Re: My Very Strange Webhost, SBI! -- Opinions, Please

On May 10, 12:16 pm, Sherman Pendley <spamt...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
>
> The kind where you have to screw your pages up yourself, instead of your
> hosting provider doing it for you. :-)

LOL -- get this, SBI! tech sup****t wrote again (and it's the fourth
rep in two weeks now!), and finally informs me that the images of an
image-swap need absolute path names..."just how SBI! works"...I'm
pretty much fed-up with this lot...nothing major, but silly little
things which precisely because they're so petty you wonder why a multi-
million-dollar webhosting company would work that way -- and they
don't explain it any further.

> Nothing. Seriously. No meta tags, no rearranging divs, no hidden
content,
> none of the usual voodoo. Just valid, symantically-correct HTML and
> correctly-spelled content. My CamelBones site has a Google page rank of
6
> out of 10 - for a highly-specialized site with a small audience, that's
> not bad - and it's top ranked in any relevant search I've tried.

Ah, well, yeah, so-called "long tail" stuff will be easier to
rank...but how to compete for the more popular keywords?  It's too bad
SEO has gotten such a bad reputation -- same as with DHTML and
JavaScript -- but I do think that many general principles apply...I
mean, search engines are human, they're not directories but search
engines and their spiders only churn text strings through various
algorithms...I mean, if your site is full of wordplay like double-
entendres you would need to know how search engines operate in order
to make sure that they're not blind to the true meaning of your
site....

> The thing about SEO is this: It's a band-aid. People use WYSIWYG tools
to
> create pages that output a horrible mess of invalid HTML. Then along
come
> the search engines. They look, think "I can't grok that mess" and move
on.
> The "solution" for this problem, as promoted by the SEO crowd, is to
jump
> through a bunch of additional hoops to compensate, adding meta element,
> hidden text, and all kinds of other nonsense to the page.

I think that was in the bad old days, wasn't it?  Tricks like hidden
text are recognized by search engines now and delisted, for example.

Moreover, we may have differing definitions of SEO -- I certainly
don't think of SEO as a fix, and I don't think it could serve as one.
The point of SEO is to get the search engine's notice -- but with poor
or irrelevant content, as measured by visitors quickly clicking away
back to the search engine, well, site ranking goes down and no amount
of SEO will salvage such a situation (again, SEO is not meant to be a
fix, but a "calling card" for search engines).

> And let's talk about his term "optimize" for a moment. To optimize is to
> take something that works, and improve it. When a page's HTML is so bad
> that a search engine isn't able to index it, I don't call that something
> that's working. So we're not talking about optimizing, we're actually
> talking about fixing something that's broken. SEO doesn't actually fix
> anything; it's just clumsy workarounds.

Again, "SEO" is my term for what SBI! pur****ts to do on behalf of
their subscribers -- they themselves are adamantly anti-SEO and would
not want the association.  But I use the term because it does describe
the effect of their mission: to get the search engines to notice and
rank highly.

To that end they have various proprietary online widgets which track
traffic, analyze keyword density, keyword popularity (they use Word
Tracker for that), etc.  Now I could go subscribe to Word Tracker
myself and scrounge around for various substitutes for their widgets,
but it could be more expensive (an annual Word Tracker subscription
could be as much as SBI! itself for a year) and just not as convenient
as having one place for all such needs.

However, I've been getting more and more annoyed by them this past
month, nothing mission critical to be sure but giving me a feeling of
*awkwardness*...it's *really* strange but SBI! has been like meeting
an interesting person at a cocktail party who, half-way through an
interesting conversation starts picking his nose...I'm getting that
weird awkward feeling with these people and yet it's not for anything
mission critical -- yet...but for $300 a year I don't want to feel
like there may be a string of little weird issues like this image-swap
matter and their not sup****ting certain common file formats...I'm
about to cancel and cash-out on their pro-rated refund guarantee, but
I'm going to think it over for a few days before I make a final
decision....

> sherm--
>
> --
> My blog:http://shermspace.blogspot.com
> Cocoa programming in Perl:http://camelbones.sourceforge.net