the same IP etc).

I would advise AC-Hotels to correct every single problems as fast as they can so they can then quickly file a reinclusion request to Google to be able to enjoy again traffic from a organic results. In my opinion there were no intention from AC Hotels to misbehave abusing SEO techniques but one may ask: Where is the boundary between optimization and SEO abuses? That’s a question SEO companies keep on asking themselves, and that’s why we pay them for.

PS: AC-Hotels can still count on other domain names to drive traffic from Google. Those domain names have a different design and are registered under a different IP. They are indexed by Google.

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• AC Hotels and Google – A learning experience
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• New Google feature: Local Business Centre