malcolm coles

Three's a trend. And five's a default. So here are five examples of sites whose logo is a link to the homepage - and who make this obvious by changing the image on mouseover / rollover (difference explained here). There are some tips on how to do it yourself at the end.

Amazon

Amazon logo changes to show it's a home link

Pampers

Pampers logo changes to show it's a home link

Facebook

Facebook's logo

Waitrose

Waitrose logo changes to show it's a home link

Riverford

Riverford logo changes to show it's a home link

How to do this yourself

Some useful links:

• CSS image rollovers - this probably has all you need. But the following may help too (although CSS solutions are probably better than javascript ones - see CSS vs javascript) ...
• Create a rollover logo
• Using JavaScript, when a user mouses over an image, you can tell that image to switch to a different image
• Using CSS to change rollover image for link
• Double Image Rollover using Pure CSS

OK, newspapers shouldn't turn off RSS feeds like I said here. And here. And here.

I was wrong.

I feel better now...

The point I was trying to make was that there didn't seem much point having RSS icons in your header (Express) or by your search box (Mirror), or offering a brilliant RSS mashup feature (Guardian), or having RSS icons by each section of your news area (Independent) etc etc - but not doing anything to educate people about what they could do with all this.

And also that as a way to get people to engage with you, see reactions to stories, and understand a bit more about the story than just a headline, Twitter works much better - so why not replace the RSS logo with a Twitter one? Anyway, I'm supposed to be climbing down ...

Still, RSS is great - I use it. It doesn't run itself as some people seem to think. But it should still be available for people who want to use it, whether to monitor output or to create mashups or whatever.

As such, my headline 'Newspapers: turn off your RSS feeds' was a bit idiotic ... Click on the three links earlier and you can see people violently and quite rightly disagreeing with me. (Although, I wasn't suggesting podcasts should be turned off as someone said.)

So what did I learn?

• Inflammatory headlines make good link/comment-bait, but they probably don't do your reputation much good ;).
• What I still think is a good point - newspapers' failure to educate their users about a feature that most of them show on every page - is going to get lost if you reach a stupid conclusion.
• Trying to deal with the backlash of something like this can wipe out most of your day if you decide to engage with it. (And to think I turned down a ticket to Activate 09 because I had work to do that day ...)
• I really need to fix the preview on this blog - I have to publish to see what anything looks like, and people had tweeted this post (bloody RSS!) before I'd even finished reviewing it.
• I should probably stop writing posts at midnight. Doesn't make for clear thinking...

Right, better go and publish something else to get all record of this debacle off my front page.

I recently pointed out that the Delia Online's relaunch was a right cock up. They've now made things  worse ...

deliasmith.com has vanished - so links from external sites are broken and give no SEO benefit.

One of my criticisms was they had left the old site up at deliasmith.com (with no real warning that it was defunct) as well as the new one at deliaonline.com (in some good news, they've finally redirected the non-www version to the www one).

What they've done

They've now turned off deliasmith.com ... and haven't put any redirects in place to the new site. What does this mean?

• Google results useless Any results that appear in Google for deliasmith.com don't go anywhere - you just get "The server at www.deliasmith.com is taking too long to respond".
• Links broken Any links to deliasmith.com no longer work - you get the same message.
• SEO benefit thrown away. And they've thrown away the SEO benefit of the 330 links that Yahoo site explorer reports to deliasmith.com, such as the one pictured above from Maldon Salt.

What they should have done

The correct thing to do is identify which deliasmith.com pages have inbound links and redirect them to relevant new pages on deliaonline.com. Then redirect every other old page to the new site's homepage.

If you can't be bothered to do that, just redirect every deliasmith.com page to the new deliaonline.com homepage.

But don't just switch off your old domain ...

There's nothing illegal about being paid to add a link to someone else's sites. However, Google doesn't like it - doing this can "can negatively impact [the selling] site's ranking in search results".

Let's look at the ic network, one of Trinity Mirror's local news brands ...

At the bottom of icCheshire pages in a box of links to other Trinity Mirror sites is one that says 'Remortgage'. This links to http://www.godirect.co.uk/remortgages.php. I can't find a connection between Go Direct and Trinity Mirror - they look like separate companies.

icCheshire home page - is one of these a paid link?

At the bottom of the icLiverpool page is the same box, but this one has a link with the keywords 'Life insurance' that links to http://www.godirect.co.uk/life-insurance.php.

icLiverpool - is the first link a paid one?

Of course, people are free to ignore Google's guidelines. However, they shouldn't complain if their ranking in search engine results drop ...

To avoid this fate, Google recommends using the nofollow tag, which Trinity Mirror isn't doing for these links.

It definitely doesn't recommend stuffing a keyword-rich link to a 3rd-party site in among links to other sites you own ... Or am I being overly suspiscious?

Maybe it's coincidence? Maybe I'm talking more crap? Or maybe people are getting fed up with people slagging them off in a review and uniting to do something about it?

Anyway, three's a trend. So here are three people hitting back at bad reviews in the last week.

Roger Corke attacks Tim Dowling over 'The Madoff Hustle' TV review

Roger Corke, the producer-director of The Madoff Hustle, didn't like Tim Dowling's review:

If an opera is reviewed, you get someone reviewing it who knows about opera. The same is true if dance, art, architecture is reviewed. Why is it, then, that newspapers give the TV reviewer's job to someone who clearly doesn't know anything about TV?

... posh, educated people go to the theatre, ballet and art galleries, so they need to be given a reviewer who knows what they're talking about. TV, on the other hand, is that box in everyone's living room and so the assumption is made that anyone can review its contents. As a result, you end up with someone who can't even give his readers an accurate summary of the programme they are reviewing.

More here.

Alice Hoffman attacks Roberta Silman over 'The Story Sisters' book review

Here's her Twitter tirade, reported here.

"Roberta Silman in the Boston Globe is a moron," she wrote. "How do some people get to review books? And give the plot away." Ms. Hoffman also lambasted The Globe and went so far as to post Ms. Silman's phone number and email, inviting fans to "Tell her what u think of snarky critics."

Alain de Botton attacks Caleb Crain over 'Pleasures and sorrows of work' review

Alain hits back on Caleb's blog (there seems to be some doubt as to whether this is really ADB, but a later comment claims he tweeted to say he was commenting there):

Caleb, you make it sound on your blog that your review is somehow a sane and fair assessment. In my eyes, and all those who have read it with anything like impartiality, it is a review driven by an almost manic desire to bad-mouth and perversely depreciate anything of value.

I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.

Last one courtesy of @badjournalism.

The latest subscriber figures (see table below) show that, apart from a couple of exceptions, it's time for newspapers to turn off their RSS feeds - and hand over the server space, technical support and webpage real estate to an alternative, such as their Twitter accounts.

Melanie Phillips: Only 11 Rss subs thank god

The table below shows that only 3 of the 9 national newspapers have an RSS feed with more than 10,000 subscribers in Google Reader.

And most newspaper RSS feeds have readerships in the 00s, if that.

Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips has just 11 subscribers to her RSS feed (maybe there's hope for the UK population yet ...).

Despite having virtually no users, the Mail churns out 160 RSS feeds and the Mirror 280. All so a couple of thousand people can look at them in total.

The other papers are just as bad. And while the Guardian has a couple of RSS readers with decent numbers (partly because Google recommends it in its news bundle), it has more feeds than there are people in the UK ...

Top 3 RSS feeds at each newspaper

They didn't all have three that showed up (full table here) ...

Switch to Twitter instead

I suggest newspapers switch to Twitter instead. Twitter's advantages over RSS include:

• Wheat vs chaff As a reader, you can see which stories other people are RTing and are therefore popular.
• Context There's space in 140 characters for newspapers to give some background to stories as well as the headline (well, there is for those that don't just stick the first few words of the standfirst after the headline).
• Promotion Followers can RT newspaper stories, promoting the paper - they can't do this with elements of an RSS feed.
• Tracking Stories' development can be tracked on Twitter - you can't usually tell what's changed in an RSS feed.
• Conversation You can take part in a conversation on Twitter. People only talk to their RSS feed when they swear at it. The journalists behind the story can tweet, too.

Newspapers agree with me ...

As I say, despite poor subscriptions for many feeds, papers pump out RSS feeds as if there's no tomorrow - the second column in the table shows how many feeds (rounded) that each paper has.

But despite this, it's clear some papers agree with me - and have already given up on RSS feeds and no longer actively promote them.

No visibility

The Mail, despite its 160-odd feeds, only mentions them in its footer.

The same is true of the Sun.

On the page but hardly visible

The FT's RSS link does at least have a logo - but its buried at the bottom of the right hand column on each page.

The Telegraph shows relevant RSS feeds on pages - but they're buried in a different way: above a banner ad that no one will ever look at.

Even the Guardian, which lets you mash up your own RSS feeds (hence the 000,000s in the table), hides details of its feeds under an unusual term 'webfeed' in the far right of its header.

Times promotes twitter

The Times still has an RSS link in its main header menu on its news page. On other pages its's at the bottom. And it mentions Twitter on its pages much more than RSS.

Visible - but not doing them any good

The Independent is alone in listing RSS feeds on its main category pages - although that doesn't seem to get it many subscribers.

The Mirror has an RSS link next to its search box, although it took me ages to find it. Does this count as visible - it's not exactly intuitive ...

Express theatre RSS feed: gibberish

And the Express has a link and a logo prominently in its header. But as the express doesn't update its website often (or at all on sunday), I guess that's why no one subscribes. And some of its RSS feeds appear to be garbage - check out this theatre one ...

Caveats about the data

After you've started writing something about newspapers, you'll eventually discover that Martin Belam has already written about it. Having just noticed his Top 75 British newspaper RSS feeds (written before the recent explosion in Twitter use) as I was researching Google Reader's market share, I figured I'd just repeat his caveats about his own data as they apply to mine too:

• Subscribers don't necessarily ever read anything.
• Numbers quoted by Google vary wildly.
• Newspapers have problem with the same feed on different URLs. To quote Martin: "If the papers themselves can't work out how to set one canonical URL for their content, why should I?"
• Google Reader search is not great. There may be mising feeds.

Delia Smith relaunched her site last wednesday - the new one is here. She / her new hosts seem to be having problems.

Maybe she's been taking lessons from the ABCe relaunch? Anyway, here are some of her biggest issues ...

They've deleted all the old forums and lots of people's saved recipes

This is utter host-moving, site-relaunching madness.

The old forums: deleted

Delia deletes the old forums

They're not migrating the old forum posts prior to the relaunch to the new site - that's 10s of thousands of postings from the old version of the site.

I really can't conceive of what would make someone do this when they relaunched a site.

Maybe it's related to the fact that when the site relaunched, people were forced to choose a new password.

New passwords? Sounds fishy ..

According to this page: "when the new site is launched, you will have to supply a new password as, for data protection reasons, we can't transfer your existing passwords over."

Smells fishier than fish-pie recipe to me. What has data protection got to do with this? More likely, they didn't want to spend the time / money to port over the database of old posts and passwords. So they're just going to delete everyone's postings.

Someone who doesn't realise the old site hasn't actually been turned off yet, has pointed out that it's all OK as you can still access the old forums ... via the google cache. Oh. My. God. They do know the cache will eventually disappear. And is that really the way to handle a site migration!??

Saved recipes: deleted

If only you'd known ...

The (old and new) site lets you save recipes in your own personal online recipe book - so you can build up a nice collection of ones you like.

However, confusion over passwords has led to some people reregistering.

As a result, they've lost their profiles and recipes.

They didn't actually have to do this, but it wasn't clear - an email was supposed to go out, but not everyone got it.

Missing saved recipes: devastated

As a result, people have reregistered - losing their old profiles. So some people have lost their entire history of saved recipes - one described herself as 'devastated' as a result. The rest are just really annoyed.

Again, this could all have been annoyed if they hadn't just wiped the slate clean with the relaunch.

Oh look, they're selling links

This page is a sponsored 'advertisement promotion'.

I'm going to gloss over the fact that the breadcrumb trail says this: "peppadew^TM: naturally south african" (yes, with the TM) but they don't use the TM in the copy.

However, they are giving a dofollow link to peppadew.com to someone who has paid to advertise on their site.

Paid links are in violation of Google's guidelines. These aren't law, obviously. But they are if you don't want to get booted out of Google's index ...

Also, if you're going to have a link to a money off voucher on this page, maybe don't point the link to http:/// as this won't really work ...

OMG - there are adverts in the breadcrumb trail

The only breadcrumb trail ever to link to adverts rather than to pages on your own site

Have you come across Vibrant? They do those annoying double underline adverts where when you mouseover, a big box appears selling something. They call it 'in-text advertising'. I call it really annoying.

Anyway, Delia has used it in the breadcrumb trail.

Yes, in a world's first, they've turned keywords in the breadcrumb trail into clickable adverts. Words almost fail me. I know I said I couldn't conceive of something earlier. But really. Linking words in your breadcrumb trail to an advert ...

(You may have noticed the word honey double underlines in that earlier screenshot - yes, they're linking people's  usernames to adverts as well!)

Oh look, there's the old site at the same time!

The old site was at www.deliasmith.com. The new site is at www.deliaonline.com.

For some reason, they've left the old site there while running the new one. That should really confuse everyone - google certainly seems confused as it's currently returning both. Let's hope it doesn't think the new site is duplicate content and remove it from the index...

There is a tiny message on the old home page that says "The launch has been delayed by a few days: look out for the new site any day now!" Except it is launched ...

None of the other pages on the old version have this message, so you can happily browse the old site without realising the new one is there... Still, at least it means you can access the old forum posts for now.

Sort out the www and non-www versions

Adding to this, it's yet another site that doesn't realise that deliaonline.com is NOT THE SAME as www.deliaonline.com.

Surely they should do better than serve up 'Bad Request (Invalid Hostname) when you visit the former? Try a redirect, people.

Sloppy title writing

Can I suggest a simple rule for the title - the bit of meta data that Google uses to show in the results.

It's usually best to go: 'Page name - Section name - Site name', or some similar rule. On your home page, try something like: 'Site name - short summary of proposition'.

Here's what not to do: 'Something random and different each time'.

And it's rarely a good idea to go 'Site name - page name' (as it makes it hard to scan results in Google as they all start the same, plus Google treats the keywords at the front of the title as more important).

However, the relaunched site has titles like this:

• Delia Online - Ingredients (even though the section is actually called ingredients with a lower case i)
• Delia Online - community (I do so love random capitalisation)
• Delia Online - how-to-cook (this is my personal favourite - random hyphenation. I mean, do people check this stuff when they relaunch sites? No? Just me then.)

I suppose they're consistently inconsistent, which is good. We have both Recipes and equipment (so there's more than one one upper case and more than one lower case example), and also news-and-features, too - maybe the rule is that all multi-word sections are hyphenated and lower case. Maybe they just didn't think about it? Who knows.

The ones in the forums are good, too - every single one has the title of 'Delia Online -'. That'll look great in Google.

The first link in the massive header is pointing to the wrong place

The header to Delia Online. Massive.

The header is massive - about 450 pixels deep. What on earth is all that white space for?

Seasonal food? Or the wrong page?

Also the list of links for June (which are part of the header - yes you see that massive white hole on EVERY PAGE) are a bit odd.

The top one is to 'Seasonal recipes to cook this month'. This takes you to a gallery page with examples such as 'beat the credit crunch' and 'Chocolate to make you melt'.

Are these seasonal?

I'm presuming they meant to point to the 'What should you be cooking this month' page.

More testing required ...

There's a funny post on Google's autosuggest feature (where, when you start typing, Google suggests searches) on SEO Services group. I gave it a go with some less SEO terms. My god it's rude ...

Gordon Brown: sh*t, a moron, useless, incompetent

This is the prime minister. Shouldn't they check these?

This is what Google thinks of our Prime Minister

David Cameron: a sexy idiot, apparently

He gets a better press.

Google Autosuggest for David Cameron

Prince Charles: antichrist

I think he's a nutjob, waste of money and constitutional abhorrence. Apparently Google thinks he's the antichrist.

Google Autosuggest for Prince Charles

Jade Goody: is she dead, or not?

Google seems a bit conflicted.

Google Autosuggest for Jade Goody

Micheal Jackson: dead, back, freak and going to die ...

Yup, he's dead, back, a muslim, dying, a freak, innocent, ill, Latoya and going to die. Hmmm.

Google Autosuggest for Michael Jackson

The express website is about to have a redesign. You can see it here. Here's a screenshot. They also seem to be moving URL from dailyexpress.co.uk to express.co.uk.

It doesn't seem that much better to me ... a bit like they've tried to bodge the BBC home page into their ghastly colour scheme. And I'm not sure they've thought it through - they're truncating intros in the featured story box like this: "A COUNCIL which was criticised after banning home ba ...". ba what?!?

The new look express

I lack the time and energy to go into it right now. But it's pretty awful when you look at the detail. There is so much copy sliced off by the right of the boxes for a start. They can't think this is good can they?

Also, someone better explain about accessibility to them soon. This is how it looks with javascript turned off - there's nothing there!

Javascript off: nothing there!

In March, I appealed to the Audit Bureau of Circulations to sort out its terrible ABCe website. It's had a redesign. Here's a list of its latest problems.

If at any point the ABC wants to pay me a consultancy fee, for all this free advice, just leave me a comment to tell me how to receive my money ...

All the URLs have changed but there are no redirects

Search results for ABCe after redesign

They've had a redesign, but they haven't redirected the old URLs to new ones. So, for instance, if you click the second link shown in Google for a search on ABCe, you get page not found.

Lesson When relaunching a website, always 301 redirect your old pages to new ones (even if they're all just to your new home page). That way, external links still work and you keep the SEO benefit of any links.

They haven't sorted www vs non www

The more observant will have noticed that the title of the first result in that screenshot says 'To access IIS Help'. The ABC hasn't realised that abce.org.uk is not the same URL as www.abce.org.uk. And if you go to the ABC URLs without www, you get page not found or server errors.

Compare these pages:

• www.abc.org.uk
• abc.org.uk

and these ones:

• www.abce.org.uk
• abce.org.uk

Lesson When you set up your website, redirect yourdomain.co.uk/whatever to www.yourdomain.co.uk/whatever. And log in to your google webmaster account to set your preferred domain (www or non-www).

They're running two absolutely identical websites

The new ABC homepage. And also the new ABCe homepage.

You can access the entire website at www.abc.org.uk - or you can see an identical website at www.abce.org.uk.

The only difference for each and every page across the two sites is whether there is an e in the domain name or not. For instance, compare these two URLs:

• www.abc.org.uk/Corporate/AboutABCe/StandardsandMetrics.aspx
• www.abce.org.uk/Corporate/AboutABCe/StandardsandMetrics.aspx

The same is true for every URL. This will cause problems with duplicate content in search engines, plus splitting incoming links over two URLs is problematic for SEO.

They do have two brands - ABC for print, ABCe for online - but they don't need two websites. And even if they did, they wouldn't need two identical ones.

Lesson Have a website. Don't have another identical one.

The navigation is inconsistent

If you go, say, here, some related links appear in the right:

• If you click on the first one, JICwebs, then a jargon buster sudenly appears in the left hand menu, under the links that are for subscribers only.
• If you click on the second one - the jargon buster - you get page not found.
• If you click the others, some random stuff happens.

As far as I can work out, the top navigation bar controls the right hand related links box which in turn controls the left-hand menu.

Some pages have a right hand menu with related links, some are full-width with no right hand menu, and some have an empty right hand menu.

Lesson Make your navigation consistent. And keep things that are together, together. Having the top, left and right navigations interdependant AND inconsistent is really confusing. And use templates consistently.

Some minor points

• Login not clear To get to most pages, you need to login. It's not clear which pages require this. Although on this page it says "only members can access the following pages" and you can click on the links, so clearly they're confused at ABCe too ...
• Titles unclear Although the titles have improved since the last site, they still aren't ideal. For a start, capitalisation is random. And secondly, they don't show the site structure. Instead of going 'Page name - Section - ABCe', they just show the page name. This looks unclear in Google.
• Descriptions poor The descriptions aren't proper English. This isn't gramatically correct: "How to become a subscriber to ABCe and what are the benefits of doing so."
• Too many link styles Some links are blue italic. Some are black unerlined. Some are red not underlined. Some are grey. Make your mind up ...
• Mising images There's a contact list here, but all the photos are missing.

I could go on - there's more. But I won't.

Yet despite these basic problems, they're using SIFR to show fancy fonts. I think they should concentrate on these other things ...