No point

Well there isnt is there

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.

Authority and Trust on the Internet

OK so a client introduced some new products. I put them on its website. So I found a relevant blog with a suggestion form and suggested that the new products were of interest.

Wonder of wonders, the blog posted about one of the products.

And then to give his post a bit of a boost, the blogger favourited it on the mindless useful comparison shopping site Stylehive. Three other people favourited it, one of them being me.

So which of the three write ups of the item does Google choose to list on the first page of its results for the brand name of the manufacturer?

The website with details of the product? The blog with an opinion about it? Or the flotsam on Stylehive?

Yeah you guessed it - it was the flotsam. Because Stylehive has got the authority and the trust.

Now I'm not that bothered for the client. It's got some good rankings for the brand name plus product type and is getting fair traffic.

But really, why would anyone care what the morons eager comparison shoppers on Stylehive are clicking on. Most of them are only promoting themselves anyway. Or saving the products of their friends who are also promoting themselves.

I know there is no point in moaning. Best to just do what you need to get the results.

But I just can't help... I mean... Stylehive? C'mon Google find a better way to measure user sentiment please.

The BBC is better than Twitter

Is mainstream media even relevant anymore? Twas funny watching the BBC fall over themselves looking for credible sources - Twitter knew..."

What? I mean really what?

Twitter didn't fucking know that Michael Jackson had died. Twitter just guessed, like everybody else.

And the BBC wasn't falling over themselves. They were doing what they have to do, which is not go on hearsay, but make sure they have got it right.

And as for mainstream media no longer being relevant...

Say I want to find out about something. Not breaking news. Not what people are wittering talking about in the last hour/day/week. I mean really know about something. And it doesn't involve seo or making money on the internet.

Obviously, I wouldn't consider Twitter. Or Digg. Or even blogs. How do I know which blog is any good?

I would go the the BBC website. Or read a newspaper. Obviously.

Actually, I didn't even trust Twitter to tell me Michael Jackson was dead. It wasn't until I saw the news confirmed by the LA Times that I was sure it was true.

I just hope the mainstream media can find a way to monetize their content because the idea of having to depend for information on the sort of half-baked nonsense quoted above is too horrible to contemplate.

More reasons to quit playing around with Twitter

More grist to my social-media-marketing is useless mill. Two small but significant social media success stories that generated nothing useful at all.

First example:

This is from a client account on twitter. I tweet occasionally for them, nothing special going on.

A week ago, out of the blue came a really nice recommendation from a tweep in the same industry sector who I had followed without knowing that the client had worked occassionally with them.

She has nearly 2,000 follewers so I could have hoped for a little bit of action, right?

Wrong. Analytics showed 2 visitors to the client's site from Twitter. And no spike in direct hits at all.

So nobody came. Yeah maybe somebody searching some day for what the client does just might come across the recommendation and act on it. Maybe. But then again, maybe not. There was no useful keywords in the tweet. Just the recommendation and the clients twitter account name.

Second example:

Another client got a sudden insurge from Stumbleupon. An old page must have been restumbled and oooh wow did get lots of traffic. Maybe 1,000 from Stumbleupon over 3 days.

But did they stick around? No.

Did they look at more than 1.1 pages? No.

Did a single one of them convert? Of course not.

Nothing new in this I know.

It just confirms me in my stick-in-the-mud belief that the industry obsession with social media and Twitter is just so misplaced. And that time spent elsewhere (linkbuilding) is just so much more likely to generate financial rewards.

Twitter is boooooooooooooooring

Just finding it hard to even browse Twitter nowadays.

So much self-promotion...

I used to find the characters engaging - you know, the ones who swear a lot or the ones who get baity a lot. But once you get to know what they do, well, they just keep on doing it so that gets a bit tedious.

And so much naval-gazing. When I checked in this morning, there was lots of this:

RT: @kevgibbo: RT @gcharlton: Five of my favourite Twitter fails http://bit.ly/106lV8 from @kevgibbo

The linked to page was clearly doing what it was supposed to which is generate buzz (aka get your friends to write RT a lot).

I knew I shouldn't have because I really don't give a xxxx about Twitter fails.

But the RTs got to me in the end so I clicked and...

Five rehashed non-stories about ... truthfully, I'm not even sure. I just couldn't bring myself to read in detail what these people had done wrong or right on Twitter. I know from the past that Jennifer Anniston's ex-boyfriend tweeted too much; and that that guy who went to Memphis said he hated the town and got into trouble.

The others? Who cares?

Maybe I should follow 100 more people. Yes, I think I will. An experiment to test out my jaundiced hypothesis that following more tweeps will just lead to more noise for the same pathetic amount of signal.

I'll report back in a week or two