Forbes seems to have discovered the very cutting edge of web unusability. Check out the following page:
In Pictures: Google + Apple = ?
I saw this in my Gmail (as a web clip) and clicked through to find the most ridiculous concept in web browsing: an auto-refreshing slideshow that consists of entire-page reloads every 15 seconds with no user input.
While a lot of people in the tech blog circles have a tendency to scoff at interwebs practices like forwarding funny emails, adding animated gifs to email signatures, and spiffy-fying their own blogs with graphical counters, they are (for some inexplicable reason) falling pray to something just as useless and diabolic - the blog tag meme.
I think it started with the “5 things you didn’t know about me” blog tag. Even I succumbed to that one - as did countless others - it seemed like everyone else was doing it - it was all in good fun. But after seeing the success of “5 things” others decided to launch new ones like “5 books I read”, “5 magazines I read“, “5 reasons I blog” and the list seems to just keep growing.
Last week Matt Cutts talked about hidden links and illustrated a case of what was a pretty blatant attempt to hide links within text.
This morning I surfed over to MichaelSaunders.com (a brokerage here in Sarasota) and saw that their footer area is full of keyword-laden text. If you mouse-over the paragraphs you will see that a large number of the keywords in text are actually links to different parts of the Michael Saunders website. The text links are made to blend in completely with the rest of the paragraph. It appears that the links are there solely for search engines and not users of the site.
» Continue reading “Is MichaelSaunders.com Violating the Google Guidelines?”
Since when does the world revolve around pleasing Google?
The fact of the matter is they are a publicly traded company and are in it to make money off your advertising dollars. So when Matt Cutts starts telling webmasters that they need to write code to please Google’s agenda, I say “please!” He recently wrote:
If you want to sell a link, you should at least provide machine-readable disclosure for paid links by making your link in a way that doesn’t affect search engines.
Since when is Google in the business of regulating disclosure for the types of links you have on your site? And why is Matt speaking like a representative of “search engines” as a whole? Matt is also encouraging snitching on those who are “selling links”. (Note to self: report every single commercial website to the Google link nazis.)
» Continue reading “Please Register Your Link Intent with the Google Borg”
DomainTools recently added a new feature allowing anyone to change the text of any domain name in their database (with a little bit of ajax). So when the computers can’t tell what the domain is “supposed” to mean, you’re supposed to give them a hand.
Well for a bit of end-of-the-week fun, here’s the concept of user contributed content gone awry, straight from Domain Tools itself…
