Posted by Mark Goodge on 10/09/07 06:28

On Mon, 08 Oct 2007 22:02:11 +0100, SpaceGirl put finger to keyboard
and typed:

>Mark Goodge wrote:
>>
>> "This site" being http://www.mortgagenews2.com, for the benefit of
>> anyone jumping into the thread at this point.
>>
>> Anyway, let's see how popular it is using some common freely-available
>> metrics:
>>
>> Google Pagerank: 0
>> Compete Rank: no data
>> Alexa Rank: 1,697,203
>> Netcraft ranking: 5,098,230
>>
>> Those figures are crap. A personal website might be that low; any
>> commercial site getting that little traffic is virtually dead.
>> However, that may not matter much if the income stream is good.
>>
>> To see what they're charging for advertising, I registered with the
>> site. That was a bit of a problem in itself: despite the fact that I
>> have a UK keyboard their interface is mapping the keypresses directly
>> to a US key map and hence when I typed certain characters on my
>> keyboard something different showed up on the screen.
>
>That's kinda weird... Flash doesn't contain any language stuff. I think
>your machine is buggered, or they really have done something funky
>inside that SWF (it's not default behavior).

It's not a problem this end. I tried it on more than one machine -
same error each time.

>I agree with the rest of your comments though, but it's not the way
>ranking works. It's a combination of inbound links + content. Get enough
>inbound links, make sure the content is published as an alternative
>stream (RSS, or an alternative metatag), or provide a text version of
>the content on the side. Remember earlier I was talking about Flash just
>being one UI of many applicable to site - well these guys got that wrong
>in this case.

Pagerank is also a measure of popularity. A Flash-only site can get
good Pagerank if enough people think it's worth linking to; what this
instance demonstrates is that no-one thinks it is.

>> Incidentally, if you click on any of the news stories on the front
>> page of that site, what happens is that it opens another website
>> framed within its own Flash framework. That's usually prohibited by
>> most website Ts&Cs, and has been held to be a breach of copyright in
>> previous lawsuits. I wonder if the site's operators have considered
>> that? Maybe that's why they're happy with an inaccessible design and
>> low visitor numbers - trying to sneak below the radar of the sites
>> they're ripping off.
>
>Grey area, but I do sort of agree. It's pretty bad practice -- and
>wouldn't work in any of MY sites... I have breakout code in all my sites
>to prevent anything we work on being re-framed by a 3rd party.

In all the cases where this has gone to court, the framer has lost.
That makes it a pretty black shade of grey, to me.

Mark
--
http://www.MotorwayServices.info - read and share comments and opinons
"Wherever life may take me, I know that it won't break me"

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