I run a PC which is a bit dated on the “media content” front. (in other words I dont give a flying pink pig what “media” is available to me to waste my time on).

An example of this is when I set my homepage to MSN.com, every now and then they must put some drivel up which crashes my browser.

Now – ive no real time to mess around with MSN’s output – so instead I set my homepage to this
http://fgdfgdfgdfgdfg.com/

This way, everytime I load FFox, (a typical load of this browser represents about 10 entries in my taskbar under windows), all I have to download is “PAGE NOT FOUND”.

FANTASTIC – I think – I now dont need to download MSN every time I load an instance of a browser, and I dont get rubbish news in my face – all I get is “PAGE NOT FOUND”

So,

After a couple of weeks of bliss………..
why not visit http://www.fgdfgdfgdfgdfg.com – great site eh?

How about we all key in daft strings and let this company????? what – do their stuff?

Ive had two of these registered btw – how about getting them to register
fdfjksghru.com – its a great domain name – must be worth zillions.

Am I missing something?

Well, I cant know why anymore, because I cant seem to find a tool that tells me what pages are linking to pages on my site – never mind move forward to think on why they may have linked in the first place.

All SEO link checking tools are crap. But one example of inbound linkage to incidental pages is scraped content. Archived content in search engines and Web archives is another example. There are others.

So.. what if you have a lot of boxes, ajaxian tabs, fields etc etc.. it can be an amazingly well designed page, with tons of links. Is that bad from a usability point of view ? And from a spam point of view ? I wouldn’t say so. Then the NYT with 400 links would be banned, blacklisted and sent to the google dungeons.

AJAX is implemented through Javascript and style sheets. A good AJAX developer provides for accessibility (through static HTML code and text) that doesn’t look like anything is being hidden. The search engines don’t have a problem with good AJAX design, just with bad AJAX design. But that is true of all types of design styles. You can do great Web design with HTML tables that looks clean and neat under the hood and that is fully accessible.

“A relatively inactive forum or new forum doesn’t have much of a link profile. Its internal linkage won’t help it much unless it uses static HTML pages. Do you know why? The reason may not be obvious to everyone.”

I haven’t got the faintest idea.

Look at “The linking differences between forums and blogs” for the answer. To a non-technical person it may not be intuitively obvious.

Well, I cant know why anymore, because I cant seem to find a tool that tells me what pages are linking to pages on my site – never mind move forward to think on why they may have linked in the first place.

Googles list of inbound links has been crud for ages, MSN recently switched off its link facility – and that was crud because their index is incomplete, and today (although its probably been of for a bit now for all I know – Yahoo site explorer isnt responding).

I realise links are not everything – but in my quest to become master SEO – can anyone guide me to a link checking site which has its own database of the links on the web?
(a comprehensive one – which doesnt rely on scraping any SEs to provide the data)

Oh man Im pulling my hair out here – every door seems to be slamming shut in the web site owners / webmasters face.

I haven’t got the faintest idea.

I have never understood the not many links on page part. Aside from the fact yes, it is ugly, unreadable at some point etc.. I see quite a few pages that are crawled weekly if not daily, well established and ranking well. They are lists of libraries or expert lists that even on such an “old fashioned page” still group their links in topics on that same page.

Matt Cuts said it recently.. ok… great.. from a usability perspective.. so are the google guidelines. It never said: we will not crawl anything above 100 links. Matt also said.. keep page below 100 K.. well.. does this mean 100 links ? Where does that logic come from ? Maybe my javascript files are already more than 100 K. Maybe I have a tiny bit of html and huge amount of links.. I can surely pack more than 100 links in 100 K.

What people forget these days is ajax. On yahoo.com you can see the ajaxian tabs, and usually (though not checked with yahoo just now) SE’s will crawl all tabs. They do with us anyway.

So.. what if you have a lot of boxes, ajaxian tabs, fields etc etc.. it can be an amazingly well designed page, with tons of links. Is that bad from a usability point of view ? And from a spam point of view ? I wouldn’t say so. Then the NYT with 400 links would be banned, blacklisted and sent to the google dungeons.

And I can go on and on and on..

Couldn’t agree more.. it’s not about applying a blanket template: all reciprocal is wrong, linkpages are wrong, lots of links on a page is wrong. It’s about who does it and why (and OK… How).