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.

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.

There are tons of “jobs” like these listed every day. Employers who just want a writer to produce blog entries each day in hopes of driving traffic. Or they want someone to write copy with an eye on SEO. Of course, these people — the employers and writers alike — aren’t really saying anything. So what’s the real value?

Likewise, I’ve had clients and employers alike get very concerned about how to drive traffic, how to raise visibility and I always just kind of shrug my shoulders at the wasted effort of it all. Because either you turn into one of these leeches who’s just gaming the system and not actually delivering any new information or you end up competing against them.

I don’t have a solution but I have this suggestion: information is valuable. If you are delivering actual information and not just linkbaiting or regurgitating keywords then your site will have value. So why not just concentrate on creating value and forget about keywords, SEO and linkage?

Oh and in case Indeed takes down that link, here’s a screenshot of the listing.

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.

I took a quick peek at the code and didn’t find meta tags or, in fact, any text with the phrase “Marks and Sparks.” Neither is that phrase in the <title> tag — the text which is displayed in the top of your browser window. (One of the ways I’ve been told to improve search results is to make that <title> tag into descriptive text — something I’ll have to address later.)

Maybe it was human intervention, maybe it’s terrific inbound linking that landed them in the number one slot, but it appears that Marks & Sparks isn’t gaming the system to get there. Thank God.