I find it to be a wrong perspective. The reason being some one like me has no idea about web standards, being a economics student. If a company like google enforced strict standard compliance then i wont even be able to have people reach my web page through the search engine.

For the search engines they have to follow what the 99% of the world does. They can not try and change the world. I dont think that is their role.

How about this !! suppose a bunch of economists were discussing about money and then suddenly some one said, well from now on in this world, only those people can talk about money who understand the “theory of money supply” !!

You guys are doing a great job !! Just wanted to give you a outside the group perspective.

To clarify, PageRank does not mean “how a page ranks”. It is a part of the Google formula that takes into account the number and quality of links *to* a website. That part of the ranking formula was devised by Google co-founder Larry Page; thus “PageRank”. Unfortunately, this means that it’s often confused with the *entire* formula; had Mr. Page been Mr. AnythingElse, this confusion would likely not exist. Note that, according to Google, the ranking forumula takes into account over 101 of other factors.

> improve the readability of your code for search engine spiders

This is always a good thing, in my experience. Choked-up/clogged-up/incorrect code *can* be a problem for search engines as opposed to leaner and meaner code. From what I can see, sites coded to Web Standards could definitely rank highly for search terms if they are also optimized for those search terms.

search term: ‘Athens 2004 hyperlink policy’

Yesterday I put up a page on my website about the Athens 2004 hyperlink policy. It’s linked to twice from my (Google indexed) homepage (once with the search term in the link text, once without). I would be very, very surprised if anywhere else linked to it.

The page itself contains the search term in the title and h1 tags, and the filename, and contains Athens 2004 in two paragraphs.

It’s now top of the Google rankings for the search term described above.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=athens+2004+hyperlink+policy&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

I think this may be due to the rarity of the term itself on the internet – if you search for ‘Athens 2004 website hyperlink policy’, I’m nowhere to be found (my page doesn’t include the word ‘website’ anywhere).

I was wondering if the presence of the search term in the filename had an effect. Maybe I’ll try that tonight with ‘Athens 2004 website hyperlink policy’.

I’m not convinced that Peter Jane’s tests are wholly valid, as the ‘inbound link count’ factor may not have been triggered. Many people linking using the same anchor HTML to his intro page would be a better measure.

I don’t think there’s an SEO vs Standards bout to watch, it’s like saying Roof vs Walls.

Sorry to say this, but the SEO community has more of an image problem than a knowledge problem.

I agree that focusing solely on Google rank will get you precisely nowhere. Any site should have clearly defined, real-world aims, and everything else (search engine rank, code, design, content, functionality) should only be used in as much as it furthers those aims.

With regards to Google being more open about how it ranks pages… well, wouldn’t that just open the door to the spammers, thus crippling Google for the rest of us?

They are there to crawl the web and suggest pages that meet peoples searches, not to promote a style of coding. A page that validates perfectly and is marked up semantically isn’t necessarily more relevant to a search than one that isn’t.

To a search engine, relevancy of the content is what they are interested in, not whether the page creator used tables or not.

Semantic, Standards based design can help Search Engines crawl a site, and if you really are making good use of headings and the title (I’m not overly confident of the test done, I’m sure I saw a similar one a while ago that provided better results, more in line with what you would expect) then you are helping the rank.

Neil, standards based design won’t help with PageRank specifially, PR in an over simplified way is a measure of then number of sites linking to a page, it’s just one of the way Google ranks a page. I’m also slightly dubious that there are as many benefits to rank as have been put forward by some people. As I said above, standards based design can make it easier for your site to be crawled, and if marked up well may help rank to a certain degree, but theres a bit more to SEO than that.

And Matthew, unfortunately there already are people who take a “it works in Google” approach. There are a lot of people who get so involved with their ranking in Google, they forget about everything else it seems. A while ago when Google were making regular monthly updates, you would see huge threads on the various Search Engine forums discussing it with people moaning about how their site was high one minute, low the next. It’s where the whole thing about link exhcanges and people asking for links has come from, to try and gain PR to try and get ranked higher in Google.

Unfortunately many of these people forget that, once you have a visitor, you often then want to convert them into a customer. There are numerous storiews of people spending a lot on SEO tactics, getting a lot of traffic, but not getting the custom to go with it.
This is why a lot of other SEO’s do see that it is only a part of making a usccessful site.

To say that a semantic, valid site should automatically rank well I think is a bit of a biased view. I look at it as a bit like Accessibility. There are a good few parts of accessibility that you can cover with no accessibility knowledge. Using good markup is inherintely more accessible. But there are some other bits to it as well. SEO is like that, good design and markup is good for the search engines, but there’s a bit more to it that you can do (without needing to spam).

And as I said in the forum thread, though the way it’s come about maybe wasn’t great, I think the discussions been very worthwile and it seems like it could help the groups/areas work together better.

If any person or organisation is in a position to encourage valid and well structured markup, it is Google. People pay more attention to Google than a standards-publishing consortium. In the longer-run Google gains more from well structured content. Looking at their Google labs projects, there are implementations that rely / could be better accomplished using structured markup – like Google Sets and Google Quotes.

One of the holdbacks on these tools is the lack of well structured content out there. Anything Google can do to improve that signal, turns into better structured information that they can take advantage of to return better / more focused results to the visitor.

I’m all for semantic markup and CSS, but Google has to index the entire web, not just the parts you and I like. I don’t think it is Google’s place to skew their search engine ratings to satisfy our interest in standards. It’s a nice thought, though. Most of the talk about semantic markup and SEO seems to focus on speculations about how search engines ought to work. An H1 heading really ought to mean more than a casual reference deep into the third paragraph. That might be a more fruitful discussion with the search engine people.

I am excited by Peter Janes’ work, and the prospect of reverse engineering the actual behavior of search engines. That might be the most fruitful path to clarity, until we can convince Google and others to be more open about how they rank their pages. Above all, let’s start replacing speculation with real data. It’s about time.

First of all, I LOVE your book, Eric Meyer on CSS. I want everyone who reads your blog to know that. I linked to your book companion site as soon as I finished reading it.

I appreciate your comments. Thank you for being so professional and considerate.

I’m all for working with you and Molly (whose books I love) and Steve Krug (whose Don’t Make Me Think is required reading at our firm).

I just don’t want you and your colleagues to make some of the mistakes that others have made. Search-friendliness does not only mean having a “spiderable” web site. Being “spiderable” is only the tip of the iceberg.

For example, doorway pages (which are considered search engine spam) are “spiderable,” but they do not meet the terms and conditions set forth by the search engines.

Thanks again. And I hope to see you (or maybe be on a panel with you) at the Chicago Search Engine Strategies conference. Right in our back yard.

…We’re going to be focusing entirely on the benefits of using XHTML and CSS to show you how to improve the readability of your code for search engine spiders, maintain a good content-to-code ratio without going beyond file-size and word-count limits, and how to use CSS to mimic common image effects…

Ditto on the above kudos to Sullivan, Kaminski et al. It’s good to see there are at least a few SEOs out there who are interested in optimizing rather than spamming.