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Comment by Kiro | Hacker News Reader

It's nothing black hat going on here. W3schools is just using wildcard subdomains and whenever people are accidentally linking to wwww.w3schools the Google bot picks it up.

I love W3schools btw. Got me into coding and I still use it for reference. Hate me all you want but I'm tired of people bashing them for no reason.

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W3schools is a cancer. They have old, outdated information. Their website, their content, and their business model is all a throwback to last decade. They sit atop of the search results, doing nothing, and raking in cash while providing a poor service. Meanwhile, their very dominance sucks all the oxygen (page views, ad dollars) away, ensuring that better competitors can't grow.

What redeeming feature do they have? If you aren't easy to use, accurate, comprehensive, or responsive...how good a reference site are you?

I've yet to see anyone bash W3schools for no reason, but I see plenty of people defending them for no reason.

Is there another alternative out there? I feel like the mozilla developer docs are the only thing that comes to mind offhand.

You answered your own question. MDN has far better docs.

Tizag, which is second in the results, is a pretty good resource.

"Tizag, which is second in the results, is a pretty good resource."

Their Perl tutorial set is pretty terrible. They call it "PERL" (it's Perl), they believe the latest stable version is 5.10 (it's 5.14) and the code samples are simply awful.

http://www.w3.org/standards/ of course.

htmldog: http://htmldog.com/ is good resource. i know this is a far stretch but they're some really good books out there for quick referencing...i know it's not as fast as opening a new tab, but some of the books: "the definitive guides" are great.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_sq_top?ie=UTF8&#...

i generally write code at my desk more so then on the go, so i always have those books handy

http://javascripture.com is a pretty quick reference for just javascript. http://dochub.io has MDN docs plus some others in a nice, consistent view.

The Opera Web Standards Curriculum, though it isn't a reference, is a fantastic resource for beginners.

Unfortunately they seem to have moved it onto w3c's domain and now it looks completely awful: http://www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/Main_Page

w3schools has a lot of misinformation...

http://w3fools.com/

In case you missed it, in the original post, I included a link to a JSBin containing many of the subdomains:

http://jsbin.com/upamof/edit#html,live

Those are not accidental. No one types "www.jigsaw". That's intentionally affiliating the URL with the word "jigsaw" that comes from the W3's validator. Look at the other subdomains. Those can't be accidents. It's not a wildcard thing at all.

http://foobar.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_replace.asp

http://sdfaxdds.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_replace.asp

That looks like wildcard DNS to me. The question is where the linkbacks are coming from. It is possible w3schools is creating those themselves, in which case that does seem like unethical SEO tricks. But if not, well, they can't be responsible for how people link to them.

Oh, I know that wildcard subdomains are valid, but it's simply not possible for people to type these subdomains (http://jsbin.com/upamof/edit#html,live) by accident.

My opinion is that they're trying to use technically-allowable but questionable methods to bypass the fact that people are 'blocking' them from search results.

How would people be mistyping "www" as "ww1"?

Looks around guiltily - I still use their site too when I need something quick and I know they have it. Sure, some of the info is old. But some of the stuff doesn't change and is just as relevant now as it ever was. If they come up first in a google result and it's for a query I know they have the answer to, you're darn right I'll click it :)

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