V
viza
Hi all,
After Mike Barnard's thread "I had my site 'professionaly' reviewed", I
decided to let BT have a look over a commercial site which I wrote
several years ago.
The man from BT showed me several pages with images of text and with the
alt text missing. I validated it while he was on the phone to me and
asked him to do the same, it had a long list of all sorts of errors. It
looked reasonable in Firefox though. I asked him about this and he said
to me:
"that's just for accessibility [for example] for blind people"
"according to a conference call that I was in last week [with staff at
Google] w3c standards are not compatible with their search bots"
"if it's w3c compliant it won't do as well in the google search"
"it's not me that saying it it's google thats saying it. I'm just passing
it on"
When I pressed him as to whether they would be prepared to make a website
in valid html, he said
"We'd love to make it all compliant, but we would have do inform you that
it would not perform as well".
when I asked him why he said something quite vague about how standard
compliant pages present the information in a way that makes it difficult
to get out.
Now having written programs to parse SGML/XML I know that this is
bullshit, but I wonder if there is any conceivable sense in breaking
standards to achieve better search rating in google or other engines.
I am asking if anyone knows particular hacks that turn out useful, not
for dozens of replies saying "he's a twat" etc. etc, although they are
perhaps unavoidable.
I spent the best part of an hour on the phone to him and he did suggest
one or two things that I might do differently if I was redesigning the
site, but nothing that I am going to jump to change, apart from an
outdated link to multimap that I will upgrade to google maps. He sent me
a quote for £1400. (IIRC that's less than I charged the client
originally, but then I suppose that I am better than them - lol).
viza
After Mike Barnard's thread "I had my site 'professionaly' reviewed", I
decided to let BT have a look over a commercial site which I wrote
several years ago.
The man from BT showed me several pages with images of text and with the
alt text missing. I validated it while he was on the phone to me and
asked him to do the same, it had a long list of all sorts of errors. It
looked reasonable in Firefox though. I asked him about this and he said
to me:
"that's just for accessibility [for example] for blind people"
"according to a conference call that I was in last week [with staff at
Google] w3c standards are not compatible with their search bots"
"if it's w3c compliant it won't do as well in the google search"
"it's not me that saying it it's google thats saying it. I'm just passing
it on"
When I pressed him as to whether they would be prepared to make a website
in valid html, he said
"We'd love to make it all compliant, but we would have do inform you that
it would not perform as well".
when I asked him why he said something quite vague about how standard
compliant pages present the information in a way that makes it difficult
to get out.
Now having written programs to parse SGML/XML I know that this is
bullshit, but I wonder if there is any conceivable sense in breaking
standards to achieve better search rating in google or other engines.
I am asking if anyone knows particular hacks that turn out useful, not
for dozens of replies saying "he's a twat" etc. etc, although they are
perhaps unavoidable.
I spent the best part of an hour on the phone to him and he did suggest
one or two things that I might do differently if I was redesigning the
site, but nothing that I am going to jump to change, apart from an
outdated link to multimap that I will upgrade to google maps. He sent me
a quote for £1400. (IIRC that's less than I charged the client
originally, but then I suppose that I am better than them - lol).
viza