The Next Break in the Web
Webmasters currently face link rot as a major website maintenance problem. As we rely more on Google and other third parties for features such as hosting, ads, and content syndication what happens when some of the business relationships that are opening up content fall away or search engines reorganize and rebrand their offerings?
A few weeks back I made a post about the book being a dying format, and in that post I have a Google book snippet. Within a week that snippet was broken. I had a Google CPA ad integrated into one of my major websites and the ad went away, breaking 10% of a large site and making it look like spam.
Even some of the services that are not broke will likely be drastically different in a few years. Google maps is really open because they need marketshare, but after they become the clear market leader will they stay fairly open? How long until we have ads in everything?
A good webmaster service that would be exceptionally useful is something that scours websites and looks for broken stuff. Think a Xenu Link Sleuth for multimedia. Another would be how to guides on how we can enable interactivity without becoming too reliant on any third parties that break our sites.
Comments
I've wondered the same thing. Many of my top competitors rely on copyright-infringing embedded YouTube videos for content. If YouTube ever decides to clean up their act, these people will be SOL.
Unfortunately for me, I don't think YouTube really cares.
Great idea for a couple of new webmaster services. In addition to sites breaking I'm thinking of the many tools that rely on search engine APIs that break when the API changes.
It's great to be able to take advantage of the data or web services other's offer, but you can also become too dependent on them giving them control of your business.
By the way SEO for Firefox seems to be having issues with Yahoo at the moment. Everything is working with Google, but a JavaScript error is being thrown when you search in Yahoo
Internal Error: result.childNodes[0].childNodes[0] has no properties
Just in case you hadn't been made aware yet.
I will look into that and try to get it sorted before the month is out Steven. Thnx for the heads up.
Take a look at SevenTwentyFour.com. Their site isn't much to look at, but I used them once and had great results.
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