Comments on: The web is a fuzz test: patch your browser and your web server

By: copper

copper — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 10:47:04 +0000

I just like the words “fuzz testing”

By: Stephen

Stephen — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 09:25:53 +0000

The only part of our pages that won’t validate are the affiliate ads (which we can’t do much about) and (ahem) the Google Search code, which assumes a page is written with XHTML 1, which only LSD-chomping hippies use these days (HTML 4 is the leading edge, waiting on HTML 5).

By: Martin Vezina

Martin Vezina — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 19:57:11 +0000

Writing valid HTML is the holy grail, but few reach it. So it’s a good thing that Google still returns “not valid” pages, because otherwise we’d miss the relevant results in most of our searches. If Google did only return valid pages, you’d never find Matt Cutts blog : W3C’s validation tool gave me 20 errors for it’s main page.
In my own opinion, as a web developper, it’s preferable to have a mostly valid page than to lose lots of precious energy trying to please the w3c validator.

By: Alexis Kauffmann

Alexis Kauffmann — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 20:06:56 +0000

I can’t express how useful are these tips! This may explain several “unexplained” cases of apparently clean web-pages flagged red by Google or other phishing protection systems I stumbled upon during the last year or so. Thank you!

By: brian moran

brian moran — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 17:21:47 +0000

In the pre-web days, working for a boxed software company, we called the arbitrary-input the ‘butt test’ — the IDEA of sitting on the keyboard and/or using other body parts to provide non-expected input.

‘Butt test’ was a euphamism, used when talking about testing, or at least we thought it was, until we found some summer interns doing some literal butt-testing…

By: Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 16:35:45 +0000

“You are fighting spam and spammers. You are preventing for example paid links merchants of making easy money. What did/do you expect Matt?”

Harith, I take your point, and my skin is pretty thick. The only thing I worry about is if the folks making negative claims start to convince other people (who probably don’t know the whole story). So the decision about how and when to rebut claims has been on my mind lately.

By: Vladimir

Vladimir — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 13:57:35 +0000

Matt, I wanted to read archives of your blog but your next and previous entries links are misplaced. Previous should be left and Next should be right (or full right).

By: uGuX

uGuX — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 22:31:06 +0000

Point of post = use Mac OSX

Well, that’s what I got out of it, anyway.

By: Ashley Peach

Ashley Peach — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 19:45:48 +0000

Hi Matt.

I wondered if you could help with something?

My website has been up and running in google for around 1 and a half years.

I recently made some new pages on the domain that would target certain things we would sell in the future. These pages contained title, desc, keywords tag, h1 tag and pretty much nothing else. I started to gather links to these pages mainly through articles I was writeing. They were all index in google and did quiet well(for blank pages anyway) for around three months.

Around two weeks ago all these pages were removed from googles index and there tool bar PR greyed out.

The domain has around 2000 pages index and has no problem with these what so ever. Its just the pages that were blank.

The pages do not appear in google at all any more. The pages are not in the supplemental index and google appears to ignore them.

I have now added links to these pages from the main domain and have added quality unique content consisting of around 500 words.

Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

By: Omar Yesid Mariño

Omar Yesid Mariño — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 19:20:47 +0000

I had always believed that I was losing my time by validating all my HTML and CSS code (100%)… and with this post, I confirm my belief… at least up to now.