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Modern Day Search Engine Manipulations
An anonymous reader writes "I fondly recall the days of yore when search engines could be manipulated just by sticking thousands of extraneous filler words in the META tags or hidden at the bottom of the page. Nowadays search engines work by more advanced techniques that generally don't fall prey to these simplistic tactics, but it'd be folly to presume them impervious. Does it still happen?"
Nine times out of ten, when using Google, exactly what I am looking for is in one of the first few links.
I had a boss that was asking me "How do we improve our site on google?"
Answer: Provide actual information instead of some glossy maketrdroid garbage that is so prevalent in webpages today and you wouldn't have to worry about the search engines would you?
According to their "why isn't my site being linked?" page, apparently they go light on cgi indexing to avoid overwhelming the servers on the other end, and its likely they don't have much of a choice. Just a guess, but I'd imagine it would be hard to tell the difference between a sanely organized site which could be indexed as easily as a static site and one where every link could lead to a near infinite tree of unique and dynamic pages, such as cgi where it shows the same stuff only sorted differently, etc. Just blocking spidering might be enough to prevent that, but not everyone might set that, so then they'd just end up with an overwhelmed server and countless redundant pages.
You forgot to say "make sure it works in lynx because all disabled people use lynx as their browser."
Who makes the "guidelines" for usability. For accesibility? Do all disabled people get lumped together so that one guideline fit's all? Each disabled person has their own difficulties and there is no one size fits all approach. Disabled people are no different that any other person and it is up to them to empower themselves with the technology to view any webpage regardless of guidelines used.
Maybe we can use the gubment's guidelines and use PDF files which rate along with Flash as major web annoyances. I mean, so what if a disabled person gets annoyed having thir computer freeze because some clueless moron decided that the best way to give out a 1 page brochure was to put it into a 2 mb PDF. Don't you think disabled peopel get annoyed at this crap also. But it's okay, because it fit's the disability guidelline.
The best guideline any web developer can use is both common sense and do not interfere with the user regardless if they are disabled or not.
... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...
If you use google to search for something technical, quite often you'll get lots of results for a mailing list that is archived to a web site. Because each archived message usualy links to 5 or 6 others (next/prev in thread, by date, by author etc), each message must cound as being linked to lots of times. At least thats the only reason I can think of for a 3 line emails showing up in google searched so much.
Democracy isn't about no one telling you what to do. It's about everyone telling you what to do.
This is one of my absolute pet peeves. www.caching.com/caching101.htm is a starting point for one of the factors that soooo many web designers seem to miss and that is that a page once created, can be cached _appropriately_ very easily of you just do the cache a favour and give static content a static URL. That way you are doing your server a favour as well since someone else can serve your page once someone nearby has asked for it.
I get so pissed off at sights that hide the true URL of a document behind bullshit asp/pl/dynamic URLs. It is just so brain dead. I know all the arguments that people will come back with from the commercial to the "deep linking" to the ease of dynamics, but I just think it would be easier to write out a physical page once and then serve it from there. I mean a catalogue is the perfect example of this point.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."