Web Design is our .Biz

The Death and Rebirth of Flash

2006-03-28T05:54:00.000-08:00

Pop-ups and ActiveX blocking – thanks to an old patent which is finally making waves in the web world, developers will have to change how they handle embedded content or face entire sites becoming unusable.

Introduction

A little under 12 years ago, a small Chicago based company called Eolas ‘completed a licensing agreement with the University of California for the exclusive rights to a pending patent covering the use of embedded program objects, or "applets," within Web documents’.

In 1995, applets were being touted as the “next big thing” in web browsers. It turns out, they were right. Macromedia Flash, QuickTime, RealOne Player, Acrobat Reader, Sun's Java Virtual Machine, and Windows Media Player all embed applications into a webpage. In other words they make use of applets.

On February 2nd, 1999 Eolas decided to cash in on their patent and sued Microsoft for ‘infringement of Eolas' patent on fundamental Web browser technology that makes "plug-ins" and "applets" possible’.

To cut a long story short, Eolas won their case and were awarded $521 million dollars plus interest in damages. The amount of money is not what concerns web developers, but the impact this will have on how we create and maintain our websites does. The law suit has resulted in a change in the way Internet Explorer has to handle ActiveX – and not for the better.

What has changed?

Microsoft has released an optional update for Internet Explorer 6 as a response to this lawsuit to avoid continuing patent infringement which turns off the ActiveX controls by default.

Every embedded object or applet in the page now has to be turned on by the user if they want to see it, which will result in multiple pop-ups or warnings which will have a huge impact on how the visitor interacts (or chooses not to) with your site.

How to fix the problem

This is not something that web developers will want their visitors to have to deal with, so work-arounds and hacks have been developed by numerous sources.

Option 1: Uninstall the update

If only one or two of your clients are having a problem with this, it may be an option to ask them to uninstall the update. This can be done quickly and easily on Windows XP:

Open the Control Panel
Load “Add/Remove Programs”
Tick the “Show Updates” box on the top right
Scroll down until you see the update numbered “912945”
Select it and uninstall

Option 2: Add code to your page to fix the problems

Obviously option 1 is not a viable solution if this problem is here to stay. The only other real option is to add code to your webpages to turn on ActiveX controls by default (in other words, make ActiveX work like it used to)

This article is to create awareness in the web community – for the technical details on how to add code to your webpage to make embedded objects, please try one of the following links:Microsoft – Activating ActiveX Controls

Conclusion

While these fixes and hacks are not the best solution, it is what is available for now. Hopefully a different solution will be found, as I’m sure most of us don’t want to go back to all our past projects and have to recode every element!

Note: Browsers which are open source, such as Firefox will not be targeted by this patent.

Google PageRank Prediction Exposed

2006-02-15T13:31:00.000-08:00

What is PageRank?

“Devised by Google, it measures not only how many links point to a website, but the "quality" of the sites providing the links.” It is a ranking system on a scale of 0 to 10 (0 being worse, 10 being best) to determine how valuable or popular a website it.

What is PageRank Prediction?

PageRank is one of the holy grails of the search engine optimiser – they spend countless hours tweaking a website to increase their PageRank and their position in search engine listings. The PageRank of websites indexed by Google are generally updated every 3 months, so Search Engine Optimisers (SEOs) want to see if the tactics they have been trying have had any effect on their PageRank and turn to tools which try to predict their future PageRank.

One of the most popular tools to predict PageRank is by iWEBTOOL. This article explains why their tool does not work, and in fact, analyses the wrong data to come to its conclusion.

iWEBTOOL PageRank Predictor – how it works

There are three steps to how iWEBTOOL predicts your future “PageRank”

It sends a query to Google with the URL you specify and Google returns a result which looks something like:

Rank_1:1:6 Rank_1:1:6 Rank_1:1:6 Rank_1:1:2 Rank_1:1:4 Rank_1:1:4 Rank_1:1:4 Rank_1:1:4 Rank_1:1:3 Rank_1:1:3 Rank_1:1:3 Rank_1:1:3 Rank_1:1:3 Rank_1:1:3 Rank_1:1:5

It takes the last digit for each 3 digit combination and adds them up

It then works out the average of these numbers and returns the result as your “predicted PageRank” UPDATE: It has been mentioned that it doesn't work out the average. I will look into this further to confirm/deny and post the update here

The tool makes the assumption that the last digit is the PageRank of the top 10 pages who link to your website. It takes the further leap to think that Google works out it’s PageRank by taking these numbers and working out the average.

Where the PageRank Predictor goes wrong

I decided to look further into this PageRank prediction system and found that an XML file is generated to display the results shown above. I won’t go into full detail here, but in this XML file there is a node called <RK></RK> which contains the third number in the above results. People have assumed that RK stands for the websites PageRank.

In actual fact, after looking at Googles XML Reference, it is clear that RK has nothing to do with PageRank, but rather the relevance of a website with regards to the search term:

RK Definition: Provides a general rating of the relevance of the search result

In other words: Google's rating of how good a single search result is

So what is the PageRank Predictor actually doing?

It is using data which has nothing to do with PageRank to calculate your future PageRank. It is the equivalent of me wanting to find out how many apples will grow on my apple tree this year by going to count sheep in a field... Utterly pointless.

A bit more in depth analysis

For the more technically minded I have completed a little experiment to prove all of this.

We are going to analyse www.iwebtool.com using their own tool to prove that its PageRank prediction simply does not work.

If we have a look at the XML file generated by Google when we test www.iwebtool.com we will find the following results (NOTE: different data centres will return different results, so make sure you use the link above):

The XML file contains the following sites in this order

1. http://www.iwebtool.com/
2. http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker
3. http://www.programmingtalk.com/archive/index.php/t-21828.html
4. http://www.programmingtalk.com/search.php?do=finduser&userid=141567
5. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/archive/index.php/ (shortened)
6. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=37333
7. http://www.webworkshop.net/seoforum/viewtopic.php?p=81569
8. http://www.searchguild.com/printer/fm2/22319/
9. http://www.statbrain.com/www.iwebtool.com/
10. http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/Protocols/DNS/Web_Tools/

If we do a search on the same Google data centre for "www.iwebtool.com" (including the “” ) it displays the following links in the top 10

So, now we know that all these sites mention http://www.iwebtool.com somewhere in the page, but does their PageRank match the node in the XML file? Let's find out:

(format: link number. XML file value for <RK></RK> | Actual PageRank)

1. 6 | 4
2. 6 | 5
3. 2 | 2
4. 3 | 0
5. 5 | 0
6. 4 | 0
7. 4 | 0
8. 3 | 0
9. 3 | 1
10. 5 | 4

UPDATE: It has been mentioned on a number of websites discussing this article that the numbers on the left could be representing a web pages current PageRank. There is no way to prove or disprove this at the moment - I will keep looking into it! It has also been mentioned that RK "has to be" the PageRank as no other system on Google has a rating scale of 0-10. A system that is based on organising information and sorting it by relevance is bound to have a large number of rating systems, but PageRank is the only figure that is widely known about which is why people might come to this assumption.

Apart from number 3. (which is most likely a coincidence) we can see that the <RK></RK> value does not match the actual PageRank. This clearly shows that by trying to predict the future PageRank by taking the average value of <RK></RK> will simply give you the average relevance of the top 10 sites who mention your domain name in relation to your website.

In Conclusion

If it was easy or even possible to predict a websites future PageRank, then the system would quickly collapse as SEO companies discover how it works and exploit it. We would see websites shoot up the rankings and the whole Google system would be a shambles. There is a reason Google’s algorithms are kept a secret. At this point, the only way to find out your websites future PageRank is to sit tight and wait for their next update!

UPDATE: Googles search algorithms run on the latest PageRank of a website - which is updated on a daily basis, but they only make these public every few months to stop people making changes and checking how those changes affect their PageRank. As I mentioned above, if the current PR was publically available, then Google would be taking a step backwards as people try to manipulate their rankings by checking back to the figure. This is a further reason why it is my opinion that the RK value has nothing to do with PageRank.

People are also mentioning that iWEBTOOL succesfully predicted a websites future PageRank - the odds of it successfully predicting a PageRank is one in eleven or around 9%. There is only one way to find out the accuracy of iWEBTOOL and that is to record the results of before and after.

Google Ranking Shake Up in 2006

2006-01-04T09:33:00.001-08:00

Google has added two new servers called BigDaddy to their growing network (located on 66.249.93.104 and 64.233.179.104). They are currently testing their new servers which are using a new infrastructure which includes improved canonicalization (to make sure that data conforms to certain rules), improvements to the site: search query and other changes "under the hood".

How will this effect my search engine rankings?

A key quote from a recent article gives some insight into the changes Google will be making in 2006:
"the changes on Bigdaddy are relatively subtle (less ranking changes and more infrastructure changes). Most of the changes are under the hood, and this infrastructure prepares the framework for future improvements throughout the year."

This brings the obvious question of what the future improvements will be. There has been much talk about Googles recent patent applications and we may start to see the search engine giant start to make use of these patents (if that isn't happening already!).

We should expect to see a shake up of the rankings as a result of any changes to the Google search algorithms. The best thing you can do to ensure that your website either maintains its ranking or improves is to make certain that your website is fully optimized for the search engines.

Search Engine Optimization for Beginners and Experts

2006-01-04T06:01:00.000-08:00

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art of building and promoting a website to ensure the highest possible rankings in the major search engines. The aim is to make a website appear in first position in the results when people search for specific words or phrases (keywords).

Why is SEO important?

When looking for information on the internet people head straight for the search engines to find it. Your website will be competing with millions of others to try and get people to visit. It is therefore crucial to optimize your site so that you will be found and your competitors will be pushed further down the ladder.

How do I optimize my site for the search engines?

Remember Camelot! There are a number of tried and tested methods that are proven to work for optimizing your site for the search engines, each will be explained in more detail:

C - Content is King
A - Age of a website
M - Meta Tags
E - Easy to read URLs
L - Link Building
O - Optimized Coding Practices
T - Text Formatting

C – Content is King

A website is similar to a magazine or newspaper. Imagine you were given a newspaper that had all the text removed and you were only left with the images. You wouldn’t be able to make heads or tales of what you were seeing and the same is true when the search engines browse your site (spider your site). Search engines have selective vision, and only choose to see text when gathering information about your website. It is therefore important to provide content which is descriptive and informative. This will not only benefit the SEO for your site but also your visitors. The content should be unique and keyword rich – include phrases and words that people may search for to find your site.

Websites which rely on "flashy" animations or are heavily dependent on graphical elements and little else will suffer in the search engines as a result. There are exceptions to this rule when other methods of SEO are made the primary focus, such as Link Building.

It is important to remember that text saved as a graphic file can not be read by the search engines.

A – Age of a website

The longer a website has been online, the greater its reputation will be in the eyes of the search engines. It shows that a site is stable and will not disappear overnight and as a result will aid in pushing the site higher up in the search engine results.

Obviously if your website is sitting on a brand new domain name the only way to boost its age reputation is patience. If you know you are going to be building a website at some point in the future, it is a good idea to buy the domain name as early as possible and put up a simple holding page. Use Link Building to let the search engines know your new domain name exists. When the site is launched, whether it be 1 month or 2 years from now, you will already have started to build your age reputation with the search engines.

It can also be useful to employ a similar method on existing websites. Try to create placeholder web pages in advance if you know you will need them. The search engines will then spider these pages and get them ready for the search results. Once the new content is added to these placeholder pages, the search engines will quickly gather the information and see that the page has been around for a while and will boost the page in its rankings as a result.

M – Meta Tags

Meta tags are pieces of Information placed in a web page not intended for users to see but are instead used by search engine crawlers. There are three main meta tags that are very important for search engine optimization:

Title (although not a meta tag, it is used in conjunction with them)
Description
Keywords

Title

This tag is used by the search engines as the title of a search result listing. It is important to be as descriptive as possible using between 5 and 10 keywords. The example below shows the best way to use a title tag:

A webpage for a shop selling mobile phones in London:

Bad Example: “Phones”

Good Example: “Mobile Phone Shop – buy new handsets in London, UK”

The search engines place a lot of importance on the words used in the Title tag – a good title tag can make a huge difference with the search engine listings. Title tags should be descriptive about the pages content they relate to.

Description

The description tag is a brief summary about the content on a web page. It will be shown in a search engine result underneath the title. It should be between 200 and 250 characters in length (including spaces) and contain keywords that people may search for.

Using the phone shop example:

Bad Example: “Mobile Phone Shop web page”

Good Example: “The Mobile Phone Shop in London, UK sells cheap and discounted handsets by Nokia, Motorola and Samsung. Great deals on our new phones and tariffs. Popular mobiles for 2006 will be dispatched from our London depot with free delivery.”

Keywords used: mobile, phone, shop, London, UK, cheap, discounted, handsets, nokia, Motorola, Samsung, deals, new, phones, tariffs, popular, mobiles, free, delivery, 2006

These keywords could form a range of search engine queries such as

“Cheap mobile phones”
“Nokia handset deals”
“New 2006 mobiles”
“London phone shop”

Keywords

There is a lot of debate over the value of using the keywords tag. Some search engines completely disregard the keywords tag and instead rely on the title, description and content in the page to create a list of the most used keywords for the search engine listings.

It is always better to be on the safe side and include the keywords meta tag. The keywords tag contains words or phrases separated by commas. It is a difficult task to get to the top of the search engines for popular keywords such as “phones” so it is often better to target specific searches such as “phones in London”. The keywords tag should contain between 15-30 words or phrases.

For example: mobile, phone, shop, London, cheap, handsets, Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, UK mobile phones, London phone shop, cheap new phones, buy mobile phone, cheap phone tariffs UK, discounted Motorola handsets.

It is important to only focus on keywords that relate to the content of the page – never include keywords because you think they may be popular (people sometimes add keywords such as “sex, celebrities, games”) as this will not help bring targeted traffic to your website.

E – Easy to read URLs

The URL of a webpage (its address), if made correctly can greatly improve your search engine listings. The search engines look for any keywords or phrases in a URL and use this as further information to process your website.

Bad Example: http://www.domain.com/014.html

Good Example: http://www.domain.com/nokia-phones

Easy to read (and remember) URLs will not only help with the search engines, but also visitors who want to return to your website.

The domain name should, where possible, contain the main keyword(s) that your site is about. For example: www.phoneshop.com contains two keywords relating to the content, whereas www.wizzawong.com will not mean anything to a search engine (unless of course wizzawong is a keyword you want to target!).

More technical readers should look into mod_rewrite for ways to provide easy to read URLs for both static and dynamic websites.

L - Link Building

Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to your website and is an extremely important part of search engine optimization.

Each link to your website is seen as a vote by the search engines. This means that if a lot of people are linking to (or voting for) your website, it must be important and will be pushed up the search engine rankings as a result.

A mistake a lot of people make when link building is to think quantity is better than quality. Two hundred links from websites which contain content that doesn’t relate to yours will do little to improve your search engine rankings. A handful of links from relevant websites that have a high search engine ranking will do a huge amount to improve your listings.

It is important to mention Google’s PageRank system as this is a quick and easy way to gauge the popularity of a website and the value of a link from their website.

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important.”

In other words, if you wanted people to judge you as a person, a positive testimonial from a high court judge would look better than a testimonial from your mate John down the road and it is the same with link building. Getting a link from a high ranking website to yours will give your site a lot more credibility. Try to target websites with a higher page rank than you currently have. The google toolbar includes a PageRank displayer.

There are two types of links; reciprocal and one way. Reciprocal is as simple as “if you link to my website, I will link to yours”. One way is when people link to your website without you having to link back to theirs. One way links are better for search engine optimization than reciprocal links as it shows that your website is a valuable resource.

The best way to start link building is to phone or e-mail websites asking for a one way or reciprocal link. This will start the process of enabling internet users to find out about your website. If you have followed the other rules in the guide and your website is well designed, you will find that people will start linking to your website of their own accord (creating those much sought after one way links). This can often start a snow ball effect – the more people who find out about your site, the more who will start linking to it.

Link building should be an ongoing process throughout the life of your website – there will always be competitors trying to take your place so you have to try and stay one step ahead.

O – Optimized Coding Practices

To improve your search engine rankings CSS based layouts should be used rather than table based layouts. CSS based sites will help you gain the highest possible listings as they provide a simple and logical structure for the content which allows the search engines to make a more educated analysis of your websites content.

The code should be checked for mistakes and should follow the guidelines set out by the W3C to ensure that the search engines will read the content properly.

Images should be given descriptions using ALT tags in the same way that Title tags (see Meta Tags) are used.

T – Text Formatting

Text formatting is an often overlooked aspect of SEO. Through a range of testing it has been found that text formatting is a hugely important part of improving a site’s listings in the search engines.

When writing a document in a program such as Microsoft Word you will no doubt make use of the Heading attributes and this should be no different from when you are preparing text for the web.

Search engines place a large emphasis on text which is contained within header tags (<h1>,<h2>,<h3> and so on) and it is therefore vital to ensure keywords are contained within these tags.

Use these tags only when appropriate – in other words, don’t put your entire sites content in an <h1> tag as your site will probably get blacklisted on the search engines, which will defeat the purpose of SEO!

In Conclusion

If you follow the advice and guides laid out above, you will find that your website will quickly work its way up the search engine rankings. Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing process, in order to get to the top and stay there, a lot of work needs to be put in by continually optimizing and improving your site.

The algorithms used by the search engines change regularly to ensure the highest quality results for the people using them. This means that SEO changes all the time, but if you follow the Camelot guidelines, you can be sure you will be ready for any changes that may come along and be able to take them in your stride.

Copyright and Linking

This article is original content and is copyrighted to Scott Bowler. You may quote sections of it as long as a link is provided pointing back to this page where it is quoted (see link below). You may not copy or publish the entire text without written permission from Scott Bowler.