Sorry I have no idea where else to post this question, I would just like to hear your thoughts on this situation
A simple question, I have a site who’s name I would rather not mention, this site was done by a small web development company, it has a PR of 5 as it always did even before this particular web developer redesigned it for me.
Now I got a new web developer to do a completely different site for me, but I asked him to check the other sites SEO for me, this person has come back to me with his findings and it does not sound good, now I need to know who is the moron the old guy or the new guy, can someone help me please.
THE FINDINGS ARE AS FOLLOWS
The existing site is fully flash designed, it has alternate content in HTML that the search engines are indexing, however the alternate content that the user sees, is as follows.
“To view this site please download Flash”
When viewing what is hidden in the text-only cached version of the site, this is the result.
Hidden within a div tag is all the flash sites text and headings with H1 tags, strong tags, em tags, alt tags, title tags, href tags, and a tags, this is hidden within the css by use of a div tag set to 100px height, and the css set to overflow: hidden;
Apparently this is a problem, also I have been told that the textual content within this hidden area has slightly different text in comparison to the flash site for optimisation, and that is also a problem according to the new web developer.
The next issue posed by the new developer is this.
My site has to do with accommodation, I have 3 other resorts, so 4 resorts in total, on this site there are links to the other 3 resorts, and on the other 3 resorts there are links to this resort, the 4 resorts range in pr from 3 to 5, and this is fine in my opinion, and the new developer agrees, the problem however is that my previous developer not only made my website, he made other websites for florists, photographers etc. some of these sites at the time were brand new and had no pagerank, what he has done though is within this hidden content he has added about 5 links to every one of these sites, so there are links like, valentines day pointing to the flowers site, and then another that says say mothers day with a link to the flowers site.
He never asked my permission to do this firstly, and according to my new developer this could also drop my sites pr, firstly because there are 5 links to the same site one under another, like a mini link farm, second because the site being linked to is pr0 and mine is pr5, and third it is hidden, and fourth it is not good form.
Please tell me what you all think.
Another thing I just thought of, if all the above is true, then does that mean that my google analytics reports would not be accurate
