Beware SEO fraudsters

Ever since the dawning of the search engine at the back end of the last century there have been people trying to optimise web sites to appear at the top of rankings. Good web designers will try to make their sites search engine friendly at birth, others may fall short. Either way SEO [search engine optimisation] companies do not give a damn whether your site is the most search engine friendly in the world or a single page flash site with "Untitled Document" as the page title. They just want your money.

SEO companies have been ringing up my customers for years trying to get them to part with hundreds of pounds a month to put their sites on the front page of Google, but there is an increasing trend of these snake oil salesmen taking perfectly good web sites and wrecking them - and charging for the privilege.

Last month a customer was persuaded to let an SEO company "optimise" his web site. They promptly shut down the site and forwarded all the traffic to a moribund site of his with totally out of date content and a PageRank of "unranked".

And last week another genius took a web site I made, changed the title to a huge long list of spammy keywords, added four keywords at the bottom of the page, plus a really ugly web counter AND A LINK BACK TO THEIR OWN SITE. But best of all they managed to wreck the style of the site so that all the text (apart from their link) was brown on a brown background.

If you are rung up by anybody offering to optimise your web site or get you on the first page of Google, please tell them to go away. They are all fraudsters. And tell them to fuck off from me.

Keyword meta tag

Back in the day when Alta Vista was the king of search engines, meta tags were said to be vital to a web site's search engine position. Since everybody knew this, it was easy to skew results your way and so search engines started worrying about more important things like title, content, link text, URLs and back links to rank web sites.

So are meta tags finished? Well clearly description tags are used by search engines when results are displayed so presumably they have some impact on relevance, even if marginally. Keyword tags must surely have had their day though.

Well I have the official answer. Sort of.

I have just taken over a web site - Appuldurcombe which I redesigned, and not wishing to break what was not broke, I copied the keyword and description tags from the old site. One of the keywords was open to the oublic (sic). I changed it to public but did a search on that key phrase to see if it appears.

These results will soon be out of date but Google has no interest whatsoever in Appuldurcombe's web site with the phrase open to the oublic. Even "open to the oublic" appuldurcombe does not bring up the web site. However it does bring up a number of directory sites that appear to have harvested the meta tags to create a page such as Cylex Business Directory.

Yahoo, however, once it has clarified that you really mean oublic and not public, has the official Appuldurcombe web site at the number 1 position.



Bing takes the same view as Google - which is to ignore the tags completely in its search results. And since Bing will shortly be providing the search results for Yahoo web sites, the end of the keyword meta tag is very nigh.

Windows 7 window management

You will all be familiar with the three buttons at the top of windows which allow you to minimise, maximise, restore and close the application. You may also know about double clicking the title bar to restore and maximise the window. Windows 7 has a few more things you can do with the window you are working on.

If you hold down the Windows Button on your keyboard and press the arrow keys, some interesting things occur. You can use the right and left arrow keys to switch between positions occupying exactly half the monitor. This is really useful if you want to drag files from one folder to another or work on one document while looking at another. This also works if you have a multiple monitor set up on your computer.

Windows + Up or Down will allow you to maximise, restore and minimise; although once you have mimised you will need to get the mouse out (or use Alt + Tab) to get the page back.

You can also get windows to resize themselves by dragging them about. Pick up the title bar with your mouse and drag it to the top of the screen; this will maximise the page, drag it down and it restores. Drag the title bar to the far right or left of the monitor and the window will occupy exactly half the screen.

If you have a window restored on the page (in other words open but not maximised over the whole screen) put the cursor over the top edge of the title bar so the up/down cursor shows and drag it to the top of the monitor. This will make the window fill the whole height of the screen area - extending the bottom of the window at the same time.

There is also the facilty to mimimise all windows apart from the one you are working on by picking up the title bar and shaking it.

All little things but well thought out and in the end quite useful, especially if you have a decent sized monitor or a multi-screen set up.