RE: "Think EUO, not SEO"/Google

As far as I can figure, there's an easy workaround to this. Skip links
generally have alt text. Couldn't a spider check the alt text and determine,
based on it's character count and the inclusion of certain keywords
(navigation, skip, content, etc.) that it's a skip link and not an attempt
to manipulate the search ranking.

Character count is important because alt text on a skip link is usually only
a couple of words.


-----Original Message-----
From: The Snider's Web [mailto:lsnider@thesnidersweb.com]
Sent: Friday, June 13, 2003 2:37 AM
To: Joe Clark; WAI-IG
Subject: Re: "Think EUO, not SEO"/Google


Hi Joe,

Thanks for posting this link-it was very interesting to read.

I just got this info from another publication about Google, which is quite 
worrisome:

...Google [is] declaring all hidden links as
bad and automatically checking every page for them...Most
invisible links do fall into the spam category, but not all.  If you
look at http://www.cnn.com/ you will find an invisible GIF link
telling you to "Click here to skip to main content."  Is this spam?
Absolutely not.  What CNN is doing is an accessibility technique
called "skip navigation" to make their site friendlier to people with
disabilities.

I really hope they are not going to penalize people for trying to make 
sites more accessible :(

Cheers

Lisa


At 10:01 AM 6/6/2003 -0400, Joe Clark wrote:

>A page good for Google is a page good for humans. "Accessibility"
>mentioned repeatedly.
>
><http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2003_06_06_index.html#200393098>
>
>--
>
>   Joe Clark  |  joeclark@joeclark.org
>   Author, _Building Accessible Websites_
>   <http://joeclark.org/access/> | <http://joeclark.org/book/>