Far too many websites "Rick Roll" visitors to their homepage and the SEO consequences can be disastrous. Not only does "Rick Rolling" choke a website's overall traffic to a virtual trickle, but it also reduces the value of each visitor as well as undermines a website's rankings in the search engines. Fortunately it is an easy SEO mistake to avoid and you can prevent your search engine rankings taking a hit by following this simple advice:

Don't "Rick Roll" visitors to your homepage.

Okay, okay, I admit I'm using the term "Rick Roll" pretty loosely. Strictly speaking a Rick Roll involves tricking someone into following a link to a video of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up". To experience for yourself what it's like to get Rick Rolled, go to Jeb's blog on the ScribeFire plugin and click on one of the links in the comment about the fictional ScriBot plugin.

Our talented Web designer & developer, Jack Shepler, introduced us to the Rick Roll a while back, but the prank and the goofy video still hasn't gotten old for me. I've been Rick Rolling friends and colleagues in emails ever since. Rick Rolling Jeb through that comment in his own blog post was one of my more recent triumphs and immensely satisfying (even if it was a little too easy).

As fun as it can be to Rick Roll the unwary and unsuspecting, no small to medium sized business website would ever intentionally Rick Roll it's visitors with bogus links pointing to "Never Gonna Give You Up". The first couple times might be amusing, but the joke quickly grows old and becomes a more and more annoying prank. Eventually such a website would lose all its credibility and the visitors would eventually stop coming.

But this is almost exactly what a website does when it has a video on it's homepage that autoplays every time it loads in a visitor's web browser.

An autoplaying video on a website's homepage renders all those precious links in the Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) little better than the Rick Roll links Internet pranksters have been leaving in comments all over the Blogosphere. The user experience is the same: (1) eager anticipation and hope of finding something useful or interesting, followed by (2) disappointment and irritation at the intrusiveness of the autoplaying video, culminating in (3) a mad scramble to get to the browser's back button and return to the calm serenity of Google before (4) following a link to your competitor's site.

Even if a new visitor to your website withstands the aural assault of the autoplaying video, it makes it more likely for that visitor to view fewer pages and spend less time on site. This is because many of your website's visitors use your homepage as a sort of home base for their navigation of your site. After exploring one section, visitors tend to return to the homepage to begin exploring other sections of the website. Warry of being "Rick Rolled" again on the homepage, a visitor is more likely to leave your website altogether in order to avoid having to endure the video's unwelcome intrusion.

So, why would a search engine ever care if a website "Rick Rolls" its visitors with an autoplaying video on the homepage? In a certain sense it doesn't care at all. The video is virtually invisible to the search engine spiders and the search engines don't have to suffer through it playing when they crawl your homepage. But Google does care about the user experience on a website and can get a pretty good idea of that user experience through web analytics.

In a blog post at SEOmoz.org our friends at Slingshot SEO confirmed a nagging suspicion that Jeb and I had and could never quite shake: namely that Google does pay attention to user stats like bounce rates, time on site and depth of visit (page views) when ranking websites. When a site "Rick Rolls" visitors with an autoplaying video, not only do you get less value out of each visitor to your site, but you are also actively working against improving your search engine rankings.


I'm sure we've all been "Rick Rolled" in one way or another by homepages we've visited in the past. If you've been "Rick Rolled" by a website's homepage, please share it with us by linking to it in the comments below.