Search Engine Musings

Since I don’t currently have a blog on the web design site I thought I’d drop this one in here. After all, trying to do SEO on top of poor foundations is a thankless task. It was inspired by a blog item which I “think” I saw on SEOmoz entitled The 5 most underused HTML tags, though now I can’t seem to find it. (Good blog incidentally, recommend it.)

HTML has undergone many revisions and fashions in its short life, and there have been a number of blind alleys and wrong turnings on the way. This has resulted in the complete misuse / miscoding / misunderstanding of many of the tags which give the markup language its tools. By this I don’t mean those horrible tags like blink or marquee which made so many sites unbearable in the late 1990’s, but the ones that competent designers should know how to use.

Unfortunately some of the WYSIWYG programs which appeared when website building became popular were responsible for lulling people into thinking that they didn’t need a solid understanding of HTML. Some of them made it hard to even see the underlying code while many of them produced code that was at best convoluted and sometime completely invalid. Only the fact that the most popular browsers were far too forgiving of poor code allowed the resultant sites to get away with it.

So here we present:
The most mis-coded HTML tags
The most misused HTML tags
The most misunderstood HTML tags

The table tag

What’s so wrong with the table tag I hear you cry. Nothing much in itself, perfectly reasonable tag, I don’t even mind too much if you use it for positioning (though it wasn’t intended for such things) but please, don’t give it attributes that are invalid - mainly height. It’s not good code and mostly it proves you’ve used a WYSIWYG program without understanding what it does. Secondly, do try not to nest them more than 3 or 4 deep - if you do that then you are probably trying to create positioning that should be handled using CSS.
And for goodness sake don’t try and put an absolutely positioned div inside one.

The meta keywords tag

The spammers favourite. Stick every keyword you can think of in there, throw in Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and the kitchen sink. Ignore the fact that everyone except Yahoo stopped paying attention to it (except to penalise spamming of it) years ago and even Yahoo check to see if your body text includes the terms and penalises you if it doesn’t.
Then wonder why your site doesn’t rank…

The font tag

C’mon guys, they announced that this was being deprecated back in the 90s. The occasional bit of in-line use might be forgiveable - building new sites using it all over the place for basic formatting in 2006 is just amateurish. If you can’t even learn CSS1 then stop claiming to be a web designer and then we can dump this one into the bin with “blink”.

The span tag

It’s not a div tag, you can’t have block level tags inside it. It’s for in-line styling within tags such as p tags. It’s for exceptions to the general rule, not to be used all over the place.

The form tag

Probably the single most miscoded tag in the world. If you must mix it with tables either put it inside a table cell (td tag) or outside a table tag - do not put it round a tr tag - not only will it throw up an error on that tag, it’ll produce knock-on errors that will have the validators running in circles. And it’ll make any attempt to use CSS to effectively style the form into a horrible mess.

Wouldn’t it be nice to see these being used properly in 2007!

Happy Hogmanay and a Good New Year to you all.

Since around August there has been an intermittent problem for .com sites with Google results in country specific listings (e.g. searching Google.co.uk and selecting UK-only results). What has been happening is that the home pages of these sites drop out of the country specific indexes, although they are still there in the global indexes. (To check if you’re affected simply do a site:www.mydomain.com in the two versions of the results) Along with this drop-out the rankings for any search term that is in any way reliant on the home page drop as well, and this has been causing problems for many businesses. A strange symptom that also often appears in these cases is that an https version of the domain address shows up in the indexes, even though there is usually no such version in existence.

There’s been a fair bit of discussion of this in the forums (for instance on webmasterworld) and those affected have reported that their sites periodically reappear and then drop out again, which agrees with what we’ve seen on some affected sites that we monitor. By no means all .com sites are affected and various theories have been tried and proved faulty as to what might be triggering these problems. The general opinion seems to be that at some point Google tried to introduce some sort of geo-specific filter which has gone wrong, and have subsequently been trying to fix it, however none of us really know and Google aren’t saying anything, even in reply to specific questions.

Sadly this is par for the course and is difficult to understand. We saw the same thing last year when what is now called the Big Daddy update took place. At that time many perfectly ethical sites dropped out of the indexes for a number of months while many spammy sites seemed to reappear. Eventually the update was rolled out and most of the good sites came back and reclaimed the rankings they had held previously. One of my own sites suffered this effect, even for some very specific terms for which I was clearly amongst the most relevant sites. At that time there was a great outcry but very little if any useful feedback from Google - just the usual generalities about making sure you do all the normal ethical things.

Now you can understand Google wanting to distance itself from making too many direct answers because they must certainly be inundated with queries from both ignorant users who can’t manage to read the T&Cs, and spammers who are trying to get back into the rankings after being banned. However when people have legitimate questions and there are provable problems with the results you would think that it would benefit them from a technical point of view as well as a PR point of view to be a little more communicative. While the sitemap / webmaster interface is a step in the right direction there are still many questions which are unanswered. SEO clients, who are often big businesses themselves, cannot understand how their SEOs can’t just phone up Google and get answers. The apparent climate of secrecy contributes to the “smoke and mirrors” reputation that SEO has.

The current situation only gives credence to the opinions of those cynics who point to the fact that these major index drops always seem to happen in the run-up to Christmas and are deliberately engineered to boost Adwords revenue. The best way to scotch such suggestions would be for Google to be more open about what is going on and admit any problems when they occur. Even if nothing can be done to speed up the solutions it would ease the minds of those affected, stop them tinkering with their sites in ways that may well be harmful in the long term, and greatly increase their respect for the company that was founded on the idea of “do no evil” but whose reputation is no longer seen as whiter than white.

Google aren’t the only ones to have some strange results at the moment. MSN / Windows Live is also doing some odd things. While checking my own listings I noticed that if you go to msn.com (which these days no longer redirects you to the uk version) and search for “search engine optimisation scotland”, the top ranked site is a holding page for a forthcoming site and contains no content apart from a handful of Google Adsense ads. Surely some mistake!