Hacker News Reader

blauwbilgorgelon Indie artist trying to claim his domain name

204.138.26.200 is a problem IP.

Registrations like:

fasebook.com dailymtoion.com

Show with http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/web-sites-on-web-server/

over 300.000 domains according to domaintools.com .

When searching for copy on their landing pages:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Try+Searching+the+Interne...

About 86.600 results for me.

Some pretty nasty spammy stuff in there. For example a result from the Google index that randomly redirects users to another domain, perhaps in violation of the guidelines.

saintrosehospital.com/ (original is strosehospital.org/)

medicalinformatoin.biz/ (for me)

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=%22try%20sear...

And various misspellings of schools, universities and "healthcare" websites like these.

Registering a trademarked domain name is stupid, but squatting on hospital websites is extremely low.

blauwbilgorgelon Minimum Viable SEO

I sometimes recommend nested folder trees, but never deeper than 3 folders. 3 folders deep is enough for millions of pages.

I like nested folders for a couple of reasons, some of which are:

- Clarity. A good structure will instantly signal what the page will be about, before a user or searchbot follows that link.

- Bolded keywords in URL in the SERPS.

- Using pages to flow juice to categories.

- Benefit of targetted anchor text, when using the URL for anchor text.

Compare: big-ecommerce-site.com/yoga-pilatus/accessories/yoga-mat/

vs.

big-ecommerce-site.com/yoga-mat/

And search queries like: "pilatus mat" or "yoga accessories". Which will work better for these queries?

- Structure. Your URL's will reflect in your breadcrumbs, allowing users to navigate your site through URLs (By removing a folder and going to a higher level in the site).

- Silo's. After the Panda update, and this is speculation on my part, Google might lower the imporance of "parts" of your website. Let's say only your blog is of very low quality. Google could discount /blog/ when you have nested folders. With a flat structure your removed "parts" or higher level categories from your site, and don't allow for this.

Ofcourse there are benefits to going flat too. But nested folder trees are not neccessarily a bad thing.

blauwbilgorgelon Minimum Viable SEO

I did a quick SEO analysis on priceonomics.com. Most of these tips fall into the 20% category. Maybe they can use some of these tips to perfect their SEO strategies.

1. Blog on a subdomain.

Though sometimes easier for administration, subdomains might dilute your SEO efforts. Links to a subdomain don't count 100% as links to your main domain. A /blog/ could help with the generation of incoming links and addition of fresh content to the domain you want indexed a lot.

2. Employ Canonical

www. redirects to non-www. Trailing slashes get added automatically. So far so good. But it is still easy to create duplicate URL's by adding random dynamic variables.

Without Canonical an URL like /boats/?dupe=content will point to the same resource as /boats/. Here you might introduce a canonical problem. (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-y...)

3. Optimize your site for speed

Though not that many search queries are affected by the site-speed algo, site speed remains very important for your visitors, and so indirectly for your SEO/marketing efforts. Google Site Speed plugin, Yslow or these guidelines (http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html) might help you fix some of these issues and gain a few seconds.

Mostly loading javascript just before </body>, turning on caching, and compressing and combining resources.

4. Robots.txt vs meta robots

/search is disallowed in robots.txt. If you disallow it on a page basis, with meta robots, you can specify: "noindex, follow". That way if people link to your search results, link juice will keep flowing through your site.

5. Breadcrumbs

Add rich snippets mark-up. For product information and reviews, but an obvious contender is the breadcrumb. Link to your twitter (and future Google+ profile) with 'rel=me' to signify ownership of your graph.

6. Images

Add an alt-attribute to the site logo. Specify the dimensions for faster rendering.

7. Don't critique ehow.com if you fill Google's index with 245.000+ automated results.

Or put less bluntly: Write more unique content to introduce bigger categories. Add more relevant content to your listings (reviews, search/trend data, price watch).

8. Make clear if an item is "already sold".

If I click on 10 entries and I get 10 times "item already sold" I start to doubt the usefulness of the application. I compare this to a job site, where the jobs are mostly filled: You happen upon such a site through Google, because Google still thinks these listings are relevant.

9. Quality

The site is mostly void of trust factors. Due to some listings being in ALL-CAPS, some result pages can look a bit spammy. Add more trust factors, and try to repair spammy listings.

blauwbilgorgelon IE6 Usage Falls to Under 1% in U.S.

>> You honestly seem to be arguing that IE6 was a perfectly compatible browser and was the pinnacle of browser design. I think you'll find a lot of disagreement, even from Microsoft themselves. We know enough about security these days to know that not upgrading is a bad idea.

If I honestly seem to be arguing that, I apologize. It also means this discussion is fruitless, because counterarguments are based on a perception that no one here holds. If anything I view IE6 as an accessibility issue.

> You don't need exceptions to make sites render on IE6. >> I disagree.

Hackernews renders on IE6 and it doesn't need exceptions. You don't need exceptions to make sites render on IE6. You might need a work-around or two (for example: opting for padding, instead of margin). You can still both code to standards and have it render without exceptions on IE6.

>>implying that we should code for the blind because they did not choose their limitations.

I disagree. User choice or forced, disability or no: accessibility is for everyone. Wether people choose to turn off javascript or their browser forces them shouldn't make a difference. Choice is no pre-requisite for accessibility, unless you make that choice for your users.

>> THIS IS PROGRESS This is what progress does.

In your analogy, at least you still have access to the data on the floppies. And if our current progress destroys the initial ideas for progress from authorities like TBL, doesn't that give reason to pause and reconsider the way we are heading?

blauwbilgorgelon IE6 Usage Falls to Under 1% in U.S.

Perhaps because I didn't say nor mean both those things. Perhaps also because your parser mistranslates "sites designed for IE6" as "sites using MS-specific code".

blauwbilgorgelon IE6 Usage Falls to Under 1% in U.S.

>> Because these technologies came into existence after these browsers were made. Such is progress.

An example: the "about page" for Google Music. You need to download the newest Chrome to view it. I don't call it progress if accessibility and backwards compatibility get the shaft.

>>This is a law, and being blind is rarely a choice.

Two things: I hope you make sites accessible for the blind, not because it is law, but simply because you want the blind to access your content. Put another way: If it wasn't for the law, we could forget about the blind too? Accessibility needs a law for front-end engineers to take note?

Being on IE6 is rarely a choice too, especially in a corporate environment.

>>Because they were built with two codebases, one for regular browsers, one for IE6. Double the work for that 1%.

You don't need exceptions to make sites render on IE6. You only need exceptions if you start implementation in a modern browser, and make IE6 a minute after-thought.

>> But IE6 required a lot of browser-specific code.

Only if _you_ required hacks to make a design work.

>>Is that progress? Yes.

I don't think that was the progress that Tim Berners Lee had in mind. A progress where HTML documents from the HTML5 era become inaccessible to later generations.

Disclaimer: I am able to build sites that render in IE6, without much hacks or troubles or extra work, but I don't like working around its quirks. I don't have a strong opinion on why and when IE6 should die, and I certainly don't want to play that judge with my clients websites. I want maximum accessibility, and that includes IE6 in my opinion.

blauwbilgorgelon IE6 Usage Falls to Under 1% in U.S.

I like how ie6countdown.com renders perfectly fine on both IE6 and modern browsers.

I don't like how inaccessible HTML5 and CSS3 techniques are to older browsers. It reminds me of having to upgrade flash.

I like how we try to make sites accessible for the blind, regardless of their usage stats.

I don't like how we seem to throw away 1% of our best possible conversion rates, by fully ignoring 1% of our audiance.

I like how the web is maturing and growing.

I don't like how plain and simple information-providing websites are turning into HTML5 applications, with 100k's of javascript, hashtags and other dynamics.

I believe that in 20 years, sites that were build to render on IE6, will continue to render just fine. Sites that were build using experimental browser vendor-specific code, with AJAX and hashtags might need a special server to render. Is that progress?

EDIT: seems to be some confusion about "Sites build for IE6". I ment "Sites that render on IE6/were build with IE6 in mind". To me that doesn't auto-translate to active-x, MS-filters, conditional rules, IE7.js and CSS hacks, but I can see how others can view that. Anyway, I am clearly playing with fire, by taking these views on IE6. I'll just let this be and not delete it. It wasn't a troll or a flame, but this topic is always a heated one, so best to just let it be.

blauwbilgorgelon Facebook deleted their Python SDK repository without warning

I understand Facebook deprecated the REST API, but could you stop cloaking the documentation?

If I visit with my normal useragent I get a log-in form. If I visit with the Googlebot useragent I get content.

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/rest/

blauwbilgorgelon Welcome to Schemer

So what could Schemer be exactly?

  According to IGN, who partnered with Google to help 
  consumers find things related to games and entertainment, 
  Schemer is a platform that helps you discover things you 
  didn't even know you wanted to do.

From the about page:

  Whether it’s exploring a new city, checking out a 
  friend’s movie recommendation, or just finding new 
  activities for your weekends, Schemer lets you discover 
  new things to do, share schemes with friends, and make 
  the most of your day.

Patent: http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=8...

  Downloadable computer application software for mobile 
  phones, namely, software to facilitate group decision 
  making, event planning, and social networking

  Providing a website featuring on-line non-downloadable 
  software to facilitate group decision making, event 
  planning, and social networking.

Edit: That website really wants to log me into my Google account. If you are logged out and try below URL it will send you into a redirect loop, adding parameters to the URL with each attempt: http://www.schemer.com/about?lo=2

blauwbilgorgelon The Pest Who Shames Companies Into Fixing Security Flaws

EDIT: Something about Bradley Manning, double standards, journalistic integrity, grudge hacking and PR. Sorry.

blauwbilgorgelon Reasons to Use HTML5

Of course I embraced HTML5, but since this was written as a top 10 of why I _should_ use HTML5 now, I'll try to refute that top 10 for reasons of why you _shouldn't_ use HTML5 right now:

  10. Accessibility.

HTML5 sure has the potential to improve accessibility, but.WAI-ARIA guidelines are in draft mode. It will be several more years before assistive technologies fully support HTML5 to the degree they now support HTML4 and all your users will run on browsers that support HTML5.

"Upgrade to the latest version of Chrome to view this HTML5 demo" isn't any more accessible than prompting a user to download the latest version of Flash 5.

WAI-ARIA was needed to combat the accessibility problems that ajax-rich/click-rich web applications introduced. Part of this HTML5 and forward thinking is responsible for accessibility problems, not a cure.

Requiring javascript support (shiv) or a web-kit browser from a user, for laying out a web page isn't all that accessible.

  9. Video and Audio Support

The author called flash video implementation a hassle. So what does the author call a flash video fall-back, with a <video> tag, and your video encoded in .ogv, .webm, and .mp4?

And javascript feature detection to decide which to show? And a way to implement custom controls for both flash-video and html5-video?

And since you want accessibility how about flash and html5 captions? Descriptive Audio?

And Yahoo searchmonkey RDFa that you already used for your flash video and schema.org for your html5 video? Incompatible.

How long did it took for Flash to support webcam video and what is the current support state of <webcam> for html5? Video and audio support is what Flash did/does best.

  8. Doctype

It is short and simple, right? Why not <doctype>, or why not leave it out all together, if you can't be bothered as a HTML web developer to remember, store or copy-paste a doctype?

And RDFa with a html5 doctype?

  7. Cleaner code

Faulty example.

Why not <ul id="subnav"> <li>..</li> </ul>

How is that less clean than <nav id="subnav"> <ul> <li>..</li> </ul> </nav> ?

  6. Smarter Storage

Only works for local storage capable browsers, so off limits for app critical functionality, unless you don't care about that. If it was so smart, why can't I store a 15MB movie on Safari mobile?

Do you want to bother your users with a pop-up that says: "This website wants to store stuff in your local cache" while storing stuff like preferences in cookies is much more silent.

And how secure (for your privacy) is local cache and ETags when it can be abused for tracking?

  5. Better Interactions

"Better" Interactions. Better how? "It can do everything Flash was able to do in 2001, but better". Also better than Papervision3D from 2008?

  4. Game development

I don't need to switch from Flash to HTML5 to get Game development. I wouldn't switch from Flash to HTML5, because better game development.

"If you’ve built Flash games before, you’ll love building HTML5 games."

If you were to poll game developers, this would likely be a very unpopular statement. I know it certainly doesn't apply to me.

  3. Legacy/Cross Browser Support

Again, no reason to switch to HTML5 from HTML4. It would be a reason _not_ to switch, if it didn't had legacy browser support, but that doesn't make it a game changer all of a sudden.

And a browser conditional statement ("if lt IE9" or "if Windows XP general user"), followed by a javascript hack, isn't native legacy support. It is just what it is.

  2. Mobile, Mobile, Mobile

HTML5 for mobile will be great, and this is a good reason to switch and fully familiarize yourself with HTML5 as a webdeveloper. Responsive design et al was already possible with HTML4 though, but the author is correct in saying html5 is important for mobile.

I am not really waiting to get "apple-touch-icon" approved as a HTML5 standard, but there is no denying that the future of HTML is in the hands of the big companies now.

  1. It's the Future, Get With It!

Sure, that is why I am already implementing HTML6 on most of my clients websites. The specs are a little rough around the edges, but at least I made my clients websites future proof. ;)

It seems you are advocating more of a switch to dynamic HTML5 web apps.

blauwbilgorgelon SEO tricks from Patio11

They are talking about Twitter having no link juice.

With my post I tried to show that Twitter has both SEO (indexation, ranking, discovery) and marketing value (visitors, network, following).

Using Twitter is so-so SEO strategy. But it is an invaluable online marketing strategy.

Just dumping your links on Twitter and calling that link building is silly, and he is right to shoot that down. But using Twitter a little more intelligently, would have you connecting with other webmasters and linkerati: People who can add (Twitter) links to their sites, for example when they blog about the topic of your tweet, or submit it to Hacker News.

There are valid reasons to ditch Twitter: if your produce content just for ranking, instead of your users, and you lack a brand, because you have a keyword-in-domain.net, then Twitter will be very ineffective. No one wants to follow or engage with a non-brand, with highly optimized content.

If you have a brand and produce interesting content, you'll shoot yourself in the foot, if you ignore Twitter.

>> Do .edu links have any ranking weight anymore?

I don't know, I am unable to measure their value (lack control groups with the exact same linking profiles)

There is good reason to believe there is something like "proximity to authority". Taking a seed set of quality websites (Stack overflow, Wikipedia, a lot of .edu domains) you can calculate the distance/similarity of your site to this seed set and measure your own quality and authority.

If this is a solid measure, then the .edu TLD alone might not give a free pass. It matters if the .edu is deemed authoritative or not and to what degree. A link from cnn.com can be more authoritative, relevant, contextual and so provide more ranking weight, than a link from a random university student page that happens to end in ".edu".

A nofollow link always caries mention-value. For a smart search engine just a relevant mention of, for example "SEOmoz", could attribute a vote to http://seomoz.org . Also an added benefit of mentions is the increased "search results estimate" for your brand or product. Some people give more trust to companies that have more results in the index, especially when comparing companies.

blauwbilgorgelon SEO tricks from Patio11

Is this not a bias? As in: It only looks like Google discriminates for the Big Three, because they are so abundant?

I've heard from official sources like below that Google doesn't discriminate on TLD. There are my sites and Googlers who use ".info" TLD in a legit and well-ranking manner.

Where this "evidence" does play a role, is in spam/made for Adwords-sites. It is reasonable to assume that a .co or .ly will get more attention, to combat spam/made for Adwords sites that try to use Keyword-In-Domain tricks to outrank legit companies.

But if you are not making Keyword-In-Domain Made-For-Adwords sites, you have nothing to worry about (at least as for Google discrimination).

It is mostly _users_ who discriminate for a .com. If Google ranks website.ly in the top 5, but its users don't click on the result, in fear of spam or low-quality, then your rankings might suffer.

Matt Cutts interview on DomainRoundtable.

  "For example, do .com domains carry more weight than a 
  .net, .us, .info, etc. 

  He said that TLD doesn’t matter -- that’s the way Larry 
  and Sergey originally designed the Google algorithm. The 
  algorithm doesn’t care where the page is located, it’s 
  all about pagerank (LINKS) of the particular page. At the 
  end of answering this question he did admit that they 
  might have started to look at particularly cheap (and 
  spammy) TLDs differently than other TLDs or they might 
  start considering TLD in their algorithm if they’re not 
  already doing so."

So it is still good to advice against .io and witty domain names (portfol.io), but not for the reason of Google discrimination.

I am reminded by statements like: "For better ranking, claim your domain for 5+ years". Just because Google gives extra attention to domains with a low expiration date, because they correlate with spammy/get-rich-quick sites, doesn't mean that spam on a 5+ years registered domain is ok, or that simply claiming a domain for 10 years, somehow signals quality to Google.

You only have to worry about registration dates, when you know that you deliver low-quality content and you don't want to be found out soon.

blauwbilgorgelon SEO tricks from Patio11

>> Twitter links has no SEO juice

Besides using Twitter to:

- build your network and following,

- Twitter can aid in brand/product mentions

- Some reason to believe Twitter links are followed by the search engines, so help with indexation and discovery.[1]

- Some reason to believe Author/Agent/Identity rank of social profiles will start playing a role.[2]

- Finally, there are sites who add Twitterfeeds to the author profiles. Not all these feeds have the "nofollow" property.

The last one is also relevant to the statement: "Wikipedia doesn't matter for link juice". There are many copies of Wikipedia on university domains, where they don't employ nofollow (For study about web crawling or natural language processing). Or people rewriting Wikipedia articles and adding the references without nofollow. A nofollow link can transform into a dofollow link.

>> Don’t use the keyword meta tag.

Exactly, but do use its fine on-page alternative: Microdata keywords: http://schema.org/WebPage

If only for internal usage: Writing down the keywords for a page, keeps you focussed. If you don't mind giving this information to your competitors (there are tools to find out these keywords anyway, if not already obvious), do experiment with microdata keywords.

[1] http://www.seomoz.org/blog/using-twitter-for-increased-index...

[2] http://www.seobythesea.com/2011/11/agent-rank-or-google-plus...

blauwbilgorgelon Googlebot is Chrome

I can't edit that link anymore. Would suck if the Wordpress install was hacked. I'll try to contact the author. Thank you for the heads up.

blauwbilgorgelon Googlebot is Chrome

Mirror Google Cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http:/...

I started believing that Googlebot would render entire pages, when Google Pagespeed was introduced. When they calculate page loading times, they can also produce a waterfall view of the rendering progress.

Before I suspected some rendering/css/DOM parsing was used to detect hidden text and links, but not on such a massive scale. Like now you can index a new page and it almost looks like a preview image gets generated "on-the-fly" when there is no cache available.

I wonder how much of this render data is used for Google Panda quality control updates. Position of advertisements, call-to-actions, author information, address information and disclaimer/privacy policies could now all play a role in making your site seem more credible in the eyes of Google and your users.

blauwbilgorgelon How To Build A Site That Looks Great On Every Screen

This is no tutorial or even an article on responsive design. It is a small collection of links, that seems to confuse HTML5 or iPad magazines with responsive design.

I think this is a fluff piece, with a catchy title, build around a buzzword, not around expertise or original research. We designers get a few links to the basics of HTML or irrelevant frameworks, could you even imagine the same happening for a serious programming article?

blauwbilgorgelon Serving at the Pleasure of the King

>> Google can arbitrarily and capriciously exclude them from their index.

As a web developer on SEO forums, I hear of these cases all the time, but when you analyze these sites, usually 1 of 3 things is happening:

- Web developer(s) made a mistake, causing a (search engine) accessibility problem.

- The site is in violation of the Google webmaster guidelines.

- The site lacks (unique) content, or otherwise doesn't contribute at all to a healthy search engine index.

I never read of a case of Google arbitrarily or capriciously excluding sites from their index, offering them no way to appeal. In general, I also think the advice Google gives is far from inconsistent.

This could be a popular position for a web developer who got a site de-indexed, but maybe apply Occam's razor first. A mistake? A trend? An algo change? Worthless content? Blackhat SEO? Bad architecture? Got hacked?

Or do you want to jump immediately to Google arbitrarily removing well-intentioned sites from their index? I guess then you can blame bad luck of the draw.

blauwbilgorgelon Robert Scoble's Galaxy S II vs iPhone 4S camera test

I believe this is called the "Robert Scoble"-effect. One could liken it to social media spam: I don't want to know Robert Scoble, don't find him notable, yet his name appears everywhere.

Such people know how to insert themselves in the daily conversations and can count on the support of their followers to carry their views far and beyond. Most of the time those views are not much more than a catchy social hook. You Googling his name and reading this reply will likely cement Robert Scoble in your brain for a while longer.

I find it an interesting, albeit at times annoying, phenomenon. Like the Quora drama (in which Scoble was able to permeate into a lot of topics):

http://scobleizer.com/2011/01/30/why-i-was-wrong-about-quora...

http://www.quora.com/Dan-Kaplan/Sorry-Scoble-Quora-is-not-yo...

blauwbilgorgelon Google Killing Off Buzz and Code Search

Very saddened to see 'University Research Program for Google Search' go. Google's index offers an exciting corpus for linguistics and AI study.

The current search API's just don't cut it for proper research (for example: just 64 results per query and 1000 queries a day [1] and the "estimatedResultCount" being off by a factor of 10-100 [2]).

I believe spammers were abusing the Google translate API to spin articles in different languages. This contributed to it being closed down. I don't hope that Google's search API is crippled to thwart the bad apples. Because then those that follow the TOS (don't crawl Google's results) have little recourse, but to halt their research (Yahoo Boss and Bing Api give little solace).

[1] Too few for either deep analysis or learning queries like:

  "X is a *" and "X, such as *,"

[2] Estimated results for "test". With API: 257.000.000 vs. manual search 2.750.000.000

blauwbilgorgelon 16% of the queries on Google each day are brand new (never seen before)

It is a very cheap way (quality score is high for your own business name) to advertise the fact that "this is a business that is reputable/savy/spending enough to invest in ads and appear on Google." I really don't know how much that is worth, but it must count for something. Especially if you use Adwords for branding campaigns.

blauwbilgorgelon "Unknown or expired link." - Why?

I thought this was to combat cross-site request forgery attacks?

Else couldn't one set up malicious scripts to up-or downvote many stories, or post comments under someone else's name?

blauwbilgorgelon It’s official: Google+ will be connected to everything

I don't like this one bit. I was on Youtube and noticed I was logged in. Then when I logged out on a "Video Sharing Site", I was logged out of my "E-Mail Program" that was open in another tab too. I was scared for a second that a public Youtube profile had been made from my gmail-address, so people can view my last log-ins. I also looked, to no avail, at a way to disconnect my personal Gmail-account from Youtube.

I will miss the personalization. But for me this too will mean less browsing while logged into Google services. It is not the same scale like Spotify requiring a Facebook account, but it is close enough to make me cringe and worry about my favorite online services.

blauwbilgorgelon Does the Google Bot index css hidden divs? yes.

Google does index "display: none"/hidden divs: http://www.google.com/search?q=De+eerste+stap+in+het+generer...

  <div class="webinar-blurb" id="bot-164716" style="display: none;">
  De eerste stap in het genereren van websitebezoeken met AdWords is
  ...
  </div>

blauwbilgorgelon Does the Google Bot index css hidden divs? yes.

To me, accessibility is all about providing proper access to information.

It doesn't matter to me if it is because a screenreader, a Lynx browser, a preference, or a no-script plug-in. All that matters to me is my users can access my content on a broad range of devices.

CSS on/Images off is an unlikely scenario, but it is a possible scenario (also consider the possibility of images not loading for whatever reason). If I were a user stuck in that scenario, I'd say: "I can't access core parts of this website". For a website developer, you could call that an accessibility problem, no?

Relevant thread on WebAIM: http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread?thread=3785 A little more cheeky: http://www.arespritesaccessible.net/explain.php Wikipedia: Web accessibility refers to the inclusive practice of making websites usable by people of all abilities and disabilities.

blauwbilgorgelon Does the Google Bot index css hidden divs? yes.