The DFH strikes again!

Since the 8 deadly sins article was published our intrepid Surfer from Hell has come across even more DFH tricks that you should be aware of

The Designers from Hell are not, unfortunately, a dying breed. Pity, that, because they've cottoned on to a new way of distracting the innocent surfer. Pop-ups, they're called. You've probably seen them. Inside every Web page authoring package, whether it be FrontPage, Dreamweaver, HomeSite or any other, there's the facility to use DHTML stuff - Dynamic HTML, that is.

This allows you to decide what happens when certain events occur - like the surfer leaving your page, or entering your page, or even rolling the cursor over a certain spot.

So, you enter the DFH's site, and immediately it spawns half a dozen new browser windows - small, but far from beautifully marked - extolling the virtues of this product, that product, this Web site, that search engine... you get the drift.

So you end up with a task bar filled with browser buttons. You close them, one by one, but they spawn new ones. So you close your main browser window. It spawns new ones. Again, and again, and again.

Even the better class 'adult' sites have stopped doing this these days (I'm told... not that I've ever been to one, oh, no).

JavaScript Junkies from Hell

If that wasn't bad enough, there's a new breed of DFH coming onstream. They're the JavaScript Junkies from Hell (JSJfH). They've discovered that you can, if you want, create a site that's composed entirely of JavaScript and Java applets. They cruise all of the JS and Java sites looking out for new toys to put onto their sites, work out ways of presenting their content in a JavaScript manner, and, generally, cause JavaScript errors all over your browser.

You see, they don't look to see which version of JavaScript their new toys are written in. And they don't check out how well they degrade cross-browser ('Degrading' means that, even if the script won't work in, say, Netscape or Opera or any other browser, that it won't throw up an error, and won't make a dog's dinner of the page it's on).

So you get sites that look the business in Internet Explorer 5.5, look pretty dire in 4.1 and just won't work at all in Netscape any-version-you-like. Like all DFHs JSJfHs tend not to get many repeat visitors.

Search Engine Riggers from Hell

JSJfHs aren't too bad compared to the last group for this session. These are nasty, nasty DFHs of the very worst kind. They've been to the sites that tell you that well over 70% of your visitors will come from the top search engines. They've read the articles on how to get the best ranking possible for your site. They understand keywords and meta tags, and they've subverted the process for their own ends.

What they've done is to garner the statistics that show what the most popular search terms are in family areas of search engines, and they've constructed what's known as a doorway to their site that fits, exactly, the criteria for getting a highly ranked place on a search on certain of those popular keywords. That wouldn't be so bad if their sites had anything to do with the keywords in question, but the fact of the matter is, they don't.

The sites are either adverts collections, or bombard you with cookies you don't want, or, worse still (and this is very rare, I'm happy to say) are very definitely of an adult nature.

Now, as a Surfer from Hell, the kind of hyper-critical visitor a lot of sites don't want, I'm happy to say that the major search engines are onto these DFHs, and they're being weeded out. There's nothing whatsoever wrong in optimising your page for search engines to spider (that is, read and index on their databases), indeed, it's a damned good idea so to do. But be honest! Tell it like it is. The fact is, if your site is good enough, you'll be swamped with visitors - word of mouth sees to that.

Oh! And don't believe everything a site trying to sell you search-engine optimisation software tells you. Word of mouth does far more good than high rankings in search engines, even though such rankings help. I'm sure that the rest of the PPC team will be telling you more on how to get more hits to your site as time goes on - listen to what they say!

More Surfer from Hell articles:

His first journey

 

David Dorn