sandwichesandapples

Lately, I’ve been reading the Linux Distillery on iTWire. I enjoy the column but really dislike the design of the site. Look at these old-school buttons to navigate to new pages:

That raises another usability issue: pages. Man, I dislike pagination on a web page. I suppose it’s useful when you write a 5000 word article but I don’t think I want to read 5000 words on a website. I wonder if web magazines track bounce rates by pagination. Occasionally, I’ll read the first page of an article, see the pagination and bounce.

But on the Linux Distillery, I don’t think their articles are long enough to deserve pagination. I bet they paginate in order to serve more ads. In which case, they are putting the advertisers’ desires above the user’s which always creates a poor user experience.

Additionally, they have incredibly un-friendly URLs. Mouse over this link and check out the URL’s long query string.

Those aren’t good for users and they aren’t good for SEO.

I subscribe to a feed of all blog jobs from Indeed.com — you know, just for fun. I haven’t found anything worth checking out. I come across a lot of useless stuff and, of course, things like “make me a WordPress blog for $150.” No thanks, cheapskate.

Anyway, today I ran across this listing on elance (via indeed) and figured it was worth noting. Maybe you don’t realize what’s going on here but an employer is looking for a contractor to leave comments on .edu blogs that link back to the employer’s site. I don’t know exactly why he’s targeting .edu blogs but all those links back will improve his Google Page Rank. Basically, he’s spamming blogs but with a human so that his spam won’t be so easily recognized. (continue reading…)

Here’s some interesting news, especially in light of what I’d said here.

In my current position I work with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) a great deal. The more I learn, the less I understand and frankly, sometimes, the less I care to understand. Often we’re working at gaming the system — creating SEO pages that honestly don’t have any new information on them. I prefer dynamic, content-driven websites and it’s my wish that search engines favor these over what are, essentially, glorified yellow pages ads.

Anyway, sometimes search engine results blow me away and really restore my faith in their engineers’ ability to deliver the best results. For example, a friend mentioned Marks & Spencer which reminded me of the store’s English nickname “Marks & Sparks.” I googled “marks and sparks” thinking I’d get a blog post or wikipedia entry about the nickname. But the number one search result was: marksandspencer.com.

(continue reading…)