IE6 is rubbish but that's no reason to be rude

I choose to utilize my right to refuse you access to my site.

As an internet 6 user you are abiding by no rules and complying with no internet standards. This may mean nothing to you but to us developers we are deeply annoyed by both the existence and use of Internet Explorer 6.

You personally are responsible for wasting hours and hours of useful and expensive time. Because of people like you we will be forced to accept a lower quality of internet... bla bla bla

What a load of pompous, self righteous twaddle.

Yeah I hate Internet Explorer 6; yeah sure it wastes a lot of time.

But since when are there internet rules? since when have css standards become compulsory for the whole population? Since when have they become an excuse for rudeness to ordinary people who quite understandably know and care nothing about us developers or how deeply annoyed we may be.

Ironic that I encountered this message on http://damienhowley.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/ie6-hack-replacing-clearboth/ when browsing for a solution that might work to get divs to clear properly in IE6. This was for a client website for whom 20% of the visitors use Internet Explorer 6, a statistic that varies little across all my clients' sites.

So much though I would like dump IE6, it's not really an option if I want to do a decent job for clients.

Or maybe it is. Maybe by even trying to make a site work in IE6 I too am personally responsible for wasting hours and hours... and forcing the world... and generally lots of very evil things - regardless of my clients' wants.

Maybe my axxx (uk spelling).

Can you think of another industry where the practitioners are so up their own axxxs that they insult users in such self-righteous terms simply because they are using an old fashioned product?

Postscript: The solution offered in the article for clearing elements in IE6 didn't work either. Not that I am blaming the author for that. IE6 is a nightmare with floated layouts and sorting them out is a horrible long process of trial and error and a complete time-hog.

For the record, what worked for me to clear floated h2s in IE6 was to set css float to none and css display to block.

Is Google just pretending?

Interesting.

In the most competitive of the small UK niches I compete in for Google success, the top keyword is ruled by a website with an almost exclusively paid-for backlink profile.

There are a few directory links. And some puff on article sites. But not, as far as I can see, a single organically generated backlink. Not surprising really. The site is merely one of several too expensive directories that serve the niche and it isn't even the best.

Now Google hates link buying. I know because it keeps telling us so. No matter. Despite the exclusively grey hat tactics, this website sits on top of Google and has done for months.

I've known about this for ages. But I assumed buying links worked here only because this is a tiny niche in the UK, not worthy of proper scrutiny from the big G.

But if you think about it, that doesn't make sense.

An algorithm is an algorithm. It doesn't work harder when a keyword is popular. It detects. Or it doesn't. And I'm beginning to think the Google algorithm isn't all Google cracks it up to be when it comes to bought links, irrelavent links and generally spammy linkbuilding tactics.

And today, I came across two blog posts today that seemed to back up my view.

The first was from the We Build Pages blog. Links for Sale – PR9 Links only $300 / Month! pokes fun at link sellers, but admits along the way that a customer was complaining how all of his competitors are buying links and kicking his ass for some key phrases.

Tell me about it.

The other post - Proof Anchor Text Links From Unrelated Sites Are GOLD Too - is from the Hobo blog.

The title says it all. Shaun Anderson looks at the seo vertical and concludes that unrelated links, for all the Google seo bollocks about relevance, work just fine for a Google push.

I couldn't agree more with both posts.

And I got to thinking - maybe Google has been quite knowingly putting the frighteners on us white hats for the last few years.

Making us work hard to build good content in pursuit of supposedly extra-valuable natural links. Making us police ourselves because really, it's too hard to algorithmically detect many kinds of bought links; and too complicated to differentiate between good backlinks from irrelevent sites and bad ones.

Whatever, I think I'm going to get a little greyer. Because it really is beginning to look like it is the quickest and - given the time it takes to generate and promote good content - the cheapest way to get results.