Top 5 Reasons Not To Use Internet Explorer - August 14th, 2007

Internet Explorer has for a long time been known for its constant flaws and lack of support. In some cases Microsoft released patches to close security holes 200 days after initial reports.

Nevertheless Internet Explorer is still the most popular browser with 78% of the market share. Why? Because it comes as standard with Windows and most users don’t know or can’t be bothered to find a better option.

Why Not To Use Internet Explorer?

Security – It’s commonly used as THE gateway for most malicious software. IE makes it relatively easy to install spyware and adware through ActiveX and Active Scripting; consequently hackers focus their attention on Internet Explorer. Security improvements in Windows XP SP2 claimed to have closed these holes, but newer attacks against IE allow the installation of malware on SP2.

Stability – Internet Explorer crashes very easily. Due to its many deficiencies it doesn’t take much for IE to crumple. In effect it can be done with on line of code (61 bytes):

<script>for(x in document.write){document.write(x);}</script>

It’s rather worrying considering that this script could be embedded into any webpage.

Web standards – This is almost certainly the main reason why IE is hated in the web development community. Since the late 1990’s Microsoft is oddly focused on the addition of non-standard features, there are so many web standard features that do not work on IE but works on all other browsers. This not only increases development costs and time but also stops web developers from being creative.

To name a few incompatibilities: IE doesn’t support native XHTML; misinterprets the W3C “Box Model”; and lacks support for PNG alpha channel.

Community and extensions – Unlike other browsers you can’t add extra features. Any other major browser has tons of extensions available covering anything that you can think of.

Better options – At present mozilla is the best browser in the market. It’s free, it follows all the standards correctly. It has loads of extensions which can turn your browser into an all-in-one application. If you still using Internet Explorer, try something new today! Alternatively there are other browsers worth looking at like Opera and Flock.

Tino
SEO Programmer

Listen to this podcast

Posted in Cowboys|No Comments »

Beware of rogue SEO Companies - July 26th, 2006

Please be aware that there is an SEO / Marketing company currently contacting website owners, especially Just Search client’s database and advising them that they do not currently have enough links from other websites pointing to their own. They will often advise you to type into Google ‘link:www.yourdomain.com’ this will advise what sites Google chooses to display that are pointing to yours.

The problem that arises is that this is not an accurate view of the overall number of sites linking to yours. For example link:www.justsearching.co.uk has shown over the past two years 1532, 468, 234 and currently show 162 despite are position growing ever stronger, it is also useful to carryout the same exercise in MSN, Yahoo and All the web this will then give a much more accurate view of how many sites are linking to yours.

The company in question is offering links from their network of 1000 websites, they advise that at least 400 have a Google Pagerank of 4-5; they then advise they will place an article on each website with links that point back to your site, in essence gaining you up to 1000 extra links.

One of our clients advised us about what they had been offered and showed us an example site. The example site had a Pagerank of 5, but had no links in Google and no websites in Google’s database that recognised the website. The next thing is that the pages that contained the articles were not being picked up by Google (i.e. No cache or Pagerank.)

Please be aware of the following when being offered any form of links:

1. Does each site have a separate IP address.
2. Is the page your link will be on being cached?
3. Does the link contain a rel=’nofollow’
4. Is the site a link farm or bad link neighbourhood?
5. Is the article the same on each site?
6. What timescale to the links increment over.

The following should always be asked when being offered links as many clients can often lose listings due to unorthodox linking strategies. For example if the company uses the same article link information on a thousand sites, then there is 1000 duplicate articles pointing to your site, again if they are running 1000 sites from one database when they add your article it will instantly add this to all 1000 sites, when Google notices that in a very short time you have had 1000 extra sites linking to yours it normally suspects this as a link farm or SPAM and so can downgrade your site or even ban your site from their Search engines.

The reason we have specifically noticed this is that one of our clients achieving 1st page listings has signed up with a company and after a week of work they are claiming that they have got the site to its position. Despite the fact that our coding is still there and the back links pointing picked up by Google are from sites that we created the link from.

It is usefull to know that some links from other sites can take several months to register within the search engines and to see an effect.

Neil Walker
Technical Director

Listen to this podcast

Posted in Cowboys, Latest News, Search Engine Optimisation|No Comments »