While booking a room at a nice New York City hotel, I went to the hotel Web site to get the contact info and/or book the room. What I found was, well, interesting to say the least.

I have recently written about how frames can effect rankings and in every seminar or workshop I present, I explain the potential issues with flash. Here, I found both…

After fighting my way through the opening splash page, where I had to select No Sound, DSL Version and This Window in order to get into the site unmolested, I found what I thought was an all flash Web site. No big suprise there - many sites are all in flash, mostly because designers and SEO’s are cut from different cloth. Still, no big deal.

Since I’m a curious SEO, I decided to have a look at how this hotel organized the site. The source code told an interesting story.

First I saw the expected head tags. Although present, they were written without any SEO in mind. Be that as it may, at least they were present. Normally, in an all flash site, I would expect to see the flash file immediately below the head information. This didn’t happen. Instead, I saw something that actually suprised me: A Frame Set.

I studied the code to make sure I understood what I was looking at and even got a second set of experienced eyeballs on it to confirm. This was an all-flash site and a framed site, all in one. It is, in short, the anti-SEO site.

But there was some attempt to feed the bots. How do I know? Because after the frame set, there exists a noframes tag that contains over a thousand words of content.

Although nobody can know human intention without being told, one would be hard-pressed to make any assumption other than one of three. 1) The designer was trying to trick the search engines by providing words inside a noframes tag, inside a frame, living as an all flash site. 2) The designer actually thought that this was the a proper use of SEO tactics. 3) The designer knew that this was bad, but would not get caught. And surrounding one of these three motivations is the presumption that the tactics would actually work. Well, in my quick investigation, they don’t. I can’t find the hotel in any meaningful search query.

Clean design. Easy to find information. Simple code. Appropriate use of flash and images. Avoiding frames. These are all fundamental to successful SEO. This example serves to show what not to do.