To get good rankings, all you have to do as a webmaster is produce a user friendly, useful, maybe informative website.
If someone can produce an informative website, they might benefit from some usability advice. In the same way, that person might benefit from some Search Engine Optimisation advice.
For example, choosing good HTML page titles that reflect the content of each page helps Google to understand that page. This will drive relevant traffic to the site.
Someone who gets you "visitors who aren't the slightest bit interested in your website or product" is not optimising your site.
If everyone optimised their site for the subject matter on that site then search engines become more relevant, and the site owners make more money.
PageRank was the innovation that made Google's results better than the rest. This, along with the quick loading, uncluttered interface was why people switched to Google.
When is Google going to move from an 'importance' method to a 'theme' method; boosting pages that are widely cited from pages relevant to the query, not just widely cited pages?
"because the domains are different, the many thousands of links these sites have to one another all count toward the automated calculation of their popularity and quality at Google"
Wrong. PageRank counts links, whether they're on the same domain or not.
"giving them all a boost in the rankings and hence bringing Webseed more traffic and hence more revenue"
Wrong. Webseed tripped Google's spam penalty and their hub has had a PageRank of exactly zero since about January 25.
"AltaVista appears to be making a comeback"
Wrong. AltaVista is on its last legs. Fast Search is a quick, comprehensive search engine with advanced features. Inktomi is a good referrer for site owners because it powers big sites like MSN Search. Google is a big, quick search engine that's iextremely popular, very easy to use and it still has a habbit of putting the better sites near the top (even though people are trying very hard to spam it).
I could go on. My point is that you can either be a half-hearted jack-of-all-trades, or do the Web a favour and pick something, learn to understand it and collaborate with people who have complimentary skills.
Of course a Web site is no use if no one visits it. A link from the/. home page is a good start.
> Now WebTV and Mac, that are.5% and 1.5% of this website?
How did you come up with that?
I have found that enquiries from WebTVers and sales to WebTVers far outweigh the tiny footprint left by their very aggressive proxy caches. If the Web sites I control were WebTV unfriendly then I might have as much faith in my server logs as you seem too.;-)
If your figures are for "hits" or "impressions" then the friendliness of your Web site to users of various browsers may affect the numbers greatly. I hit many Web pages, and I use the WWW to research much of my employer's expenditure, yet I don't browse much (or spend money with) those businesses whose Web sites I am locked from. Many PHBs in unprogressive corp's don't seem to spot the holes in obviously tainted research.
egrinake: "...Today, however, HTML has become very layout-centric, as opposed to content-centric, with emphasis on tables and invisible GIFs for arranging the data..."
Yes, a load of people have a very layout-centric approach, but that doesn't mean that HTML is about layout. HTML 4 brought us plenty of new semantic attributes, and deprecated a lot of the presentational stuff that crept into HTML 3.1
In fact XHTML 1.0 gave us exactly no new HTML structure (it just allows for the idea of mixing HTML with other XML based markup languages). The idea of leaving the markup to HTML and the presentation to CSS is far from new, it just took the browsers a long time to catch up.
I just hope that lots and lots of gullible people believe that XHTML 1.0 is the beginning of structure on the Web, and start to use it as they should have done years ago.
What the couch potatoes who lounge about with their electronic gadgets instead of getting out and about really need is a way to generate electricity from sitting around munching fries and playing with all these electronic toys.
I think you'll find that both British government guidelines and an EU directive means that this site is technically in breach of the law here as well.
The relevent legislation in the UK is the Part III of the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act. If I did what the UK Government regularly does online I could be fined, or worse. If the pointy-haired civil servants could just spend a day or so at the Web Accessibility Initiative then things might get better. Instead they produce specifications with wonderful advice, such as putting HTML attributes in alphabetical order.
I've contacted several Government departments about Web accessibility and have received mostly non-replies ("thanks for you comments, which have been filed") with some bogus replies ("but we'd have to make the whole site in HTML2!"). Quite sad, really.
"Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."
-Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996
As interiot wrote in yesterday's/. thread, Google says"Unlike other search engines, Google is structured so no one can purchase a higher PageRank or commercially alter results.".
But in Eric Rumsey's "Partial retraction", he writes "In refuting my article, Google reportedly says that they are now crawling *all* of Yahoo! as part of their agreement, which might have changed rankings."
Can both be true? In my opinion, artificially spidering a domain as part of a "commercial agreement" is at variance with "no one can purchase a higher PageRank or commercially alter results.".
That having been said, let's not all forget that amongst the mainstream search engines, Google has significant advantages over other ranking algos.
[...]I hope that the browser adheres to the spirit of Web standards rather better.
As you can see from galeon.sourceforge.net, the home page has been fixed considerably. It still has proprietary attributes and the pages within the frameset could do with some fixing, but that's not my point - this is:
I have e-mailed buggy Web page reports to many vendors and organisations in the past, and they coudln't care less. Not only does a "complaint" to the Galeon webmaster get quick attention, but suggestions and even HTML snippets are taken onboard in the spirit they're meant.
Basically open source projects are better because they get greater scrutiny from the developer community, and because their proponents actually want feedback. Imagine the following:
Dear Mr Gates, your software is full instabilities and security holes. If you send me the source I'll help make it better for you.
Though it looks different than any other app on your desktop, a screenshot from the Windows version and the X version will look basically identical, with the obvious exception of the window decorations. That way people can easily write cross-platform web apps, with the assurance that they will look identical on any platform.
Surely that should read "app's using Web technology", not"web apps".
Any developer of user agent software who tries to make the Web look the same to everyone has forgotten what the Web's about, and should go visit the W3C Web Accessibility initiative for a reminder.
Presumably because she cares about typography, and there's no way in hell that a markup language is going to give you the control of appearance that you need to do anything interesting with design.
And exactly how many times did this wonderful advocate of Open Standards mention CSS?
If Flash is the answer, then presumably the question is not "How do share structured information with someone on another computer, another browser, or another network?". That's a shame.
One day people will understand what the WWW idea ("portable content") was all about. Of course it might be past salvage by then.
Lynda: Open standards, open source, browser compatibility and cross-platform compatibility. A tall order indeed.
I wonder why Lynda Weinman think's this is a tall order. Perhaps the following might give her difficulties some context:
Lynda: What's screaming hot right now in the way of technologies is Flash.
Although she admits that Flash has "challenges" in areas of "accessibility and interaction with other Web technologies" she seems to give no advice about utilising the real benefits of the WWW.
She might sing a nice song about Open Source and a cross-platform WWW, but until she demonstrates some understanding of the concepts, newbies beware.
Lynda: We develop our own curriculum and courses in Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, ImageReady, PhotoShop, GoLive and are about to expand into Final Cut Pro, After Effects and LiveMotion.
Quite what her courses have to do with her excitement with XML and "devices other than Web browsers delivering Web content" I have no idea.
Allchin said Microsoft spent 500 person-years and $162 million on people and tools specifically to improve reliability of the product.
I'd be interested to know if anyone has a rough estimate for the number of man hours spent on "improving reliability" of Linux distrobutions? The Borland Developer July 1999 Main Survey Results counted 5656 respondents involved in "System development (OS, kernel, desktop, etc)".
500 person-years testing is impressive for a closed source application, but the input from the Linux developer community is surely more than that? Over two years (98 to 2000), 5k5 developers putting in only 2 hours a week would give more than 500 person (working) years. That does not include other users who provide bug reports, patches etc., but wouldn't bother if the product wasn't Open Source.
Personally, I think this Bobby guy is an idiot.:) A browser that reads text should just say nothing if no alt= text exists.. Bit stupid to use ALT=""...
There's a significant difference between having no alt text and having alt="".
alt="" tells the user agent that the image should be ignored in a non-visual context. The lack of alt text demonstrates that the authorer couldn't care less about non-visual and other text mode usage. This is frequently the case.:-(
I'll start coding my web pages in BHTML (Braille-HTML)
What's HTML for? Yes it provides a nice hyperlink structure that we all enjoy, but there's another fundamental principle that some of us around here are missing, Structure.
Proper use of HTML allows both the underlying data and it's structure to be conveyed whether on a WIMP system, telnet, speech browser or search engine. Now that we have CSS we can add our nice suggestions for visual rendering without detracting from the structure of the document.
The two greatest enemies to portable Web design are ignorant authors (alt text really does not make the images disappear) and the vendor of certain web breaking packages such as FrontPage Express and Internet Explorer.
Slashdot Mirror
The AlltheWeb Video Search searches for video content on the Web, using URLs and nearby text.
This is very different from searching through a real TV and film archive using closed captioning.
If someone can produce an informative website, they might benefit from some usability advice. In the same way, that person might benefit from some Search Engine Optimisation advice.
For example, choosing good HTML page titles that reflect the content of each page helps Google to understand that page. This will drive relevant traffic to the site.
Someone who gets you "visitors who aren't the slightest bit interested in your website or product" is not optimising your site.
If everyone optimised their site for the subject matter on that site then search engines become more relevant, and the site owners make more money.
Apparently, Google haven't been getting much feedback about the changes yet.
With quite a few of the world's top Internet marketeers assembled in one place, I suspect they'll get plenty of feedback next Saturday...
PageRank was the innovation that made Google's results better than the rest. This, along with the quick loading, uncluttered interface was why people switched to Google.
When is Google going to move from an 'importance' method to a 'theme' method; boosting pages that are widely cited from pages relevant to the query, not just widely cited pages?
"because the domains are different, the many thousands of links these sites have to one another all count toward the automated calculation of their popularity and quality at Google"
Wrong. PageRank counts links, whether they're on the same domain or not.
"giving them all a boost in the rankings and hence bringing Webseed more traffic and hence more revenue"
Wrong. Webseed tripped Google's spam penalty and their hub has had a PageRank of exactly zero since about January 25.
"AltaVista appears to be making a comeback"
Wrong. AltaVista is on its last legs. Fast Search is a quick, comprehensive search engine with advanced features. Inktomi is a good referrer for site owners because it powers big sites like MSN Search. Google is a big, quick search engine that's iextremely popular, very easy to use and it still has a habbit of putting the better sites near the top (even though people are trying very hard to spam it).
Calum
--
Calum I Mac Leod, Scottish Borders
> I don't suppose Google can fetch the URLS
> inside a Flash file (correct me If I'm wrong),
Sorry, you're wrong. Google does index the links inside a Flash movie, but not the content.
Of course anyone who takes search engine marketing seriously wouldn't dream of hiding indexable content in unstructured binary proprietory formats anyway.
Calum
--
Calum I Mac Leod, Scottish Borders
Web site design needs a lot of different things, Information architecture & usability, HTML & XHTML, CSS & implementation bugs, search engine ideas and keyword research, Web server techniques & content management, deeziner discussion & tech discussion, good practices & sucky practices.
/. home page is a good start.
I could go on. My point is that you can either be a half-hearted jack-of-all-trades, or do the Web a favour and pick something, learn to understand it and collaborate with people who have complimentary skills.
Of course a Web site is no use if no one visits it. A link from the
Calum
> Now WebTV and Mac, that are .5% and 1.5% of this website?
;-)
How did you come up with that?
I have found that enquiries from WebTVers and sales to WebTVers far outweigh the tiny footprint left by their very aggressive proxy caches. If the Web sites I control were WebTV unfriendly then I might have as much faith in my server logs as you seem too.
If your figures are for "hits" or "impressions" then the friendliness of your Web site to users of various browsers may affect the numbers greatly. I hit many Web pages, and I use the WWW to research much of my employer's expenditure, yet I don't browse much (or spend money with) those businesses whose Web sites I am locked from. Many PHBs in unprogressive corp's don't seem to spot the holes in obviously tainted research.
Calum
--
Calum I Mac Leod
Scottish Borders
egrinake: "...Today, however, HTML has become very layout-centric, as opposed to content-centric, with emphasis on tables and invisible GIFs for arranging the data..."
Yes, a load of people have a very layout-centric approach, but that doesn't mean that HTML is about layout. HTML 4 brought us plenty of new semantic attributes, and deprecated a lot of the presentational stuff that crept into HTML 3.1
In fact XHTML 1.0 gave us exactly no new HTML structure (it just allows for the idea of mixing HTML with other XML based markup languages). The idea of leaving the markup to HTML and the presentation to CSS is far from new, it just took the browsers a long time to catch up.
I just hope that lots and lots of gullible people believe that XHTML 1.0 is the beginning of structure on the Web, and start to use it as they should have done years ago.
Calum
--
Calum I Mac Leod
Scottish Borders
What the couch potatoes who lounge about with their electronic gadgets instead of getting out and about really need is a way to generate electricity from sitting around munching fries and playing with all these electronic toys.
Calum
--
Calum I Mac Leod, Scottish Borders.
The relevent legislation in the UK is the Part III of the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act. If I did what the UK Government regularly does online I could be fined, or worse. If the pointy-haired civil servants could just spend a day or so at the Web Accessibility Initiative then things might get better. Instead they produce specifications with wonderful advice, such as putting HTML attributes in alphabetical order.
I've contacted several Government departments about Web accessibility and have received mostly non-replies ("thanks for you comments, which have been filed") with some bogus replies ("but we'd have to make the whole site in HTML2!"). Quite sad, really.
As interiot wrote in yesterday's /. thread, Google says "Unlike other search engines, Google is structured so no one can purchase a higher PageRank or commercially alter results.".
But in Eric Rumsey's "Partial retraction", he writes "In refuting my article, Google reportedly says that they are now crawling *all* of Yahoo! as part of their agreement, which might have changed rankings."
Can both be true? In my opinion, artificially spidering a domain as part of a "commercial agreement" is at variance with "no one can purchase a higher PageRank or commercially alter results.".
That having been said, let's not all forget that amongst the mainstream search engines, Google has significant advantages over other ranking algos.
I wrote:
As you can see from galeon.sourceforge.net, the home page has been fixed considerably. It still has proprietary attributes and the pages within the frameset could do with some fixing, but that's not my point - this is:
I have e-mailed buggy Web page reports to many vendors and organisations in the past, and they coudln't care less. Not only does a "complaint" to the Galeon webmaster get quick attention, but suggestions and even HTML snippets are taken onboard in the spirit they're meant.
Basically open source projects are better because they get greater scrutiny from the developer community, and because their proponents actually want feedback. Imagine the following:
cimlCoughDropAddict wrote:
Surely that should read "app's using Web technology", not "web apps".
Any developer of user agent software who tries to make the Web look the same to everyone has forgotten what the Web's about, and should go visit the W3C Web Accessibility initiative for a reminder.
cimlFrom galeon.sourceforge.net
I hope that the browser adheres to the spirit of Web standards rather better.
cimlAnd exactly how many times did this wonderful advocate of Open Standards mention CSS?
If Flash is the answer, then presumably the question is not "How do share structured information with someone on another computer, another browser, or another network?". That's a shame.
One day people will understand what the WWW idea ("portable content") was all about. Of course it might be past salvage by then.
I wonder why Lynda Weinman think's this is a tall order. Perhaps the following might give her difficulties some context:
Although she admits that Flash has "challenges" in areas of "accessibility and interaction with other Web technologies" she seems to give no advice about utilising the real benefits of the WWW.
She might sing a nice song about Open Source and a cross-platform WWW, but until she demonstrates some understanding of the concepts, newbies beware.
Quite what her courses have to do with her excitement with XML and "devices other than Web browsers delivering Web content" I have no idea.
CalumFrom Bugfest ! Win2000 has 63,000 'defects'
I'd be interested to know if anyone has a rough estimate for the number of man hours spent on "improving reliability" of Linux distrobutions? The Borland Developer July 1999 Main Survey Results counted 5656 respondents involved in "System development (OS, kernel, desktop, etc)".
500 person-years testing is impressive for a closed source application, but the input from the Linux developer community is surely more than that? Over two years (98 to 2000), 5k5 developers putting in only 2 hours a week would give more than 500 person (working) years. That does not include other users who provide bug reports, patches etc., but wouldn't bother if the product wasn't Open Source.
There's a significant difference between having no alt text and having alt="".
alt="" tells the user agent that the image should be ignored in a non-visual context. The lack of alt text demonstrates that the authorer couldn't care less about non-visual and other text mode usage. This is frequently the case. :-(
What's HTML for? Yes it provides a nice hyperlink structure that we all enjoy, but there's another fundamental principle that some of us around here are missing, Structure.
Proper use of HTML allows both the underlying data and it's structure to be conveyed whether on a WIMP system, telnet, speech browser or search engine. Now that we have CSS we can add our nice suggestions for visual rendering without detracting from the structure of the document.
The two greatest enemies to portable Web design are ignorant authors (alt text really does not make the images disappear) and the vendor of certain web breaking packages such as FrontPage Express and Internet Explorer.
--
Calum I Mac Leod