Google Traps

Main Page > Websters

A Google Trap is a web page with no links out.

They come about when a web designer uses frames and a web visitor goes directly to an unframed page from a search engine.

Suppose all of your pages have three frames, a heading at the top, a navigation bar on the left, and the meat of the page in the lower right-hand 75%. Each page would consist of head.html, navbar.html, and {meat}.html, where {meat} was map, minister, welcome, FAQ, etc. Now suppose someone looks for your town, denomination or minister in Google. Say that minister.html comes up. Fine and good; there she is, great picture, warm welcoming words - but, since your visitor is looking at minister.html, not the whole three-framed page, and your navigation bar isn't there, he is trapped.

If you use frames, you should have a link to your home page on every interior page. A navigation bar with the main sub-sections is even better. Your visitors are not always going to be able to use the "Back" button, as they could if they came in through the home page. It is frustrating to find a page via a search engine, a page that doesn't even say what state it is in, then have to delete sections of the URL to fight back to the home page. Not everyone will have the patience (or skill) to do it.

Above excerpted from the section "Implications of Google on Web Design" on the page Suggestions for Church Web Sites.