After my investigation into what websites used valid markup I thought it would be interesting to check how accessible some of the sites are based on the W3C WAI Guidelines. In the UK it is, in theory, against the law to not have an accessible website as it discriminates against the Disabled.
Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA) does not refer explicitly to website accessibility, but makes it illegal to discriminate against people with disabilities. The DDA applies to anyone providing a service; public, private and voluntary sectors. The Code of Practice: Rights of Access - Goods, Facilities, Services and Premises document published by the government’s Disability Rights Commission to accompany the Act does refer explicitly to websites as one of the “services to the public” which should be considered covered by the Act.
Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_accessibility
While I do not think any Webmasters have been prosecuted for this I do think it is important that certain websites conform to the W3C WAI Guidelines. These would include websites for Universities and the Government.
As a quick, and not very scientific, investigation I have decided to check the Top 20 Universities to see if they conform to the W3C WAI Guidelines. As I am not an Accessibility specialist I am keeping it quite simple, I will be checking the home page of each University and running the automated checks from Watchfire WebXact. Just for reference I will also include the results from the W3C Markup validation from my previous tests.
*Ok so either Live Writer is useless or I am a moron and can’t do posts with tables very well. I have quickly done screen shots of the info and posted that, if I get some time later I will redo it all*
So my last post was a bit of a rant about my Blog not validating and that I have decided to check some other sites around the Internet to see how popular developing websites with valid markup actually is.
My first lot of checks were Blogs from around the Internet, most of them are listed in Technorti’s Popular Blogs list however I have added several other ones that either I read frequently or I perceive to be quite big.
The original reason for me starting this post was for me to justify to myself that this blog does not actually validate using the W3C Markup Validation Service even though I happen to have a Valid XHTML 1.0 logo in my right sidebar(which I will remove after this post). Now I am not out to deliberately deceive people by making them think this blog is valid when it is not, it is just because as I have made posts or added things to my sidebar the site has developed validation errors. At the time of writing the homepage has 20 errors, I expect it will have many more by the time I finish this post. So anyway I thought to myself how many other blogs actually advertise they are W3C Valid when they are not, so I began looking around a few of the sites I read and also some of the top Technorati Blogs. To my surprise not many people actually declare they are valid the only 2 I found before I gave up looking for the logo or Valid Refer Link (XHTML) were Matt Cutts Blog and the SEOmoz Blog. When I checked both the Blogs Matt Cuts had 20 errors and SEOmoz had 29, though it is worth noting that the SEOmoz homepage is actually valid. Yeay I thought I am not the only one with this problem and I think the problem is basically brought about by the fact that a lot of blogs actually start out as W3C Valid and as we make posts more and more errors get added, the only way to avoid it is to validate the Blog each time a post is made and then make the required changes which is just a nuisance.
In fact is it really the bloggers responsibility to validate their blog? I have been using Windows Live Writer for 2 weeks now, as I am sure you are aware it is a desktop application that allows easy WYSIWYG Authoring of posts so surely Live Writer should be responsible for turning the my post into Valid HTML/XHTML? After all I am sure not every blogger out there is that proficient at HTML or even knows what W3C is, so why would they check for validation?
I suppose the question people may ask me (and I ask myself sometimes) is why should I care about that stupid W3C validation anyway? Well:
W3C was created to ensure compatibility and agreement among industry members in the adoption of new standards. Prior to its creation, incompatible versions of HTML were offered by different vendors, increasing the potential for inconsistency between web pages.
Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W3c
In fact there are some arguments that not conforming to the Web Accessibility Guidelines (Not the same as W3C Valid Markup) is actually against the law.
So anyway this all got me thinking a little more, how many other websites out there do not have W3C Valid Markup. So I decided to ignore my morning list of tasks and have a look around at what sites failed or passed the W3C Markup Validation. I am going to post the results in the next post as this one is lengthy enough as it is.
Please also note, as far as I am aware all the following data is correct, I used the validator.w3.org tool to check all the sites and I have only copied the results from there. Also while I have checked some accessibility sites etc just because they don’t validate does not mean they are not accessible several sites on the list have text alternative websites etc. I am not a usability expert but I assume a text alternative is not the ideal solution to accessibility though. Actually the Web Accessibility Guidelines Checklist actually states
If, after best efforts, you cannot create an accessible page, provide a link to an alternative page that uses W3C technologies, is accessible, has equivalent information (or functionality), and is updated as often as the inaccessible (original) page.
So there has been a lot of mention about linkbait over the past few months. Some SEOs seem to treat it as the be all and end all when it comes to promoting a site. While I have no doubt it can be superb for a promoting a site by generating incoming links and, in my opinion more importantly, increasing a blogs subscription level it has also generated a huge spam issue.
There are plenty of linkbait techniques while most of them fall under a handful or methods including:
1. Tools – Examples include Business Opportunities Blog Worth with 1.5 Million links in Yahoo Site Explorer , or perhaps Digpagerank 12k Links.
2. Quizzes – Diggtest was Dugg 2843 times, though it does only have 766 links that’s not bad for one easy bit of linkbait.
3. Lists – Top Ten Reasons Marijuana Should be Legal (5,520 Links, 2018 Diggs) The Ten Most Obnoxiously over-quoted movies (1,090 Links, 2592 Diggs)
4. Statistics/Research – Top 100 Digg Users (655 Diggs, 434 Links)
5. Controversy – George W “Atheists Neither Citizens nor Patriots” (4973 Diggs, 1,140 Links), or What Should You Do if You Find an Atheist? (3750 Diggs, 547 Links, for an image). I didn’t really know what to use for controversial so just searched for atheists as religion always causes a stir.
Problogger has a nice LIST of linkbait techniques to use if you want some other ideas.
I am sure there are some Elitist Digg members may say all linkbait is spam but while many/most of the above were designed as linkbait they were all original (as far as I know) and they were all fun or informative so therefore surely they are could not be spam.
Unfortunately with every good piece of good linkbait comes along dozens of pieces of spammy linkbait. We already know how to become a Digg power user in 48 hours, and DigitalPoint has several Digg services to help get you higher in Digg or even guarantee you getting to the front page of Digg.
This has led to posts like these:
So what ways are there to stop this spam? Digg bans the site or the users? So what we can create a new user and I if you get your site banned from Digg then there is always reddit etc.
The main concerns are what is Google etc going to do about it, after all isn’t that what linkbaiting all about? Blogstorm, SEOBook, and EMarketingPerformance have all posted about Google looking in to a sites natural link growth and discounting links that grow in spikes, therefore devaluing linkbaitng unless you keep launching successful linkbait one after another. As BlogStorm suggests the best possible technique to follow would be long term link bait such as “how to’s” which will gather links constantly over a long period of time.
Unfortunately if Google does go down the route of penalising sites that grow large numbers of links during a short period of time I imagine they will penalise many sites that have hit Digg/Reddit/etc naturally rather than on purpose, and possibly creating even more controversy than the recent PageRank update where many innocent sites had their PR dropped.
Ok it has been a long day and I am tired so I may be chatting rubbish, however I was just checking some stats for some clients when I did a search for the term liquidation. The number of results it returned was 3,280,000, I took a screen print of it incase I am actually spelling it wrong or something equally stupid.
Now I made a post on the 10 of October with some of the SEO Results we had recently achieved for some sites. At that time the search term Liquidation returned 29,100,000 results. Er so what happened to the other 25,820,000.
I am not going to do any more screen shots because I am too lazy but some quick comparisons of numbers that are showing for me now.
| Search Term | Oct 10th | Nov 7th |
| SEO | 177,000,000 | 20,600,000 |
| SEO Company | 13,000,000 | 960,000 |
| Web Design Company | 371,000,00 | 266,000,000 |
| Property Abroad | 5,220,000 | 354,000 |
| Hair Pieces | 5,160,000 | 383,000 |
I presume this is just a glitch in Google’s information though a few my keywords have jumped from page 2 to page 1. Again I can not be bothered looking into detail if all my sites have been affected and I am sure everything will be back to normal by tomorrow!
Ok so I think I said I followed comments in the past but a couple of people have commented recently and I noticed they were nofollow. I have installed Lucia’s Linky Love so links will actually be nofollow if you have never posted before. I have set the limit to 3 so it wont take much to switch to dofollow, and I will manually remove the nofollow from links under the 3 link count presuming it is not spammy. Some of the features of Linky Love are:
Yes believe it or not Kylie Minogue is entering into the Social Network World possibly aiming to be the next Mark Zuckerberg or Tom Anderson. Called Kylie Connect and developed by New Visions Mobile in collaboration with Kylie’s record label Parlophone the site will be the first of its kind to be launched by a celebrity.
One of the worst part the worst parts of my job is having to invoice clients and do our accounts. I am not sure why really, you would think invoicing someone should be a good job, it means that people owe me money and that is always good. I always used to use Sage Accounts, and while I am sure its a brilliant piece of software for my accountant I can’t bear it!
The past 2 months I have been trying out FreshBooks as an alternative method of invoicing. It is basically an online invoicing and time tracking service which simplifies you client and invoice management.
Some of the features it includes are:
Click here to go to the FreshBooks site.
The main aspects of FreshBooks I like are: (After the jump)
NorthSouthMedia have released the results from this months SEO league table. Dolphin Promotions has maintained it’s position at No.3 for the International results but has climbed up from No.7 to No.3 for the National results. This month Paul from NSM added PR/Alexa info to the list, while they don’t mean anything to the positions on the table, nor to the rankings themselves, it does provide an interesting comparison of all the sites.
Well seeing as I have Live Writer working ok I thought I’d try out the Insert Map function and inform you all where our lovely offices are based!
