Interesting stats

[Foamcow]

http://code.google.com/webstats/index.html

No, they are interesting, really!

Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web design and ranting
Buy Languedoc wines in the UK

 

[ca8msm]

Is it sad that I find them interesting too?


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[TamedTech]

I'll join your computer club boys!

I do so love being a nerd ... it's always nice looking at stats like that to find out what makes other developers Tick .. as we are quite a funny bunch.

Rob

 

[ChrisHunt]

Some real nuggets of information in there. For example, word from the horse's mouth on the value of certain <meta> tags...

keywords, which these days is mostly useless, ironically, and description, which is still somewhat useful.

They're not the worst though...

revisit-after, supposedly used to tell search engines how often to recrawl the page. To our knowledge only one search engine has ever supported it, and that search engine was never widely used — at this point, it is nothing more than a good luck charm. A remarkably widely used one. More pages use the completely worthless <meta name="revisit-after"> than use the <em> element!

(Apparently, the guilty SE isn't Yahoo or MSN but one called SeachBC)

Telling use of quotation marks thoughout:

The distribution value is supposedly used to control who can access the document. Search engine "optimisers" tell people to set it to "global" to ensure that search engines index their pages.

Faint "praise" indeed for SEO folk, but this one's better:

Microsoft Office's creative "HTML" output

Ouch!

On the popularity of [tt]target[/tt] attributes in <a> elements (my emphasis):

determining whether these are mostly attempts to make links open in new windows or tabs or whether they are indicative of frames use would require further research; the first seems most likely, however, [red]since frames in general aren't used much[/red]

Ooh!, don't tell Clive! I hope they do that further research in this area. It'd be interesting to see some figures on frames usage/abusage, though it will be difficult to come up with conclusive figures (how do you identify a page that's supposed to be in a frame?).

Whatever the health of the frame, the image map is surprisingly healthy

nearly ten percent of pages in the sample used them, which is quite significant when you stop to think about when you last saw an image map.

Yes indeed, 10% of pages using image maps? Where/what are they all?

I hope Google repeat this exercise (especially given the bitchyness of some of their commentary). One thing I'd like to see added is the relative popularity of different doctypes (and none). Thanks for sharing, Foamcow.

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd