Misinformed
I had an interesting call today from a woman at Scoot (an online directory of businesses). She started out by updating our listing details, but from then on started informing me on the failings of our website.
Firstly she pointed out that it wasn’t optimized for search engines, and enquired as to who built it (obviously failing to identify what we actually do, or reading the first sentence on our website). I tried in vain to explain about semantic markup, ‘nice URLs’ and web standards, but she just banged on about some keywords that were missing from our meta tags. Even when I told her how irrelevant meta tags are, she kept blathering on about how crucial it is to have the right keywords in there (perhaps 6 years ago...).
I was tiring at this point, but she continued by telling me that our website failed the W3C validation check, finding 3 errors (unencoded ampersands in some URLs). 3 whole errors! Also, imagine my surprise to find that, as a result of this, I was now breaking the law! It was all I could do at that point to politely tell her she was mis-informed and hung up.
I don’t know if this is new policy by Scoot, but for goodness sake, get your facts right!
Posted 4 years ago