10 signs of a spammy website

What is spam? Spam has different connotations depending on the application. In most cases, Spam is defined as ‘unwanted e-mail (usually of a commercial nature sent out in bulk)’. These emails could be adverts, newsletters, press releases, adwares, spywares or even links to porn,pills and gambling.

In website development, spammy websites are websites obviously created to rank in search engine results. They’re not made for humans but for web crawlers of search engines such as Google. Of course search engines are not perfect that’s why there are quite a few people who still find ways to cheat in ranking their sites.

Since I’m working as a quality assurance guy, I’ve made a short list of things I’m looking at a site:

1. Hidden text.  Old school SEO people believe that writing all their keywords in their homepage would improve their rankings. This was done by matching the text colour with the background colour.
2. Hidden links. This is the almost the same as number one. But here, links may have different purposes. (Some sites are even using 1×1 pixel picture for links!)
3. Too much keyword density. Like for example using their targeted keywords in a repetitive manner which is not making any sense to the readers.
4. Internlinked networks. I noticed that interlinked networks still bursts but once google discovered this, the whole network will be penalized.
5. Inlinks from free sites, directories, forums, comments etc. This is practiced by a lot of people. Getting free links with no value at all is simply spammy.
6. Overly interlinked webpages. I normally see this in blogs. The main purpose of this practice is to make the page rank flow to almost all pages, making the PR closer to the home page’s pr.
7. Excessively highlighted keywords. Most of the old school SEO practitioners do this. Like the targeted keywords were stressed out by placing bold, underline or italize tags with a very very big font size. Yeah, most of these sites look like shit.
8. MFA sites (made for adsense). There’s nothing wrong with adsense. But the thing is there are lots of sites out there that were designed for people to click the adsense.
9. Link farms. Link farms are usually fake blogs with unique content. They also rank but the main purpose of it is to act as inlinks for other sites.
10. Duplicate content. Content is king. The one with better/useful content will obviously rank higher than others. If a site has duplicate content, that simply means that the owner of the site doesn’t have time to write quality articles so he just copied everything from a famous site.

Conclusion:
There will be always ways to cheat but a good website is a site that is really really helpful to people and would naturally get inlinks.

How to center a div in a browser window like firefox

It has been a while since my last web development project. The antonov star search made me skip a few small projects. But the good thing is that we’ve acquired a sort of big project from a milk company. It’s huge coz we have to maintain the site for a year.

I was assigned to code the design template. Everything went well but then someone from the company requested that the site should always be in the center of the browser. I was kinda stumped with the request since I’m not really the css guy in my old team. I’m Mr. Widget – the guy who’s doing all the purely decorative stuff in a site. But anyway, going back to the code, I tried experimenting a few settings but this is the one that worked in the css:

#main {
width: 600px;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right:auto;
}

So yeah. I spent like 30 minutes experimenting on the css only to find out that it’s all about the margins. By the way, “main” is the name of the biggest div. It’s like the parent table in the layout. So there. Another good no know…This is a very simple layout since it’s just a two-column layout. If you wanna use it. Feel free to copy paste. lol And there’s only one div for the content so most probably I’ll just add another one when the need arises.

Here’s what my nested divs look like:

<div id=”main”>

<div id=”top”>
</div>
<div id=”left”>
<div id=”navigation”>

</div>
<div id=”mainpic”>
</div>
</div>

<div id=”right”>
<div id=”content1″>
</div>
<div id=”footer”>
</div>
</div>

</div>

So far so good. We’re almost done with the project and it looks cool! I haven’t tested it in Internet Explorer though.

My Salutatory Address

My mom was cleaning our attic and found a copy of the speech I made during our highschool graduation. She encoded it in soft copy so I can have this piece handy.

As I was reading it, all the memories of highschool flashed back. I began to somehow reflect that my background was kinda solid  that’s why I’m somewhat successful in the field im pursuing at the moment.

So guys, feel free to read my speech during the last moments of my high school life.