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Netscape's digg clone, Better then most

Netscape Beta launched last night, it has a similar concept to digg, but seems to be more oriented towards the masses. When I first saw it, I was impressed on how well they optimized it for search engines. Lately companies like Yahoo and eBay have been doing a terrible job of search engine optimization for their properties, but AOL did a good job with this new Netscape Beta.

Here are some things that Netscape did right:

1. They used proper title tags for each story. Instead of using a generic title for each page, they used unique titles from the articles.
   Example: MP3 Recording: Trying to cancel AOL >>Netscape.com
2. The URL structure uses words and contains no extraneous characters.
   Example: http://videos.beta.netscape.com/story/2006/06/06/matt-lauer-rips-into-ann-coulter-on-today/
3. The content to code ratio is high, since all javascript and CSS is called from separate files. You don't want search engines crawling 1000 lines of messy code when they could have crawled 100 lines of clean code.
4. They made good use of heading tags. The titles of each story are h3 tags instead of just being a standard text link.

Although the optimization was done well there is still room for some improvements:

1. Alt tags and titles should have been used more throughout the site. There are links and tags that do not have titles (tool tips) and there are images with no alt tags. By using some of these things the site would also be more section 508 compliant which is always a plus.
2. There are no meta description tags throughout most of the site. All major pages and stories should have them. Because of the large number of pages it would be tedious to do them manually, so taking the first sentence from each story could be a possible solution.
3. They can do things to help speed up how quickly the search engine robots crawl deeper into the website. One of the things that could have been done is add a link to a page with more tags in the "Hot Tags" box.

Netscape has done a lot better job with this social networking website then most others that I run across. This is most likely because they studied digg heavily while planning this website and digg is very well optimized for search engines, which is a big factor in why it shows up for a lot of different keyword searches. After a while, just like digg has, this new Netscape website should start seeing traffic from search engines, but if they make some small improvements they will see even better results. Of course, as with any social networking type of website that relies heavily on user participation, their success depends on how much visitors interact with the website.

TechEffect, June 15, 2006

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