Comments on: SES Chicago Report

By: Luke

Luke — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 17:04:48 +0000

Thanks – all that tells us is what DOESN’T make a difference though!

Useful all the same though – thanks – I won’t bother with the longdesc crap now!! Haha.

By: Max Design - standards based web design, development and training » Blog Archive » Some links for light reading (1/3/05)

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 20:47:33 +0000

[...] , Part 1 Guide to Unicode, Part 2 Avoid 404 Adam Polselli’s 2005 color forcaster Eric Meyer – SES Chicago Report Accessibar project We’re taking back [...]

By: Eric Everman

Eric Everman — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 16:48:51 +0000

Eric, Do you have any follow-up thought on SES? After this meeting, are there clear places where standards *do* help in search rankings? Are meta-tags completely useless? Should repetative page titles (Book Abstract) be h1 and the content title (_Alice in Wonderland_) be h2 or visa versa or does it matter? Is there a way to mark key words within a large paragraph?

I should say that I’m not interested in artificially raising rankings, rather, I work for a government agency that creates a lot of publications and we want them to be as findable as possible.

Thanks – always a pleasure to read your postings here.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Fri, 24 Dec 2004 15:57:24 +0000

Having a valid document neither helps nor hurts ranking; validation is completely ignored.

Hrm…makes me wonder how much good the search engines could do for the web if they factored in validation a little. It seems that someone who takes the time to build a valid page is probably running a more reliable/valuable page. At least for the time being.

By: polarmate

polarmate — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 17:50:30 +0000

CSS techniques are being widely used to hide keyword stuffed paras on many web sites. When the text is never displayed on visual browsers, it's usually called hidden text under the more generic heading of "spam." The term spam, as applied here, is quite nebulous and ill-defined. However, web sites that use practices such as hidden text have seen 'penalties' like a drop in Pagerank and/or drop in rankings in the search engine results. Sites that link to sites that use these techniques are also hit with penalties, as was disclosed by a Google rep here on the SEW forums

By: Stephen Caudill

Stephen Caudill — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 14:42:05 +0000

Things like throwing the text offscreen in order to show a background image, hiding layers of text for dynamic display, and so forth are all grouped together under the SEO-industry term

By: Ron Carnell

Ron Carnell — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 13:45:30 +0000

Just a quick note, Eric, to let you and your audience know I enjoyed your Chicago presentation at SES and sincerely hope the Web Standards session will continue to be offered at future shows. My only complaint was that one hour and fifteen minutes was much too short. Every speaker went over on their presentation, I think, leaving very little room for questions. And there were a LOT of questions to be asked. :)

Maybe next time!

By: polarmate

polarmate — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 04:38:20 +0000

Shannon, the title tag is of significance. The title attribute of an element is not.

By: Shannon

Shannon — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 01:18:13 +0000

I am skeptical about the fact that someone said the title attribute has no effect, positive or negative. On google's Information for Webmasters page it states, 'Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate.'.

By: Chris Hunt

Chris Hunt — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 12:59:14 +0000

“Hyperlink title attribute and longdesc text”

Shouldn’t that be the other way around? A longdesc is a hyperlink (to a page holding a longer description of an image) and a title is made up of text.

Good article though.

By: jen

jen — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 12:56:11 +0000

Interesting info Eric, particularly your statement that all bans are manual triggered after being reported by a a tattletale (competitor?) as a wicked evil spammer then having to prove the site’s innocence to be re-included.

Do you really mean that there are no spam filters in the various search properties algorithms so effectively leaving all sectors to monitor themselves?

By: Jeff

Jeff — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 18:12:12 +0000

Thanks for the info, Eric. I look forward to anything else you can offer from this conference after you followup with you e-mail contact.

By: Jeff Croft

Jeff Croft — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 15:13:47 +0000

Great info, Eric. Thanks so much!

By: kalu

kalu — Sun, 19 Dec 2004 21:41:33 +0000

I wonder what is the dynamics of the relationship between the search engines and the search engine optimizers.

Do they see themselves as adversaries or do they see each other as working together to make the worlds information more easily accessible. With obviously some bad apples thrown in,

still wondering !!

if some one reading this wants to discuss this send me a email

By: clint

clint — Sun, 19 Dec 2004 04:45:20 +0000

great info, thanks for the update. it is a bit dismaying although comforting that the things we have gained in design thru structure tweaks won’t have to be tossed out.