Archive: October, 2007

Coming from a software engineering background it is sometimes disappointing to see that many web sites are poorly coded, containing incorrect and bloated HTML. This article aims to explain why creating good HTML source code, though not being a direct ranking factor, can help the search engines in their analysis of your pages.

All programming languages have semantic and syntactic rules that must be followed if the program is to run correctly, and HTML script is no exception. Unlike ’strict’ programming language compilers, web browsers can be very ‘loose’ in their interpretation of HTML, leading many web developers to take short cuts and ignore HTML code compliance. From the very beginning of the WWW, the W3C has defined the HTML script language and provides the W3C Validator to aid developers in creating compliant code.

HTML validation can be helpful to SEOs as it can outline code errors, missing alt attributes, incorrect and elements and tags and character encoding issues. A web page that successfully validates will have a better chance of displaying consistently across compliant web browsers. For the search engines, processing time and resources will be saved when extracting markup and reduces the chance that content will be stripped out along with the markup.

Thousands of businesses brokering in paid-links received a rude surprise this week as Google appears to have lowered the Pagerank scores applied to their sites.

About six months ago Google’s Quality Czar, Matt Cutts told the SEO/SEM community that Google was going to devalue the weight of paid-links, causing a swell of controversy in SEO/SEM circles. On Wednesday, the engine took action by decreasing the Pagerank of thousands of sites known to trade in links. Some of the sites include the Washington Post, Forbes.com and Search Engine Journal.

Pagerank, as understood by those working on the outside of Google is reflected in a tiny green section of the Google Toolbar rating the worth of individual web documents on a scale of 1 – 10. Most sites fall within the 2 – 5 range with “authority” sites earning Pagerank values of 6 – 8. It is very rare to see 9’s and even rarer to see a Pagerank value of 10.

Just a quick note to advertise the debut of my new show, Webcology on WebmasterRadio.FM starting at 11AM (pacific) today. Joining me as co-host is old-time SEO Dave Davies. Check out Webcology on WebmasterRadio.FM as Dave and I take listeners on an examination of the ecology of our working environment.

If you haven’t listened in to WebmasterRadio.FM yet, you should check it out too. WMR carries 24 hours of webmaster focused programming, 7 days a week.

Microsoft announced it has bought a 1.6% stake in social networking site Facebook with an investment of $240 million. The agreement between the firms gives Microsoft exclusive advertising rights to versions of Facebook outside the United States. The companies had already struck an agreement giving Microsoft third party advertising rights in August 2006 in the US which continues until 2011.

Valued at approximately $15 billion, Facebook was the fastest growing social networking application last year attracting over 200,00 new users each day. The site saw 30.6 million US visitors in September according to comScore.

In a conference call held earlier today with reporters and analysts, Facebook Chief Revenue Officer, Owen Van Natta suggested the investment will allow ambitious expansion plans at Facebook. Facebook is expected to introduce their own ad-network tailored to personal preferences set by users at the Ad-Tech show in New York next month.

Facebook is an interesting buy-in for Microsoft. Partly driven by need and partly driven by technological interest, the investment represents a badly needed foothold in a social networking space where rapid evolution tends to be user-driven. Case in point, since allowing third-party developers to create widgets, games and tools for Facebook users, over 4,000 unique applications have been introduced and adopted.