Paintings & blog by Chris Gibbins

It was a shock during our usability test with 7 users to see 4 of them select the top sponsored link as the most relevant result when carrying out a Google search. They didn’t notice the difference of styling that distinguished these one or two special results from the organic ones below. The pale yellow shaded box with label in the top right didn’t do it’s job.
In hind sight maybe it wasn’t such a revelation why these users couldn’t see the difference in style. After all they followed quite typical behaviour by focusing on this middle column, the part of the website that everyone knows contains the most useful information. Interestingly these same users did understand the right hand column to contain advertising.

Whilst Google is naughty in the placement and all too subtle styling of these centre column PPC ads, they are no where near as bad as ASK and MSN. I think their SERPs are tantamount to those old pop-up ads that tricked the user into clicking fake window alert boxes. Why would anyone use them? Just hope that Google doesn’t follow suit. Although, hold on, Google started it!

Can you see the difference between paid advertising and organic search results on this Ask.com results page? To make matters worse, there are even more ads at the bottom.

Sometimes, especially in quick turn-around campaign sites, images are used to such an extent that there is actually very little textual content on the web page. A quick and dirty solution for getting a magazine advert or flier onto the web.

“If all of the content is repeated as alt text for each image, then all is ok, isn’t it?”

Continue Reading »

I have just stumbled across this very interesting interview with Venessa Fox, who works for Google.
Having recently started to include an xml sitemap in a couple of my sites, I never quite understood their significance. They are not sitemaps in the traditional sense; a page similar to a table of contents. Instead, the new standard for sitemaps are only for the benefit of those crawling webbots, so that they can find all of your web pages. I actually thought that the job of webbots was to follow links from the homepage, but perhaps they need better directions and a little help once in a while, especially with complicated sites.

Venessa also discusses a little about Duplicate content and the filtering process undertaken by Google.

One of my clients has two sites that run off the same database, sharing 60% of the content between them. The problem is this is a duplication of content and it looks as if Google has interpreted this as an offence of some kind. Why else wouldn’t the webots have re-indexed these certain pages in 6 months.
The best article on the subject is: “Deftly dealing with duplicate content“. But the advice doesn’t exactly cover this situation.

My first attempt at resolving the issue is to remove the site that wasn’t supposed to be indexed anyway, using a robots.txt file. Perhaps this will work and regain some favour with the webots. Otherwise we have to think again.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is such an interesting subject that attracts a huge amount of debate. Sifting through the various opinions of so many people can be confusing, but the task of keeping abreast of current SEO ideas remains crucial for any web manager or developer. One great resource on this subject and a place for many useful SEO tools is SEO Chat.