HTML non-compliance breaking Google's Adwords Site-Related-Keywords and Quality Score

[Orchid]

I've been aware for some time now that it is impossible to make an Actinic site pass the W3s html validation because of proprietary tags, but thought this a minor issue.

However I've just become aware that this breakes googles Site-Related-Keywords tool.

To begin with the tool told me that there wasn't enough text on the page to find keywords - this I knew to be wrong.

I worked out the problem by creating a copy of a page and stripping out the proprietary tags and re-testing. The tool now worked.

This is more important than simply not being able to use a useful tool. Google uses the same algorithm to work out the Quality score of the adverts landing page - and a good quality score means that adverts are favourably placed at a lower bid price, this will be costing merchants money.

Troubleshooting Google's Quality Score

- please can v9 be standards complient with proprietary tags presented as comments?

[bluemax]

Yup Yup this is a biggie for me also.

[wjcampbe]

Can't you get Google to comply with W3C Standards and ignore tags they do not recognise? Why on earth should Actinic be crippled to accommodate Google non-compliance with an international standard that even Miscrosoft are attempting to follow (at last)?

[Orchid]

Bill - Why on earth would it cripple actinic to present it's proprietary tags like this

<!-- Actinic:BASEHREF VALUE="http://www.sitename.co.uk/acatalog/" FORCED=0 -->

Secondly we can't force Google to do anything!! Though it's well know that Google doesn't validate to standards, it's not their non compliance that is the issue here it is Actinic's - I believe that everyone should be aiming to comply, Actinic included. If Actinic wish to use propietary tags rather than comments they maybe they should declare their doctype as xhtml and follow the rules that this imposes.

Thirdly I'm asking Actinic nicely to make a small change to the way code is presented not asking them to restructure their product. The only difference this will make is to their parsing engine.

Don't really understand what's made you cross?

[PaulGrimshaw]

guys, there is a wishlist for this if you want to add your name to it

http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=29178

p.

[wjcampbe]

Bill - Why on earth would it cripple actinic to present it's proprietary tags like this

<!-- Actinic:BASEHREF VALUE="http://www.sitename.co.uk/acatalog/" FORCED=0 -->

Secondly we can't force Google to do anything!! Though it's well know that Google doesn't validate to standards, it's not their non compliance that is the issue here it is Actinic's - I believe that everyone should be aiming to comply, Actinic included. If Actinic wish to use propietary tags rather than comments they maybe they should declare their doctype as xhtml and follow the rules that this imposes.

Thirdly I'm asking Actinic nicely to make a small change to the way code is presented not asking them to restructure their product. The only difference this will make is to their parsing engine.

Don't really understand what's made you cross?

Actinic parses out comments when it compacts HTML/CGI - so the VERY fundamental BaseHref would be missing online and the site would immediately stop working.

So because you cannot force Google to comply, you will instead try to force Actinic to change? Surely with both you can only ask nicely? And it is Google's non-compliance that is really the issue here.

The parsing engine is the heart of Actinic. It builds the static html pages that make Actinic such a successful product.

What makes you think I'm cross - I was actually laughing at the twisted logic that says - 'If Google is non-standards compliant, and I want to use Google, the rest of the world needs reshaped to fit in with Google's noncompliance.'

[Orchid]

I did ask nicely - note the word "please"

and has been suggested in the wish list thread that we've now been redirected to all that would be needed is that comments be structured as follows and then the compacting could ignore them.

<!-- * any comment with asterixis would remain after compacting * -->

Though browsers and bots are suppossed to ignore tags they don't understand - they are still actively discouraged by the W3 because Proprietary tags were one of the worst aspects of the browser wars.
This is shown by the fact that W3 Validation fails for Actinic sites. Validation is important for it's own sake and not simply for Google.

[jont]

I was actually laughing at the twisted logic

Indeed. Even the mighty Microsoft have finally given up on trying to make the world think their way. Everyone playing together is a better game for everyone to be in.

[Orchid]

And everyone playing together is why standards are important.

[NormanRouxel]

Bill - Why on earth would it cripple actinic to present it's proprietary tags like this

<!-- Actinic:BASEHREF VALUE="http://www.sitename.co.uk/acatalog/" FORCED=0 -->

That's an excellent suggestion.

Actinic could easily be changed to detect <!-- actinic: **** --> and pass such code through to the generated pages. Likewise the Perl scripts that look for these tags could instead detect the new format. One for V9 perhaps (unless such proprietary stuff is no longer needed there).

These <actinic:XXX ...> tags can even affect the browser. I found that I needed to add e.g. </Actinic:BASEHREF> after them in order for Netscape to parse some following code correctly.

[Orchid]

Update to the original problem - I've done some further testing. What Google's Site Related Keyword algorithm actually does when it hits a tag it doesn't understand is skip the line. As Actinic produces compacted code this means the whole page is skipped.

Hence by not compacting the page you can get Google to parse the page and pull out the keywords.

If you do a lot of adword campaigns this will save you money by increasing your Quality Score.

Downside is that it might increase your bandwidth costs - it's a trade off but knowledge is power!!

[Bruce]

Hi,

I have passed the suggestions here to the development team.

Kind regards,

[jont]

Hence by not compacting the page you can get Google to parse the page and pull out the keywords.

Nice one Wayne.

[zmagyar]

These <actinic:XXX ...> tags can even affect the browser. I found that I needed to add e.g. </Actinic:BASEHREF> after them in order for Netscape to parse some following code correctly.

Actually that's a bug in the new designs (probably it went wrong when v7 templates were converted for v8). It should look like

<actinic:XXX .../>