by Head of Search
Andrew Girdwood
Popular search engine optimisation and internet marketing blogs look set to prove that they practise what they preach by boasting designs that hold up well in the forthcoming Internet Explorer 8. Andrew Girdwood
These highly optimised blogs will avoid the need to make any significant changes to their HTML or CSS.
It is the new 'Suggested Sites' feature that is most likely to upset these stalwart bloggers as Microsoft's technology offers to take readers straight to competing blogs or, in some cases, unfamiliar download sites.
Search Engine Land
Search Engine Land's design suffers only from an out of place "About Us" menu that pops down from its location on the far right hand-side of the navigation bar. It might also be said that the top of the content area is a little too tight to the light blue separator.
Econsultancy
The newly redesigned Econsultancy website fairs equally well and has little out of place.
Marketing Pilgrim
The location of the search button in the search box may look different to users familiar with how Marketing Pilgrim appears in Chrome or Firefox but the IE8 rendering is similar to the IE7 appearance with perhaps a little issues around the border.
Search Engine Journal
Search Engine Journal also copes remarkably well with IE8. On the homepage the presentation of the AdSense skyscraper is perhaps a little more clumsy than on the site we are currently familiar with.
SEO Book
Aaron Wall's SEO Book stands up perfectly fine. The clean and friendly white style of this popular blog welcomes IE8 as warmly as every other browser.
SEOmoz
SEOmoz's careful use of stylesheets helps to prepare this popular site for Internet Explorer 8's known quirks.
Search Engine Roundtable
Search Engine Roundtable does equally as well. The "All out on the Table" bar between the premium badges and the recent table activity might be a little closer to the badges than in IE 7 but not by much.
Search Engine Watch appeared to be offline during this test.
Site Suggestions
One of Internet Explorer 8's new features is a button that suggests related sites to visitors. This button makes use of browser history and related suggestions from Microsoft. The button aims to help users discover a wider range of sites and Microsoft may well be hoping that internet users turn to it for content discovery rather than returning to Google for another search.
This test was performed on a new machine with no browser history other than the SEO and PPC blogs visited for this test.
A look at Search Engine Roundtable's Site Suggestions discovers a number of websites offering downloads of the popular Google Earth. Google Earth is free and available for download directly from Google. Users cannot see the URLs of the sites recommended by the Site Suggestion feature and so the button tempts these Search Engine Roundtable visitors away to unknown download sites.
Search Engine Land's Suggested Site options included Search Engine Guide and the charity search engine Good Search.
