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  #21  
Old   
maya
 
Posts: n/a

Default Re: search results question.. - 06-29-2009 , 03:15 PM






Adrienne Boswell wrote:
Quote:
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed maya <maya778899 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
writing in news:z4CdnYdwHtOamNTXnZ2dnUVZ_rqdnZ2d (AT) giganews (DOT) com:

Adrienne Boswell wrote:
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed maya <maya778899 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
writing in news:8MOdnQHDpJ4EQNXXnZ2dnUVZ_gadnZ2d (AT) giganews (DOT) com:

Adrienne Boswell wrote:
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed maya <maya778899 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
writing in news:jpOdneQobJ9HqaDXnZ2dnUVZ_oSdnZ2d (AT) giganews (DOT) com:

Adrienne Boswell wrote:
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed maya <maya778899 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
writing in news:icmdna9ovIJ8mKDXnZ2dnUVZ_jOdnZ2d (AT) giganews (DOT) com:

Adrienne Boswell wrote:
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed maya
maya778899 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> writing in
news:6oWdnXudPLse5qHXnZ2dnUVZ_rOdnZ2d (AT) giganews (DOT) com:

Adrienne Boswell wrote:
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed maya
maya778899 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> writing in
news:HMidnWT-EeQMYabXnZ2dnUVZ_rGdnZ2d (AT) giganews (DOT) com:

Brian Cryer wrote:
"maya" <maya778899 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> wrote in message
news:vvidnT912sVzjKbXnZ2dnUVZ_j2dnZ2d (AT) giganews (DOT) com...
hi,

in google search results (and in other engines too, I
think), the first line corresponds to what's in <title> in
web page right? the second line is supposed to be what you
have in <meta name="description"..> tag.. however,
sometimes
in results for a page on my site instead of content in
meta
name="description"..> tag it show shows content of the
page,
from inside <body> tag.. why does it do this, when in fact
I
have <meta name="description"..> tag in all my pages..
Search engines are free to show you what they want. In the
early days it would have been the url, page title and
meta-description and I'm sure many search engines still use
this combination. Of course this becomes a problem when you
consider that not all pages provide a title or
meta-description.

I believe that Google will often use text from the page,
either when it thinks (according to who knows what criteria)
that the
page
from the text is more relevant or when the description is
missing or does not appear relevant to the page.

Personally, I'd still provide my own description for each
page (whether google or others use it or not).

HTH.
hi,

thank you for your response.. this SUCKS, it's not a good
system at all if they use info from body of page if the page
has a meta-description (after all, this is the main PURPOSE
of
meta-description tags, no??)

it also bugs the hell out of me that there is no way to
communicate directly with google about this, or anything
else.. these folks
make
so much money doing what they do, the least they could is
answer questions directly from folks who are affected by what
they do...

thanks again..





If the meta description is "Maine Coon Cat in Glendale" and
the
page content is "My Maine Coon, Rolo, is a beautiful female
Maine Coon, with a tabby coat, and large feet. She is a
loving
cat, and comes
to
a whistle. I taught my cat to come to a whistle by whistling
and
then
offering food when she came in."

Now, say someone wants to know how to train their cat to come
to a whistle. The word whistle is not in the description, but
it is in
the
page content. The word whistle would appear in the SERPs, and
send that user to my site. If it were just on description
alone, they might not come.

(By the way, anyone reading this message from a site that uses
Usenet
content, that IS the way I taught my cat to come to a
whistle.)


well, this is the deal.. I have a photo site, in
meta-description it says something like "Photos of India, New
York, Australia,
Thailand"..
but on the pages themselves, inside <body>, I have lots of
numbers, corresponding to the photos, with the no. for the
current photo highlighted (i.e., a different font-color..) so
in
the search-
results,
for the pages in my photo site, instead of the content in the
meta-description tag I see something like:

1 2 3 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 13 14 15 16 17 18 20 21 22 23 24..

instead of what I put in the meta-description tag...

does this make sense to you????

now the weird thing is, this happens only SOMETIMES, only for
some of the pages (all the pages are coded exactly the same,
the
code is generated from back-end programming..)

I think this is really weird...

thank you for your response...

URL?
ok, search for "Frances Del Rio" on google, then click on

"more results from www.francesdelrio.com"

(all urls under francesdelrio.com/photoblog/ are coded exactly
the
same,
yet under some of them it displays expected results, under other
ones
it
doesn't... )

(some urls in results are old and I have redirects in them, only
ones that matter are home page, /photoblog/ and /resume/...)

thank you very much...

It seems that javascript is necessary to use your site, and your
links require javascript to work. That's not friendly for people
or search engines.

Look at
[http://www.francesdelrio.com/photoblog/section2/page1/photos.jsp]
with CSS disabled, and you will see why Google is doing what it is
doing.
ok, do you mean JavaScript or CSS?
What I want to do is to disable BOTH javascript AND CSS. THAT is
what Google and brethern see.

they are too very different
things..
so now you can't use JavaScript or CSS on your sites or else
google's
search-engine programs and algorithms go haywire??
CSS is fine - means nothing to Google. All Google wants is the
content, and doesn't care what it looks like.

Javascript is NOT fine, especially if it is used to construct links.
Google does not have javascript enabled, so it cannot follow onclick
links.


sorry, this
doesn't make any sense.. does this apply also to sites like
amazon,
CNN, The New York Times, etc??
Amazon, CNN, etc., don't use javascript links. They do things
server
side, not client side. If they do something client side, it's
something to enhance the user's experience, and it not something
vital, like navigation.

do you think of any of them have
JavaScript or CSS disabled so indexing on search-engines work for
them???
You are getting confused. It is the user who disbles CSS or
javascript, or just does not have it available.

so you're saying that google's search engine only reads
meta-description tags if CSS is disabled?? sorry, I don't get the
logic or the rhyme or reason for this.....
CSS has nothing to do with it. If you don't have Opera browser, go
and download it, install it now, fire it up and then come back and
read the rest of thie message.

Go to the page I told you to go to before:
[http://www.francesdelrio.com/photoblog/section2/page1/photos.jsp]

Then click on View->Style->User Style. That disables CSS. See all
the numbers?

Put CSS back, your page is back. Now, for the javascript part.

Click Tools->Quick Preferences and uncheck Enable Javascript. Now,
refresh the page. What do you see? Nothing. That's not a good
thing, and not very user friendly. Visitors with javascript
disabled
may not know to disable CSS in order to view your page.

thank you for your response... I do appreciate you taking the
time....

What I suggest you do is:
1. Make your links accessible
2. Put the picture navigation below the picture
3. Use something like photos.jsp?id=picid and only show one picture
plus the thumbnails. Right now, you are loading ALL the pictures,
plus the thumbnails, and that, my friend, is causing the page to be
large and take a long time to load. Have a look at
[http://mywonderyears.org/gallery.php] to see what I mean. If you
look at [http://mywonderyears.org/general.php?pic=27#pic27] that's a
picture of my son.

ok, is this better???
http://www.francesdelrio.com/photoblog-pp/section3/page1/photos.jsp?
pn=
7

switch from photo to photo is a bit slow now, that not all photos are
loaded in same pg.. but well, it's the lesser of two evils I
suppose....

thanks for your suggestion.. I had been meaning to try this for a
while but hadn't gotten around to it.. (I wonder if it'll make any
difference with my search-engine problem though, probably not...

thanks again..

You still have the 1,2,3... etc at the top of the page. You have not
changed the title element.
well, I WANT the 1,2,3 to remain... what is wrong with those (you mean
I have to remove those b/c of the search engine? oh brother.. I do
like those...


You can keep the 1,2,3... just put an h1 element before it, eg:

title>Jersey City Public Library</title
/head
body
h1>Jersey City Public Library</h1
?php include "nav_inc.php";?

You're not really using a good construct for your 1, 2, 3 menu. This:
a href="photos.jsp?pn=1" id="bulletsTN1" class="bullets">1</a>&nbsp;
a href="photos.jsp?pn=2" id="bulletsTN2" class="bullets">2</a>&nbsp;
a href="photos.jsp?pn=3" id="bulletsTN3" class="bullets">3</a>&nbsp;

is not a good idea. It's a list, so use list markup (my example is using
PHP):

ul id="bullets"
?php for($i=0;$i=<count($picsarray);++$i)
{
?
li><a href="photos.jsp?pn=<?php echo $i; ?>" <?php if($_GET['pn']==$i)
{echo "class='thispage';}><?php echo $i; ?></a></li
?php } ?
/ul

but the title you're right, I forgot... yes, I'm doing server-side, so
the stuff you mention IS easy.. some things am still still doing
client-side, maybe will change since so many people (mainly here in
usenet) complain about how many users turn JS off....

There are probably a lot of things you can let CSS do that you're having
js do now. Use elements wisely, for example:

ul#bullets {list-style-type:none;}
ul#bullets li {display:inline; padding:0 .5em 0 .5em}
ul#bullets li a.thispage {color:#fff}

......

I think what you have done so far is very good. Keep up the good
work!
thank you!! and thank you for your help....




No problem. It's a conspiracy... make the www accessible for everyone!

ok, didn't do caption for each photo in title,
http://www.francesdelrio.com/photoblog-pp/section1/page1/photos.jsp?pn=4

that would be a bit more involved.. and not too practical since not all
photos have captions.. settled for putting label of each section
(reworked) in the <title>.. and yes, my next project is the
accessibility...

once again thank you very much..

Reply With Quote
  #22  
Old   
maya
 
Posts: n/a

Default Re: search results question.. - 06-29-2009 , 04:57 PM






Adrienne Boswell wrote:
Quote:
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed maya <maya778899 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
writing in news:z4CdnYdwHtOamNTXnZ2dnUVZ_rqdnZ2d (AT) giganews (DOT) com:

Adrienne Boswell wrote:
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed maya <maya778899 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
writing in news:8MOdnQHDpJ4EQNXXnZ2dnUVZ_gadnZ2d (AT) giganews (DOT) com:

Adrienne Boswell wrote:
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed maya <maya778899 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
writing in news:jpOdneQobJ9HqaDXnZ2dnUVZ_oSdnZ2d (AT) giganews (DOT) com:

Adrienne Boswell wrote:
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed maya <maya778899 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
writing in news:icmdna9ovIJ8mKDXnZ2dnUVZ_jOdnZ2d (AT) giganews (DOT) com:

Adrienne Boswell wrote:
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed maya
maya778899 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> writing in
news:6oWdnXudPLse5qHXnZ2dnUVZ_rOdnZ2d (AT) giganews (DOT) com:

Adrienne Boswell wrote:
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed maya
maya778899 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> writing in
news:HMidnWT-EeQMYabXnZ2dnUVZ_rGdnZ2d (AT) giganews (DOT) com:

Brian Cryer wrote:
"maya" <maya778899 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> wrote in message
news:vvidnT912sVzjKbXnZ2dnUVZ_j2dnZ2d (AT) giganews (DOT) com...
hi,

in google search results (and in other engines too, I
think), the first line corresponds to what's in <title> in
web page right? the second line is supposed to be what you
have in <meta name="description"..> tag.. however,
sometimes
in results for a page on my site instead of content in
meta
name="description"..> tag it show shows content of the
page,
from inside <body> tag.. why does it do this, when in fact
I
have <meta name="description"..> tag in all my pages..
Search engines are free to show you what they want. In the
early days it would have been the url, page title and
meta-description and I'm sure many search engines still use
this combination. Of course this becomes a problem when you
consider that not all pages provide a title or
meta-description.

I believe that Google will often use text from the page,
either when it thinks (according to who knows what criteria)
that the
page
from the text is more relevant or when the description is
missing or does not appear relevant to the page.

Personally, I'd still provide my own description for each
page (whether google or others use it or not).

HTH.
hi,

thank you for your response.. this SUCKS, it's not a good
system at all if they use info from body of page if the page
has a meta-description (after all, this is the main PURPOSE
of
meta-description tags, no??)

it also bugs the hell out of me that there is no way to
communicate directly with google about this, or anything
else.. these folks
make
so much money doing what they do, the least they could is
answer questions directly from folks who are affected by what
they do...

thanks again..





If the meta description is "Maine Coon Cat in Glendale" and
the
page content is "My Maine Coon, Rolo, is a beautiful female
Maine Coon, with a tabby coat, and large feet. She is a
loving
cat, and comes
to
a whistle. I taught my cat to come to a whistle by whistling
and
then
offering food when she came in."

Now, say someone wants to know how to train their cat to come
to a whistle. The word whistle is not in the description, but
it is in
the
page content. The word whistle would appear in the SERPs, and
send that user to my site. If it were just on description
alone, they might not come.

(By the way, anyone reading this message from a site that uses
Usenet
content, that IS the way I taught my cat to come to a
whistle.)


well, this is the deal.. I have a photo site, in
meta-description it says something like "Photos of India, New
York, Australia,
Thailand"..
but on the pages themselves, inside <body>, I have lots of
numbers, corresponding to the photos, with the no. for the
current photo highlighted (i.e., a different font-color..) so
in
the search-
results,
for the pages in my photo site, instead of the content in the
meta-description tag I see something like:

1 2 3 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 13 14 15 16 17 18 20 21 22 23 24..

instead of what I put in the meta-description tag...

does this make sense to you????

now the weird thing is, this happens only SOMETIMES, only for
some of the pages (all the pages are coded exactly the same,
the
code is generated from back-end programming..)

I think this is really weird...

thank you for your response...

URL?
ok, search for "Frances Del Rio" on google, then click on

"more results from www.francesdelrio.com"

(all urls under francesdelrio.com/photoblog/ are coded exactly
the
same,
yet under some of them it displays expected results, under other
ones
it
doesn't... )

(some urls in results are old and I have redirects in them, only
ones that matter are home page, /photoblog/ and /resume/...)

thank you very much...

It seems that javascript is necessary to use your site, and your
links require javascript to work. That's not friendly for people
or search engines.

Look at
[http://www.francesdelrio.com/photoblog/section2/page1/photos.jsp]
with CSS disabled, and you will see why Google is doing what it is
doing.
ok, do you mean JavaScript or CSS?
What I want to do is to disable BOTH javascript AND CSS. THAT is
what Google and brethern see.

they are too very different
things..
so now you can't use JavaScript or CSS on your sites or else
google's
search-engine programs and algorithms go haywire??
CSS is fine - means nothing to Google. All Google wants is the
content, and doesn't care what it looks like.

Javascript is NOT fine, especially if it is used to construct links.
Google does not have javascript enabled, so it cannot follow onclick
links.


sorry, this
doesn't make any sense.. does this apply also to sites like
amazon,
CNN, The New York Times, etc??
Amazon, CNN, etc., don't use javascript links. They do things
server
side, not client side. If they do something client side, it's
something to enhance the user's experience, and it not something
vital, like navigation.

do you think of any of them have
JavaScript or CSS disabled so indexing on search-engines work for
them???
You are getting confused. It is the user who disbles CSS or
javascript, or just does not have it available.

so you're saying that google's search engine only reads
meta-description tags if CSS is disabled?? sorry, I don't get the
logic or the rhyme or reason for this.....
CSS has nothing to do with it. If you don't have Opera browser, go
and download it, install it now, fire it up and then come back and
read the rest of thie message.

Go to the page I told you to go to before:
[http://www.francesdelrio.com/photoblog/section2/page1/photos.jsp]

Then click on View->Style->User Style. That disables CSS. See all
the numbers?

Put CSS back, your page is back. Now, for the javascript part.

Click Tools->Quick Preferences and uncheck Enable Javascript. Now,
refresh the page. What do you see? Nothing. That's not a good
thing, and not very user friendly. Visitors with javascript
disabled
may not know to disable CSS in order to view your page.

thank you for your response... I do appreciate you taking the
time....

What I suggest you do is:
1. Make your links accessible
2. Put the picture navigation below the picture
3. Use something like photos.jsp?id=picid and only show one picture
plus the thumbnails. Right now, you are loading ALL the pictures,
plus the thumbnails, and that, my friend, is causing the page to be
large and take a long time to load. Have a look at
[http://mywonderyears.org/gallery.php] to see what I mean. If you
look at [http://mywonderyears.org/general.php?pic=27#pic27] that's a
picture of my son.

ok, is this better???
http://www.francesdelrio.com/photoblog-pp/section3/page1/photos.jsp?
pn=
7

switch from photo to photo is a bit slow now, that not all photos are
loaded in same pg.. but well, it's the lesser of two evils I
suppose....

thanks for your suggestion.. I had been meaning to try this for a
while but hadn't gotten around to it.. (I wonder if it'll make any
difference with my search-engine problem though, probably not...

thanks again..

You still have the 1,2,3... etc at the top of the page. You have not
changed the title element.
well, I WANT the 1,2,3 to remain... what is wrong with those (you mean
I have to remove those b/c of the search engine? oh brother.. I do
like those...


You can keep the 1,2,3... just put an h1 element before it, eg:

title>Jersey City Public Library</title
/head
body
h1>Jersey City Public Library</h1
?php include "nav_inc.php";?

You're not really using a good construct for your 1, 2, 3 menu. This:
a href="photos.jsp?pn=1" id="bulletsTN1" class="bullets">1</a>&nbsp;
a href="photos.jsp?pn=2" id="bulletsTN2" class="bullets">2</a>&nbsp;
a href="photos.jsp?pn=3" id="bulletsTN3" class="bullets">3</a>&nbsp;

is not a good idea. It's a list, so use list markup (my example is using
PHP):

ul id="bullets"
?php for($i=0;$i=<count($picsarray);++$i)
{
?
li><a href="photos.jsp?pn=<?php echo $i; ?>" <?php if($_GET['pn']==$i)
{echo "class='thispage';}><?php echo $i; ?></a></li
?php } ?
/ul

but the title you're right, I forgot... yes, I'm doing server-side, so
the stuff you mention IS easy.. some things am still still doing
client-side, maybe will change since so many people (mainly here in
usenet) complain about how many users turn JS off....

There are probably a lot of things you can let CSS do that you're having
js do now. Use elements wisely, for example:

ul#bullets {list-style-type:none;}
ul#bullets li {display:inline; padding:0 .5em 0 .5em}
ul#bullets li a.thispage {color:#fff}

......

I think what you have done so far is very good. Keep up the good
work!
thank you!! and thank you for your help....




No problem. It's a conspiracy... make the www accessible for everyone!

I put the captions in "alt" property inside img tag for each photo, for
accessibility purposes; but I guess this also means every photo should
have its own caption.. that would make it very repetitive for most
other users.. hmmm....

Reply With Quote
  #23  
Old   
John Hosking
 
Posts: n/a

Default Re: search results question.. - 06-29-2009 , 10:01 PM



On Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:57:50 -0400, maya wrote:

[Some 300 lines of old conversation from posts as many as 14 levels deep
snipped. Don't people trim here in a.i.s-e? I haven't lurked here long.]

Quote:
I put the captions in "alt" property inside img tag for each photo, for
accessibility purposes; but I guess this also means every photo should
have its own caption.. that would make it very repetitive for most
other users.. hmmm....
You are rearranging the deck chairs. Since this is a.i.search-engines,
let's go back to what Adrienne said about javascript: It shouldn't be
necessary to have JS on in order to use your site. All of your links seem
to be JS (e.g. "<a href="#" class="bullets" onclick=...") and the photos
themselves don't appear without JS. Not only don't the images present
themselves to my eyes in my graphical browser, no alt text is presented
either. Your JS is *keeping content from appearing* to non-JS UAs.

Note: Google is the most famous and important non-JS visitor to your site.

And by the way, it isn't necessarily the "caption" that belongs in the alt
attribute (although you might put that in the title attribute, which may
give viewers a pop-up of that text). The alt attribute is what visitors
should see (or hear) if the image can't be seen. The alt texts I saw on
your page were like "Photo 1", which is hardly a useful substitute for the
image. Not very index-worthy for search engine either, I would think.

The actual captions would be more useful (and no, not repetitive) if they
appeared for every photo. You sometimes have "This and next four are my
cousin's toenail" on one shot, but then there are no captions at all on the
next four shots of toenails. The captions provide not only orientation for
the human visitors (who may have dropped in at toenail #3), but *content*
for SE's to index and weight your page with.

If you're worried about repetition in your captions, avoid saying "Toenail"
identically on every page; say something like "Another shot of Pat's
toenail, this time from the east, at sunrise, using my fisheye lens". More
work, but more rewards.

Also BTW: I think your photos are quite good, and very interesting. I hope
you get the site worked out.

--
John

Reply With Quote
  #24  
Old   
maya
 
Posts: n/a

Default Re: search results question.. - 06-29-2009 , 10:37 PM



Adrienne Boswell wrote:
Quote:
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed maya <maya778899 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
writing in news:z4CdnYdwHtOamNTXnZ2dnUVZ_rqdnZ2d (AT) giganews (DOT) com:

Adrienne Boswell wrote:
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed maya <maya778899 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
writing in news:8MOdnQHDpJ4EQNXXnZ2dnUVZ_gadnZ2d (AT) giganews (DOT) com:

Adrienne Boswell wrote:
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed maya <maya778899 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
writing in news:jpOdneQobJ9HqaDXnZ2dnUVZ_oSdnZ2d (AT) giganews (DOT) com:

Adrienne Boswell wrote:
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed maya <maya778899 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com
writing in news:icmdna9ovIJ8mKDXnZ2dnUVZ_jOdnZ2d (AT) giganews (DOT) com:

Adrienne Boswell wrote:
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed maya
maya778899 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> writing in
news:6oWdnXudPLse5qHXnZ2dnUVZ_rOdnZ2d (AT) giganews (DOT) com:

Adrienne Boswell wrote:
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed maya
maya778899 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> writing in
news:HMidnWT-EeQMYabXnZ2dnUVZ_rGdnZ2d (AT) giganews (DOT) com:

Brian Cryer wrote:
"maya" <maya778899 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com> wrote in message
news:vvidnT912sVzjKbXnZ2dnUVZ_j2dnZ2d (AT) giganews (DOT) com...
hi,

in google search results (and in other engines too, I
think), the first line corresponds to what's in <title> in
web page right? the second line is supposed to be what you
have in <meta name="description"..> tag.. however,
sometimes
in results for a page on my site instead of content in
meta
name="description"..> tag it show shows content of the
page,
from inside <body> tag.. why does it do this, when in fact
I
have <meta name="description"..> tag in all my pages..
Search engines are free to show you what they want. In the
early days it would have been the url, page title and
meta-description and I'm sure many search engines still use
this combination. Of course this becomes a problem when you
consider that not all pages provide a title or
meta-description.

I believe that Google will often use text from the page,
either when it thinks (according to who knows what criteria)
that the
page
from the text is more relevant or when the description is
missing or does not appear relevant to the page.

Personally, I'd still provide my own description for each
page (whether google or others use it or not).

HTH.
hi,

thank you for your response.. this SUCKS, it's not a good
system at all if they use info from body of page if the page
has a meta-description (after all, this is the main PURPOSE
of
meta-description tags, no??)

it also bugs the hell out of me that there is no way to
communicate directly with google about this, or anything
else.. these folks
make
so much money doing what they do, the least they could is
answer questions directly from folks who are affected by what
they do...

thanks again..





If the meta description is "Maine Coon Cat in Glendale" and
the
page content is "My Maine Coon, Rolo, is a beautiful female
Maine Coon, with a tabby coat, and large feet. She is a
loving
cat, and comes
to
a whistle. I taught my cat to come to a whistle by whistling
and
then
offering food when she came in."

Now, say someone wants to know how to train their cat to come
to a whistle. The word whistle is not in the description, but
it is in
the
page content. The word whistle would appear in the SERPs, and
send that user to my site. If it were just on description
alone, they might not come.

(By the way, anyone reading this message from a site that uses
Usenet
content, that IS the way I taught my cat to come to a
whistle.)


well, this is the deal.. I have a photo site, in
meta-description it says something like "Photos of India, New
York, Australia,
Thailand"..
but on the pages themselves, inside <body>, I have lots of
numbers, corresponding to the photos, with the no. for the
current photo highlighted (i.e., a different font-color..) so
in
the search-
results,
for the pages in my photo site, instead of the content in the
meta-description tag I see something like:

1 2 3 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 13 14 15 16 17 18 20 21 22 23 24..

instead of what I put in the meta-description tag...

does this make sense to you????

now the weird thing is, this happens only SOMETIMES, only for
some of the pages (all the pages are coded exactly the same,
the
code is generated from back-end programming..)

I think this is really weird...

thank you for your response...

URL?
ok, search for "Frances Del Rio" on google, then click on

"more results from www.francesdelrio.com"

(all urls under francesdelrio.com/photoblog/ are coded exactly
the
same,
yet under some of them it displays expected results, under other
ones
it
doesn't... )

(some urls in results are old and I have redirects in them, only
ones that matter are home page, /photoblog/ and /resume/...)

thank you very much...

It seems that javascript is necessary to use your site, and your
links require javascript to work. That's not friendly for people
or search engines.

Look at
[http://www.francesdelrio.com/photoblog/section2/page1/photos.jsp]
with CSS disabled, and you will see why Google is doing what it is
doing.
ok, do you mean JavaScript or CSS?
What I want to do is to disable BOTH javascript AND CSS. THAT is
what Google and brethern see.

they are too very different
things..
so now you can't use JavaScript or CSS on your sites or else
google's
search-engine programs and algorithms go haywire??
CSS is fine - means nothing to Google. All Google wants is the
content, and doesn't care what it looks like.

Javascript is NOT fine, especially if it is used to construct links.
Google does not have javascript enabled, so it cannot follow onclick
links.


sorry, this
doesn't make any sense.. does this apply also to sites like
amazon,
CNN, The New York Times, etc??
Amazon, CNN, etc., don't use javascript links. They do things
server
side, not client side. If they do something client side, it's
something to enhance the user's experience, and it not something
vital, like navigation.

do you think of any of them have
JavaScript or CSS disabled so indexing on search-engines work for
them???
You are getting confused. It is the user who disbles CSS or
javascript, or just does not have it available.

so you're saying that google's search engine only reads
meta-description tags if CSS is disabled?? sorry, I don't get the
logic or the rhyme or reason for this.....
CSS has nothing to do with it. If you don't have Opera browser, go
and download it, install it now, fire it up and then come back and
read the rest of thie message.

Go to the page I told you to go to before:
[http://www.francesdelrio.com/photoblog/section2/page1/photos.jsp]

Then click on View->Style->User Style. That disables CSS. See all
the numbers?

Put CSS back, your page is back. Now, for the javascript part.

Click Tools->Quick Preferences and uncheck Enable Javascript. Now,
refresh the page. What do you see? Nothing. That's not a good
thing, and not very user friendly. Visitors with javascript
disabled
may not know to disable CSS in order to view your page.

thank you for your response... I do appreciate you taking the
time....

What I suggest you do is:
1. Make your links accessible
2. Put the picture navigation below the picture
3. Use something like photos.jsp?id=picid and only show one picture
plus the thumbnails. Right now, you are loading ALL the pictures,
plus the thumbnails, and that, my friend, is causing the page to be
large and take a long time to load. Have a look at
[http://mywonderyears.org/gallery.php] to see what I mean. If you
look at [http://mywonderyears.org/general.php?pic=27#pic27] that's a
picture of my son.

ok, is this better???
http://www.francesdelrio.com/photoblog-pp/section3/page1/photos.jsp?
pn=
7

switch from photo to photo is a bit slow now, that not all photos are
loaded in same pg.. but well, it's the lesser of two evils I
suppose....

thanks for your suggestion.. I had been meaning to try this for a
while but hadn't gotten around to it.. (I wonder if it'll make any
difference with my search-engine problem though, probably not...

thanks again..

You still have the 1,2,3... etc at the top of the page. You have not
changed the title element.
well, I WANT the 1,2,3 to remain... what is wrong with those (you mean
I have to remove those b/c of the search engine? oh brother.. I do
like those...


You can keep the 1,2,3... just put an h1 element before it, eg:

title>Jersey City Public Library</title
/head
body
h1>Jersey City Public Library</h1
?php include "nav_inc.php";?

You're not really using a good construct for your 1, 2, 3 menu. This:
a href="photos.jsp?pn=1" id="bulletsTN1" class="bullets">1</a>&nbsp;
a href="photos.jsp?pn=2" id="bulletsTN2" class="bullets">2</a>&nbsp;
a href="photos.jsp?pn=3" id="bulletsTN3" class="bullets">3</a>&nbsp;

is not a good idea. It's a list, so use list markup (my example is using
PHP):

ul id="bullets"
?php for($i=0;$i=<count($picsarray);++$i)
{
?
li><a href="photos.jsp?pn=<?php echo $i; ?>" <?php if($_GET['pn']==$i)
{echo "class='thispage';}><?php echo $i; ?></a></li
?php } ?
/ul
I do do something like this, only in JSP, it just PRINTS like what
you show above...
(sorry, I hadn't seen this part of your post before..)
so it's better for accessibility if those links (1,2,3,4 etc..) are
inside a <ul>?? I looked up accessibility some more this afternoon,
added labels to all my form elements.. (I don't suppose you need to do
it for hidden form elements??

Quote:
but the title you're right, I forgot... yes, I'm doing server-side, so
the stuff you mention IS easy.. some things am still still doing
client-side, maybe will change since so many people (mainly here in
usenet) complain about how many users turn JS off....

There are probably a lot of things you can let CSS do that you're having
js do now. Use elements wisely, for example:

ul#bullets {list-style-type:none;}
ul#bullets li {display:inline; padding:0 .5em 0 .5em}
ul#bullets li a.thispage {color:#fff}

yes I know I still need to work on stuff like

onmouseout="document.getElementById('bulletsTN<%=i %>').className='bullets';"


in thumbnails links.. thank you again....

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  #25  
Old   
maya
 
Posts: n/a

Default Re: search results question.. - 06-30-2009 , 12:26 AM



John Hosking wrote:
Quote:
On Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:57:50 -0400, maya wrote:

[Some 300 lines of old conversation from posts as many as 14 levels deep
snipped. Don't people trim here in a.i.s-e? I haven't lurked here long.]

I put the captions in "alt" property inside img tag for each photo, for
accessibility purposes; but I guess this also means every photo should
have its own caption.. that would make it very repetitive for most
other users.. hmmm....

You are rearranging the deck chairs. Since this is a.i.search-engines,
let's go back to what Adrienne said about javascript: It shouldn't be
necessary to have JS on in order to use your site. All of your links seem
to be JS (e.g. "<a href="#" class="bullets" onclick=...") and the photos
themselves don't appear without JS. Not only don't the images present
themselves to my eyes in my graphical browser, no alt text is presented
either. Your JS is *keeping content from appearing* to non-JS UAs.

Note: Google is the most famous and important non-JS visitor to your site.
actually, as I mentioned in a post from earlier today, I changed most of
you what you mentioned just in the last few days; still am trying out,
will probably publish overnight or tomorrow night..
http://www.francesdelrio.com/photoblog-pp/section1/page1/photos.jsp

as I also mentioned, for photos that do have captions I have now
included the captions in alt-property in img-tag... (still have to add
captions to captionless photos, I suppose...) thank you.. and thank
you for your comments about my photos...

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  #26  
Old   
maya
 
Posts: n/a

Default Re: search results question.. - 07-02-2009 , 12:04 PM



Quote:
I think what you have done so far is very good. Keep up the good
work!
thank you!! and thank you for your help....




No problem. It's a conspiracy... make the www accessible for everyone!
well Adrienne, I certainly have been working very hard in the last few
days making my site accessible (all pgs have <h1> element, where
applicable have also included <h2>'s and <h3>'s.. forms are
accessible.. have eliminated most JS (can't do for rollovers for
thumbnails, since that one triggers an action in ANOTHER ELEMENT.. I
think it's ironic that now as a front-end developer they want you to be
this killer JS developer, yet for accessibility you're supposed to avoid
JS whenever you can...
if I could steal a few mins of your time when you get a chance, can you
navigate around my site and see? www.francesdelrio.com.. and thank you
so much..

(only thing I haven't done yet is put those photo nos. in a <ul> list..
I don't like lists too much as paddings and margins are unpredictable
from browser to browser.. I have developed my own formula that works for
this, but still I'd rather avoid lists when I can.. I did do it on a
test page, http://www.francesdelrio.com/photoblog/section1/page1/photos.html
(photo nos. are in list on this page)
but I haven't been able to test it on IE7, or any mac browser... so not
to keen on doing this as yet... (are more accessible?? or is there
another reason why you suggested a list?)

again, thank you very much for your help and suggestions here...
(if you'd rather continue this conversation by email you can send me
email from any pg on my website..)

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  #27  
Old   
Adrienne Boswell
 
Posts: n/a

Default Re: search results question.. - 07-02-2009 , 02:27 PM



Gazing into my crystal ball I observed maya <maya778899 (AT) yahoo (DOT) com>
writing in news:nK6dnQTG6bJcR9HXnZ2dnUVZ_hGdnZ2d (AT) giganews (DOT) com:

Quote:

I think what you have done so far is very good. Keep up the good
work!
thank you!! and thank you for your help....




No problem. It's a conspiracy... make the www accessible for
everyone!

well Adrienne, I certainly have been working very hard in the last few
days making my site accessible (all pgs have <h1> element, where
applicable have also included <h2>'s and <h3>'s.. forms are
accessible..
Good deal! Yes, it's a lot nicer. I really enjoy going to your site to
see your wonderful pictures. You are talented!

Quote:
have eliminated most JS (can't do for rollovers for
thumbnails, since that one triggers an action in ANOTHER ELEMENT.. I
think it's ironic that now as a front-end developer they want you to
be this killer JS developer, yet for accessibility you're supposed to
avoid JS whenever you can...
I was confused about thumbnails, and finally noticed the little
box/stamp thingy that brings up the thumbnails. Maybe include some text
so those of us who haven't had enough coffee yet know what it is.

I like the effect, and am pleased that it works with javascript off.
Nice job.

The theme does not work with js off. I would fix that, if only to make
it accessible for users with js off. Of course, Google can't follow it,
and Google doesn't need to follow it. I do something like:

<a href="pagename?style=whatever" class="main" onclick="chooseStyle
('black-theme', 60);return false"> That will give no js users the
opportunity to see the page with the different colors.

You also have links right next to each other, see below.


Quote:
if I could steal a few mins of your time when you get a chance, can
you navigate around my site and see? www.francesdelrio.com.. and
thank you so much..
The title element on the first page is rather iffy.
<title> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> FRANCES DEL RIO -- WEBSITE <<<<<<<<<<<<<<
</title>

That shows up in my task bar as >>>>>>>>>>. What is that? What web site
is doing that nasty thing so I don't know what it is? What is Google
going to show? The same thing. The title is the most valuable piece of
realestate on the page. Don't squander it - use keywords that describe
your website (don't stuff, don't make it terribly long).

What's this?
<meta name="description" content="photography, resume
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: :::::::::::::"/>
That makes no sense. Do you really want Google to show this as a
result? Description is also a valuable - don't squander it either.

Quote:
(only thing I haven't done yet is put those photo nos. in a <ul
list.. I don't like lists too much as paddings and margins are
unpredictable from browser to browser.. I have developed my own
formula that works for this, but still I'd rather avoid lists when I
can.. I did do it on a test page,
http://www.francesdelrio.com/photoblog/section1/page1/photos.html
(photo nos. are in list on this page)
That's the way to do it. You can always add padding/margins to suit.

Quote:
but I haven't been able to test it on IE7, or any mac browser... so
not to keen on doing this as yet... (are more accessible?? or is
there another reason why you suggested a list?)
10.5 Until user agents (including assistive technologies) render
adjacent links distinctly, include non-link, printable characters
(surrounded by spaces) between adjacent links. [Priority 3]
[http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/#tech-divide-links]

The regular photo page fails an automated test with the links not in a
list format, and the test page fails only for the style choices.
[http://www.contentquality.com/mynewtester/cynthia.exe]. When I ran the
tests, I tested for Priority 1,2 and 3.

Quote:
again, thank you very much for your help and suggestions here...
(if you'd rather continue this conversation by email you can send me
email from any pg on my website..)

Like I said, it's a conspiracy, and hopefully others are learning from
this as well.



--
Adrienne Boswell at Home
Arbpen Web Site Design Services
http://www.cavalcade-of-coding.info
Please respond to the group so others can share

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