Archive for March, 2006
March 29th, 2006 | 
Author: I love stories like this they make me good to feel that I’m not the only one to screw up. And to tell the truth I’ve never screwed up this bad! Google said that it accidentally deleted its corporate blog Monday night, causing a short-term outage.
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Overall DreamWeaverMX 2004 is a great product, but definetly not worth an upgrade from DreamWeaverMX . There are very few differences. However if your a serious Web Designer DreamWeaverMX or DreamWeaverMX 2004 is a definite must for your toolbox. It is most definitely the most productive, flexible, stable and expandable web design software on the market. It’s one of the least expensive too!
Made by Macromedia, DreamWeaverMX gives you a excellent code view editor or WYSIWYG environment. It comes with a standard library of JavaScript “Behaviors” that5 you can attach directly to page element (like images). It also has a repository of “snippets” (bits and pieces of code written in any language, stored in plain text form), that is as easy as “copy and paste” to add your own snippets to, so you can reuse them later.
Macromedia’s DreamWeaverMX 2004 (and all previous versions) works well with all web programming languages, databases, CSS, AJAX, and it’s environment is designed to work with any technology that isn’t developed yet.
That may change now that their competitor, Adobe, has bought Macromedia. They have a far inferior software called “Go Live” that you don’t really want to even try to use much less pay over a thousand dollars for.
Other web page editing and creation software:
- Microsoft Front Page: It’s inexpensive, easy to use (for the basics only), and with very complicated processes you can embed other microsoft Office technologies into web pages. The bad news, it hates non-microsoft technology like flash, java, PHP, mySQL etc etc etc. If you don’t know how to make web pages from by writing HTML in a plain text editor, then you should hire someone. But if you must dive headfirst into a very complicated process you know nothing about, this software is for you. And one more thing, it only works on windows and most of the web pages it out puts only work on windows and Internet Explorer (which will alienate at least 20% of your viewers).
- Net Object’s Fusion: You really want to avoid this software. It’s very complicated to make the most basic pages and anything extra, well, costs extra. It also says it lets you write your own code and scripts, but it usually doesn’t.
Great news for Web Designers any way you look at it! The only thing the Federal Election Commission will regulate is paid political advertising, and they won’t be regulating how much candidates can spend, just where the money they spend it comes from.1 As far as what can be said by whom and how and./or if it is coordinated, there won’t be any regulation at all. 2
Not only is this a victory for free speech, but it could be a commercial boon for American based web designers and hosting companies.
Most of my clients who are using blogs set up by me are using the WordPress blogging system. They’ve come up with a couple upgrades. One upgrade is all about Security, the other upgrade is all about usability and bug fixes. I will be upgrading several clients’ blogs as well as this one. Backups will be made first of course.
It was bound to happen. Some corporation with big money was going to loose their page rank and thus lots of business. KinderStart.com, which by all appearance used to have a page rank of 7 on their index page and great page ranks for lots of interior pages. Google updated their search engine, now their PR is is 4 on their index page and n/a on their interior pages. They say they are blacklisted, but they still have over 43000 pages in google index 1.
Well guess what? They lost tons of visitors, thus looses value on their advertising. They have sued Google, stating Google punitively or arbitrarily stopped pointing Internet searchers in its direction.2
Indeed you can even search for kinderstart by name in google and they aren’t on the first page. 3.
That’s all part of the story you’ve probably already heard. Here’s my take:
While I think it’s a bit excessive for them not to be able to be found when you type in their exact name, they are nothing but a link farm. They should have never been in google in the first place and Google has every right and indeed and obligation to searchers to keep web sites like this out of it’s search engine results. We certainly don’t want to go back to the old days before Google where every page in the search engine results was a page full of links which led to a page full of links etc. etc.
Of course there is room for in search engines for specialized directories, but even today there are far far to many of them in search engine results. Especially Google’s. Here’s a great example: Try searching Google for “St. Petersburg Restaurant” (without the quotes). On the first three pages there are only 2 restaurants. One on page two and one on page three. The rest are all link farms (or directories, whichever you’d like to call them). Yahoo’s results are little better with 4 restaurants on the first page, the rest being link farms and/or review sites. MSN’s results are perfect with every result on the first page being a restaurant. They prove it is possible.
If someone wanted restaurant reviews, they would put the word “reviews” in their query, if they wanted directories, they would put the word “directory” in their query. Why would google do this? Well a look at the right half of the page provides a great clue. If your restaurant was on the first page of these Search Engine Results, you would have no reason to buy an ad on the right hand side of the page would you?
Once again, search engines are providing poor search engine results to increase advertising sales. Some could argue that all restaurants aren’t good at SEO. But providing relevant content is type search engines responsibility.
This suit could bring several remedies if successful that are desperately needed in the Search Engine World:
- Requiring Search Engines to publish specific rules for websites to follow in order not to be blacklisted or have PageRank removed.
- Requiring Search Engines to notify websites with reasons for blacklisting
- Requiring Search Engines to offer specific ways to remedy blacklisting.
- Requiring search engines to display relevant links
However this web site is a lousy candidate for this lawsuit and they will probably loose horribly. This will set a precedent and prevent any positive change in the Search Engine world.
Search Engine Results are a complicated thing, but it’s clear that google is manipulating results to increase advertising. This results in poor service for searchers and web site that don’t play the AdWords game getting screwed.
Want to get your web site listed in the top five search engine results for your desired keywords/keyphrases on Google? Get out your check book.
Getting good rankings in oogle is almost entirely about:
- The number of links to your web site
- What the text of those links say
- What web sites are linking to you
Not all links count. The more popular or “important” the site that links to you the more that particular link counts. Links writed in anything but basic HTML do NOT count. The text in the link is the keywords your site is most likely to be indexed in.
Sound fair? NO, of course not! That why Google sucks anymore for actually searching. When they first came out their search engine results (based on this sysem), were far better than everyone eses. Two things happened since then.
- All the rich folk found out how Google works and started buying text links on other sites
- The other Search Engines adapted and have made this part of their ranking method.