| LED Digest 2312: Simplicity is Overrated |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Registration from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. December 20, 2006 Issue no. 2312 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== --== Simplicity is Overrated ==-- ~ Nathan Holley "Maybe the whole usability thru simplicity thing is wrong!" ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Google on Linking ==-- ~ Eric Ward "It's not possible to determine reciprocal link 'intent' with 100% accuracy by algorithm alone." ~ Joel Lesser "We link when it benefits the end user." --== The Email Crisis ==-- ~ James Miller "...I'm seriously thinking of making a special free program to encode e-mail addresses..." ========== NEW =================================== From: Nathan Holley Subject: Simplicity is Overrated Don't know if you caught this: Don Norman, who founded The Nielsen Norman Group with Jakob Nielsen, wrote a pretty interesting article on why simplicity as a design principle is overrated. He argues what consumers (of widgets, of websites) really want is lots of fancy functions - even while touting that simplicity is desirable. Simple designs - the actual act of simplicity - isn't rewarded by visits to websites or the cash register. Here's a salient quote from the blog (he uses toasters as examples): ---------------------- "Why is this? Why do we deliberately build things that confuse the people who use them? "Answer: Because the people want the features. Because simplicity is a myth whose time has past, if it ever existed. "Make it simple and people won't buy. Given a choice, they will take the item that does more. Features win over simplicity, even when people realize that it is accompanied by more complexity. You do it too, I bet. Haven't you ever compared two products side by side, comparing the features of each, preferring the one that did more? Why shame on you, you are behaving, well, behaving like a normal person. "The complex expensive toaster? I bet it sells well." Source: http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/simplicity_is_highly.html ---------------------- Here's what I want to get at: maybe this is true of websites. Maybe the whole usability thru simplicity thing is wrong! Don Norman seems to think so - and if he works alongside the King of Usability and says this, maybe we should listen? Now I'm all for building sites that are usable, that are clean, even simple. But I've often thought how odd it is that my visitors and clients continually ask for fancy features: RSS feeds, text resizing, flexible layouts, tableless designs, newsletters, even color switching on their sites. These are not simple things. And what I hear *all the time* is that "this design is plain" and "where can I find graphics / photos / icons / etc" - not simplistic needs at all. I think there's something to this. One of the sites I run is related to the gaming industry and it's very sophisticated - think gamespot.com but not nearly as fancy. It gets more traffic than all my other sites combined. It's by far the fanciest. And I never hear a single complaint that it's not simple enough. Just my .02, Nathan Holley ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Eric Ward Subject: Google linking Well here's my four cents. It's not possible to determine reciprocal link "intent" with 100% accuracy by algorithm alone. Cannot be done. Never will. I'll argue this point to my grave. Thus Google can only look for what I call "signals of intent" and cannot penalize a site based ONLY on its reciprocal links, because there may be many valid reasons why such reciprocal links exist. So once Google has crawled a set of pages and determined reciprocity exists (site A and site B are linking to each other) Google next has to look deeper for some type of algorithmic "signals of intent" that will help Google determine trust. So, if sites A and B are linking to each other, and Google also finds site B is linked to by sites D, E, and F, all of which Google had detected previously as being link farms, then the original reciprocity of sites A and B is more suspicious, and a "signal of manipulative intent" has been found. Am I saying Google is this smart? I have no idea. But they better be. For example, if Small Company in Idaho makes national news and gets a link to their site from CNN.com, isn't it pretty logical that the owners of Small Idaho Company would mention this on their site like... "Read about us at CNN.com" and then link to the CNN.com page that mentioned them? Of course they would. And in so doing, they just created a reciprocal link between themselves and CNN.com. So would they have been better off algorithmically to not even mention the CNN site on their site so as to not raise the reciprocal suspicion ? That would be just plain whacked. I have many recips on my site because I spotted coverage of my site and a link to my site on those sites and I wanted to tell my sites readers about them. It's for trust, branding, credibility. Like this one http://www.inc.com/magazine/20001115/21032.html When Inc magazine writes about you and links to you, wouldn't it be S T U P I D not to link back so your reader's can see this cool publicity? My intent with this link is 100% non-algorithmically motivated, but the moment I linked back to Inc.com I turned that Inc.com link to me into a reciprocal link, potentially making that Inc.com link to my site less trustworthy. Google has their hands full. Recips are the backbone of the web since before engines ever showed up. But Google must look for "signals of intent" before they ignore or penalize. MANY "signals of intent" exist that Google's algorithm could use to make a determination of trust. More than I could list here, but happy to discuss privately any time. Eric Ward -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Joel Lesser Subject: Google linking In LED 2311, Adam said: > Big ruckus going on over at Web Master > World (WMW) about reciprocal linking... After you read through the ruckus at WebmasterWorld, it's important for all website operators to remember that the only official Google policies are those published under its corporate banner. Everything else you read on the web is opinion. Even those blogs published by Google employees include disclaimers that will point you to Google.com for official policy. In regard to linking, the Google Webmaster and Quality Guidelines have not changed (although they did update them recently), saying in part: ---------------------- "Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links ... Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links. Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links to your site are placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines." ---------------------- If anyone can find anything in the above OFFICIAL Google policy that defines reciprocal links between two sites with content valuable to each other's visitors as "unnatural", I'd sure like them to point it out to us blind people who can't see it. The original post from the rep from Google did not say all reciprocal links are bad. The original post referred twice to "non-earned" links. It's safe to assume "non-earned" means no editorial discretion took place to earn that link. Editorial discretion means that you or another human who represents your website has reviewed and approved or rejected all link exchange requests with human eyes, making linking decisions based on what benefits the end user, not the search engines. There is a big difference between what is defined as a non-earned reciprocal link and a reciprocal link earned with editorial discretion. Here's a perfect example... Just this past week, a large news organization called Gannett who owns USAToday linked ( http://gns.gannettonline.com/apps/airsafety ) to one of our aviation sites (ATCMonitor.com) from a huge report. That's a huge link endorsement. We linked back to them from our forum so that our own users could read the entire report. Technically, this is a RECIPROCAL LINK. Some might argue that we should remove our link to their site so it's a one way link. That's bad advice because removing the link to the report would not benefit our end user's experience. We don't make linking decisions here based on how we think it might affect our page rank, link popularity, or other criteria. We link when it benefits the end user. What Google is -- rightly -- penalizing are bad linking practices, webmasters who obtain links (sometimes irrelevant) in high volume using full duplex software's or services that make links without editorial discretion. And the people who are crying and whining about it are primarily con artists who have been getting rich off promoting bad linking practices and phony search engine-spamming schemes and, of course, the webmasters who have been misled into buying into those schemes. Continue to link and be linked to when it benefits your end users. If you use software to manage link exchange, make sure the software is EDITOR BASED so you have full editorial control over what links are published and which link exchanges are rejected. Do not worry about a link that is reciprocated when it benefits your end users experience, or helps them to learn more about your own product or service. Linking is what makes the web a web. Google is rightly working on is how to discern good link exchange from abusive link exchange. Don't let this scare you away from exchanging links with quality websites when it benefits the end user. Best Regards, Joel Lesser, President/CEO LinksManager.com http://linksmanager.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: James Miller Subject: Email http://www.jamesmiller.com/mtmcontact.html That is one of my contact pages and I use JavaScript to hide the e-mail address. On that page the e-mail address is highly compromised for other historic reasons, but I've used a similar technique on many client sites and these don't seem to have been scraped. I use a piece of code in my Editing Browser, but I'm seriously thinking of making a special free program to encode e-mail addresses and other sensitive pieces of code as my Christmas project. Basically, you'll browse to the page, click Edit and then enter the FTP parameters, highlight the code to be encoded and then click store. Let me know if you are interested. James Miller Daisy Analysis: www.daisy.co.uk ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2006 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "In search of my mother's garden I found my own." - Alice Walker |
