More than fifteen years after the internet began to be a mass-market experience there are no longer any excuses for links that don’t work, or pages that do not have titles.

 Yet in a recent survey of the top 500 FTSE companies, Sitemorse still found well over two per cent of web pages that did not have a title, and well over 3 per cent failing basic functional tests.

 Since a company’s website is the first port of call for virtually all users nowadays, missing images and poor links can give a poor initial impression. After all, if an organisation’s  website is put together in a slapdash fashion, what does that say about the business itself? 

Google and other search engines may not properly catalogue or index a site that contains HTML errors, and that can mean less users finding what they are looking for – and in the case of e-commerce sites, perhaps a failure of sales and the consequential hit to the company’s bottom line. 

Around a quarter of users, according to recent research, will duck out of an online sale because of technical issues. A massive 82% of consumers said that if a business’ website performed badly it would dissuade them from buying goods from that organisation on the web – or even in- store.

Yet recent Sitemorse benchmarks show many online retailers either do not know, or choose to ignore this, with some of the best-known high street names performing very badly on quality issues.

Changes at Google mean that stale website content will be penalised – and that means organisations wanting a high ranking on Google may need to change their ways.

The latest  update is designed to analyse whether a person wants up-to-date results or historical data.And Google estimates the alterations to its core ‘algorithm’ would make a difference to about 35% of searches.

The update to improve the “freshness” of results builds on a large-scale update made to the underlying infrastructure of Google’s core indexing system in August 2010 known as Caffeine, making it easier for Google to keep its index up to date and to add new sources of information.

Web analysts have described the changes as “huge”. The last big update to the Google algorithm, known as Panda, affected only 12% of searches.

Google Panda was built through an algorithm update that used artificial intelligence in a more sophisticated and scalable way than previously possible. Human quality testers rated thousands of websites based on measures of quality, including design, trustworthiness, speed and whether or not they would return to the website.

Google’s new Panda machine-learning algorithm, made possible by and named after engineer Navneet Panda was then used to look for similarities between websites people found to be high quality and low quality.

Many new ranking factors have been introduced to the Google algorithm as a result, while older ranking factors like PageRank have been downgraded in importance.

One thing is clear; those websites featuring good, regularly-updated copy will be rated more highly by Google. And those that do not will be less visible on the search engine.

If you think every move you make online can’t be watched, you could be living in Cloud Cuckoo-Land, as this scary video from Privacy International shows: what did you do at lunchtime?

Government communications are not all the same, and Sitemorse have the evidence to prove it with their latest survey covering the major UK central government websites.

Leading the way is the Health and Safety Executive site which scored a vigorous 8.97 out of a possible ten marks for function, accessibility, code quality and performance.

The sprightly HSE website has stayed at the top  but other major government departments did not fare so well.

Skidding off the road and falling 272 places since the last Sitemorse survey with an overall score of just 1.09 is the Department for Transport (DfT). The DfT came bottom of the list this time.

Top websites in the survey also included HM Revenue and Customs, the UK Atomic Energy Authority, and NI Direct, the official government site for Northern Ireland citizens which aims to make it easier to access government information and services.

But well-known names at the bottom of our table also included the Scottish National Party and the Driving Standards Agency (part of the aforementioned DfT). Its mission may be Safe Driving for Life, but the DSA’s web standards seem to be falling, and from a position around half-way down the table it has fallen almost to the bottom.

A pet hate for web users is a slow-loading site, so no cigar for the UK Legislation, Department for Regional Development and the National Assembly of Wales websites, obviously a law unto themselves and the worst performers this time.

And while on the subject of the law, since it’s against the disability discrimination act to have a website which isn’t accessible, you might be surprised to find that no less than 20 of the government sector sites tested failed basic accessibility checks on every page. Worst offenders here included the UK Border Agency, Royal Mail regulator the Postal Services Commission, and Get Safe Online, which advises users how to protect themselves from identity theft. More about this and other Sitemorse surveys on their website.