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Posted by Andrι Gillibert on 11/10/07 23:51
Mark wrote:
> That is what I see on a lot of sites and and I don't disagree with your
> argument. At the same time, the h1 'hack' (as you call it) seems to be
> gaining ground. I've just noticed that it's used on the O'Reilly home
> page (www.oreilly.com):
>
Yes, this is becoming increasingly annoying.
Back in time, in 2004, I could right-click on any non-background image and
save it on disk, copy its address, open it in a new window, reload it,
copy it to clipboard, or see its properties, etc.
I see more and more sites displaying those "fake" images.
My favorite browser don't provide such a context menu for background
images. (I'll fill a wish request to the development team of this browser).
> But surely a search engine crawler will just see:
> My company name
> in a h1 element, which is about as POSH as you can get
No, it isn't as POSH as you can get, because there're these DIV and SPAN
things that are semantically non-sense.
SPAN can usually be safely ignored, which is a Good Thing(TM), but DIV
render a web page very difficult to interpret by alternative non-CSS
renders and processors. Must a DIV be interpreted as a wrapper that must
be ignored or as enclosing an entity very separate from the sibling
elements? It depends on the DIV. I cannot find a way to automate that.
Anyway, this (most probably) doesn't affect (current) SE.
> (plus I'd expect a textual h1 element to have more SEO weight than the
> text in an img alt attribute).
This isn't proven, but it's possible that primitive SE ignore ALT
attributes.
Anyway, condemning your logo to disappear or be lower ranked on images SE
to hypotetically improve the visibility of your company name on HTML SE,
all that based on very hypotetical unproven knowledge of SE, is not
necessarily good. Most probably, your company name appears elsewhere in
the page, so that its presence at the top of the site isn't that much
useful for SEO.
The point is that you've very tiny arguments to prove that it's a SEO. It
could be as well a SE pessimization.
Just stick to one guideline: Don't try to be clever with SE. Write normal
HTML, and you'll be indexed correctly.
I noticed that the current evolution with SE is to *penalize* pages that
try to be clever (e.g. by adding keywords written blank on blank and
similar hacks to improve their page rank), while they improve their
indexation of normal pages. Don't go on the side of spammers!
> <h1>O’Reilly Media</h1>
>
> #header h1 {
> width:293px;
> height:98px;
> margin:0 0 0 180px;
> padding:0;
> background:url(/images/oreilly/oreilly_large.gif) no-repeat 0 0;
> font-size:0;
> text-indent:-9999px;
> text-align:center;
> }
>
> I'm not claiming www.oreilly.com is any kind of authority on HTML, but
> presumably the developers of the site aren't total hacks either, and
> there must be some advantage to doing it this way?
<http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.oreilly.com%2Fcatalog%2F9780596515836%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0>
Excerpt from this page:
| <link rel="stylesheet" rev="stylesheet"
| href="http://www.oreillynet.com/styles/all.css"
| type="text/css"/>
This rev relation is clearly wrong.
Is this enough to convince you that their XHTML design isn't a reference?
Moreover XHTML Transitional served as text/html is a bad choice.
When doing a weird thing, you must understand the reasons for doing it.
The argument: "Others do it, so it's right." will lead to the spread of
bad design. (Bad design has already been spread in 99.99% of the web).
(BTW, the text-indent:-9999px is very ugly)
Strangely, at <http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596515836/> I see:
| <h1><a target=_top href="http://www.oreilly.com"><img
| src="/images/oreilly/oreilly.gif" width="228"
| height="67" alt="O'Reilly" /></a></h1>
Which isn't consistent with the hack used for the logo of the main page.
> Are any of you using these techniques? Are they considered OK?
Invalid tag soup is considered OK on the web by almost all web developers.
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