Resisting the Lure of Templates

Posted by JohnCarcutt
April 19, 2006

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Have you taken a look at some of the template sales sites lately? Some of the designs available on those sites are pure works of art. Those creative layouts, fresh Flash animations and the beautiful imagery just beg to be loaded on a server and delivered to your customers. The visual appeal of some of the work makes you think, “Why do we need a designer anyway?” It’s almost irresistible! It’s instant gratification! It’s extremely dangerous!

When you buy a template you are putting your site in the hands of a designer you never met, never talked to and are never likely to have any communications with. If you read this site at all, you know how integral web design is with your SEO efforts and that so many aspects of design can influence your sites rankings. Ok, so you evaluated the code and it meets your standards. Get higher standards. These designers are just that designers, they are all about making a page look pretty and do a damn good job at it. However, most of them have no clue about how to make a template solid from an SEO standpoint. Additionally, these are “templates” .. by definition they are made to be used over and over again, in this case usually by different people. In a bit I am going to cover how this puts you at risk for a duplicate content penalty, something you want to avoid religiously.

Lets be thorough here. Templates are not just found on template sales sites. When you apply a skin to your blog or install that new shopping cart with dynamic product pages, you are entering the realm of templates. This is all well and good, heck I used a nice skin on this very site, but I modified it and made sure the underlying code would not produce any search engine issues. If I found problems I fixed them. Doing these modification greatly reduced the potential issues that can arise from using any kind of template out of the box. Speaking of out of the box, have you ever installed a new online software application and decided you like the way it looked. How many other people have done the exact same thing and now have a site or pages that are near duplicates of yours. Changing the colors and adding a new logo is not going to be enough to curtail any underlying SEO problems here.

The duplicate content issues that can be caused by templates are two fold. But first, lets do a down and dirty review of what a duplicate content penalty is and how you get one. A common SEO myth is that sites get banned for duplicate content. This is not usually true, though it can happen. A majority of the time what happens is when two or more pages are deemed duplicates, all but one of the pages are flagged as supplemental results. Once flagged as such, they will not be shown in the normal search results. That is a duplicate content penalty. Which page gets listed, you ask? While I am sure there is a method to the madness, the common answer to that question is that “it is totally random”. No one knows which page will be listed or why, except the guys who wrote the algo of course. Just because you created the page or had it listed first does not always get you special treatment. A duplicate content penalty usually occurs when a significant portion of a pages underlying code is the same or very similar to that of another page. Notice I said “underlying code” and not content. This is a big distinction, especially when it comes to templates. There are tools online that can help determine the amount of duplication from one page to another. I usually use the similar page checker at Webonfs. While there is no specific percentage to shoot for, I try and make sure pages are less than 50% duplicate and the closer to 0% the better.

Now, the first and most obvious duplicate content issue, as stated before, is that site templates and skins by nature are designed to be used by more than one person or site. Engines are getting better at determining the most appropriate pages to list, but how can they with templates? One person may have a site about “Beagles” and use the same template that another person used for their site about “Beer Can Collecting”. Using the estimated base above, if the template code on these two site makes up a majority of the code (as they usually do), these two completely different sites could be deemed duplicates. Now take into consideration that these templates can be used by hundreds of people. Only one gets a listing, the rest are dumped into the supplemental abyss, never to be seen again.

The second duplicate content issue with template pages issue is a bit more obscure. It usually happens within a single site when using a content management system (CMS) to create dynamic pages. Or if two separate sites using the same CMS are creating content about the same topics or items. The easiest example is the online catalog. With hundreds of products to sell, the pages are usually created dynamically using a template page. On these pages we run into our old friend “underlying code”. Most of the time, the dynamic content on these pages makes up a rather small portion of the underlying code and you can end up having a rather messy duplicate content issue where only one of your products gets a listing. Now what if a competitor just happens to be using the same catalog software and promoting the same products. It’s not a pretty picture. I recently wrote an article about Evaluating Website Software for SEO that could give you some additional help dealing with this issue.

An individual designers coding skills are another factor that can make using templates a risky proposition. So many different factors go into how a site is created and every single one of them can have an impact on the optimization of your site. Do you know if the designer who created the site knows much about SEO, or if so, how close they pay attention to the constant changes in the industry? No you don’t. While a site may be beautiful, it could very easily have traps that will prevent it from being spidered or reduce the likelihood of getting decent search listings. While designers should know this, most don’t. They tend to focus on the creative and let others deal with the more mundane aspects of the site. Some non-SEO friendly things that may clue you into templates to avoid include; extensive use of Flash, minimal use of CSS, script within the code, graphical navigation and “creative content inclusion” such as iframes or turning content on and off via CSS. Designers love to design and sometimes good SEO gets in the way. When they are building a template site or page they don’t have to worry about all of that. But you do.

I can almost guarantee if you are building websites you will have to work with a template in one form or another someday. Its not an impossible task and if done right can save you a good amount of money or even become a competitive advantage. But the risks are high if you don’t understand and work to correct all the issues involved. Templates may seem like the easy way to build a beautiful site, but more often than not, they can end up being more work than you initially bargained for.