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I had an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) client call me today to point out something quite interesting.

If you do a search for Adelaide Mortgages, you’ll see this:

Click the image to Enlarge it

Whilst Mortgage Choice’s SEO/SEM crew must be congratulated, it’s hardly a good advertisement for Google’s local Business Listing system, is it?

I’ve recently started testing websites I develop for clients in the new beta version of Internet Explorer 8. Whilst this version of the browser hasn’t been released to the public yet, it’s a good idea for developers to be testing in this browser, as when it’s released, it will quickly become the standard (Microsoft is likely to roll it out as part of an automatic Windows Update)

Wow! If the beta version of the browser is anything to go by, web developers are in for a whole world of pain when it goes public, especially if they have legacy sites which were built using tables (Your web developer is building your site using table-less standards compliant XHTML and CSS, aren’t they? If you’re not sure, now would be a good time to ask!). I haven’t had a chance to look at why yet, but most of the sites I’ve visited which were built using tables for layout break badly in this new version of IE.

Whilst you would expect that there’ll be some minor tweaks to the browser before it goes live, you’d think that they’d have the rendering engine and basic HTML sorted out before they release a beta version.

Not so.

I was working on a site for a client yesterday. The site worked beautifully in Firefox 3, Opera 9.5, Safari 3, and Internet Explorer 7. Then I opened it up in Internet Explorer 8.

Hmmm…..

The layout seemed OK, but there was one small problem - named anchor links didn’t work. I googled, googled, and googled some more, trying to work out what was going on, then I came across this little gem from Microsoft:

Some URIs (Universal Resource Indicators) refer to a location within a resource. This kind of URI ends with a “#” mark that is followed by an anchor identifier. This is known as the fragment identifier. For example, the following URI points to an anchor that is named “section_2″:

http://somesite.com/html/top.html#section_2

When you click this link, it will forward you to the section of the resource that is labeled as the following:

<a name=section_2>

These types of links may not function in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 Standards mode. To work around this issue, use the Emulate IE7 button.

What the hell Microsoft?

So you suggest that if something doesn’t work, users go back to the old version? Isn’t that a little like Ford saying that their new model has no headlights, so if you’d like to drive at night, you’ll need to use the older version of their car?

This is a BASIC function of HTML. I would have thought that things like this would have been sorted before you’d put out a beta version of a new browser!

Late last year, Google, including the Big Cahuna himself, flagged changes to the way that subdomains were to be treated in their search index.

The idea was that no longer could a company tie up the first ten results for a particular term (let’s say “iphone”), using separate subdomains such as:

• apple.com
• store.apple.com
• blog.apple.com
• iphone.apple.com

In the past, companies have been able to tie up vast tracts of search results, by having two listed pages ranked for each of their subdomains.

Whilst this idea from Google is in theory good, there was always going to be some hand-tweaking of their filtering algorythms. For example, the Blogger.com and Wordpress.com domains have millions of subdomains, all unrelated, and run by different bloggers. Clearly bloggers using the Blogger or Wordpress service should not be penalised because of Google’s new rules.

So the task of deciding which domains would be able to show multiple subdomain results in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) fell to some mysterious entity within the walls of the Googleplex.

Surely these decisions couldn’t be influenced by commercial considerations? Of course not, as we all know - Google Isn’t Evil.

So How do we explain this screenshot then?

Click the image to enlarge

Not only have Google broken their rule about not showing more than two results from the same domain, they’re even showing a crapload of results from the same subdomain!

Wierd.

Did you know that you can get an easy to digest version of your google calendar via RSS?

Whilst this won’t be useful to too many people, if, like me, you have web access on your mobile phone but you’re not lucky enough to have a “proper” web browsing phone like an Iphone (Damn you two year contract with Three Mobile!), a quick check of your calendar in the text-only format that RSS gives us at least lets me keep on top of what’s coming up.

First - let’s have a look at how to enable the RSS function in the Google Calendar settings:

Whilst having the Google Calendar open in your browser, look down the left haNd side of the window, for the “My Calendars section. Just under this part you’ll see a link that says “Manage Calendars”, click that link.

Click the link that says "Manage Calendars"

Once clicked, that link will take you to another page which allows you to mess with your calendar settings. On this page, we’re looking to make sure that correct tab is chosen in the “Calendar Settings” (1) section, then we click the link with the name of our calendar(2)

Choose the "Calendars" tab then click the link to your calendar

Now go back to the “Calendar Details” tab, and click it, then scroll down the page, and find the little XML icon for the Private Address, and  click it:

Make sure you're using the "Private Address" and click the XML icon

You will be given a private address (URL) to the feed of your calendar. Copy and paste this address into your feed reader, and you now have access to your calendar entries on the run!