A little project I've been working on has helped me unearth some of the sheer horrors that the search engines have to deal with on a daily basis and some web designers and webmasters should literally be shot.
How about a fully functional web page that has no anchors on the HTML page, none whatsoever, yet you can obviously see a fully functional navigation menu on the page?
That's right, some dumb fuckers are doing 100% javascript navigation, nothing in HTML or CSS, completely included as a javascript navbar. Sadly, Google rewards these assholes by indexing their shit.
But this is trivial, let's move on...
How about an old domain name with a meta refresh to the new domain name.
No big deal, right?
Until the new domain 301s to an adjusted location. The page at that location has a javascript redirect to yet another location. Finally it lands on a "200 OK" response with and no more redirects, what a maze from hell.
Getting ugly but I've seen worse.
The one that completely blew me away was some dumb fuckers with UTF-8 encoded websites being stored online as UTF-16 (UNICODE) so every letter you see on the screen is actually a double-byte character which doubles the bandwidth for no obvious fucking reason except some shithead self-proclaimed web fucking designer in some goddamn 3rd world shit hole country doesn't know how to save files properly when not coding in UTF-16 character sets.
Wonder if Google penalizes them for slow loading pages or just being god damned stupid?
Some of the big ISPs like PacBell do some really stupid fucking shit too, like this:
home.pacbell.net/someaccountAnd this shit just goes on and on and on...
302 redirects to:
http://home.pacbell.net/cgi-bin/sunset.cgi?old_request=/someaccount
200 OK contains a javascript redirect (IT guy out that day?) to:
http://pages.prodigy.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi?pwpurl=http://home.pacbell.net/someaccount
404 finally!
"Discontinuation of Prodigy Personal Web Pages (PWP) Support "
It's just one big fucking mess on the web and some webmasters and designers should be very fucking ashamed.
One thing is very obvious, the search engines are doing a very skillful game of interpreting javascript these days otherwise many pages on the kinds of bullshit sites mentioned above would never be discovered.
