Comments on: Encyclopedia Britannica’s rant on Wikipedia http://www.beezly.org.uk/2009/01/encyclopedia-britannicas-rant-on-wikipedia/ Tue, 20 Dec 2011 11:29:42 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: Harry Wood http://www.beezly.org.uk/2009/01/encyclopedia-britannicas-rant-on-wikipedia/comment-page-1/#comment-477 Harry Wood Wed, 04 Feb 2009 12:53:36 +0000 http://www.beezly.org.uk/?p=1995#comment-477 Google ranks are all about incoming links of course, and this might not necessarily be a good indication of the best quality sources of information. Part of their problem is just that it's just not cool for nu-media blogging types to link to a dusty old encyclopaedia company website. So I can sympathise with them. ...or at least I would sympathise with them if their website wasn't <b>pants</b>. How much screen space is given over to the stuff you actually want to read? What's going on with the images? some kind of javascript lazy-loading trickery? That's annoying. Wont be linking to them. Google ranking is also designed to encourage simple clean HTML with meaningful (semantically sensible) interlinking. Wikipedia links to the 'Organic Compound' article in the first sentence. Encyclopaedia Brittanica also has an 'Organic Compound' link. The link's got stupid mouseover javascript, which no doubt looks hideous within the HTML. And where does the link point to? Some crappy pharmacy site. Do they really expect to outrank a site like wikipedia with that? Google ranks are all about incoming links of course, and this might not necessarily be a good indication of the best quality sources of information. Part of their problem is just that it’s just not cool for nu-media blogging types to link to a dusty old encyclopaedia company website. So I can sympathise with them.

…or at least I would sympathise with them if their website wasn’t pants. How much screen space is given over to the stuff you actually want to read? What’s going on with the images? some kind of javascript lazy-loading trickery? That’s annoying. Wont be linking to them.

Google ranking is also designed to encourage simple clean HTML with meaningful (semantically sensible) interlinking. Wikipedia links to the ‘Organic Compound’ article in the first sentence. Encyclopaedia Brittanica also has an ‘Organic Compound’ link. The link’s got stupid mouseover javascript, which no doubt looks hideous within the HTML. And where does the link point to? Some crappy pharmacy site.

Do they really expect to outrank a site like wikipedia with that?

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