T-Log

It is true that it is disappointed when my site was shortlisted but not granted the prize for the eXtreme Web Design Award. I admit I overlook a detail confirmation testing step. I tested the site with Webxact, it shows no error for the Accessibility test in the first page (only warning, not error), but it shows an error in the detail page…..partly being faked, partly being of my careless.

However, attending the lecture listening the sharing from students who receive the awards teach me almost nothing but many myths exist.

1) Don’t emphasize the advantage of using Google webmasters tool for allowing Google indexing the site. Google crawls the WWW occasionally but not base on how long you register the site to that tool. The tool only allow you to have more control in managing how Google crawl the site, and have a more detail look to the searching statistic.

2) Submitting allows search engine to know your site easier, the sitemap stands for a road guider where robots/ spider can go, this helps shorten the time for them to crawl the site, but it does not mean it help raising the ranking.. In fact, when more thing are disclosed to spider, they may find your site not good enough even though some part of your web is very SEO and well in content, this is so-call dilution effect.

3)Tags like “changefreq” are not useless in the sitemap structure, they in-cooperate with “lastmod” and search engine old site update record to help search engine judging whether the site update frequency is true or not.

4)When the site grows large, “priority” is useful in guiding search engine where they should visit and crawl more, which part should visit fewer. This help lowering the loading to your web server due to the crawling action.

The most naive point one of the student shared that one of the competitor site: http://cityu-web-hacker-turtle.shing.cc has high ranking because it was newly built, and he even said because of this the site should have an old cache file date as search engine will not frequently update sites that are newly registered. But the truth is that, the author of http://cityu-web-hacker-turtle.shing.cc/ built their site at the beginning of October and keep enriching the site content. That’s why search engine also keep updating their cache file towards http://cityu-web-hacker-turtle.shing.cc/. Hence when the student showed his confusion when he saw the cache file date is so recently.  But I don’t think most student realize this point.

I feel a little ridiculous as long as I listen to the students who share their SEO. Some of them can show some good points, but many of them can be seen that they won that just by luck without detail understanding of some detail parts of SEO and simply said those features are useless.

I think the PIC of this award should has the responsibility and obligation in correcting those myths instead of just let students said something partly or completely wrong to the majority.