Have you got any thoughts on the removal of the following guidlines.

* Have other relevant sites link to yours.
* Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Lots of people talking about it on the forums.

Bryn

Whilst reading through the guidelines, I came across a guideline which states; “make pages for users and not for search engines”

Do you think webmasters are still concentrating more on building their sites so they are search engine friendly rather then user friendly?

For example on http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66353 it says “using white text on white background”.

I feel that this should actually read “using text of the same colour to or very similar to the colour of the background”.

To people who understand the concepts of hidden text it is obvious that the colour is irrelevant, however, to the average person, this is not so obvious.

I understand that if we are writing for clients we shouldn’t care, but if that was 100% the case no one would even read the webmaster guidelines. Is there any way to truly know that updates are taking place or understand why after years on the first page and despite being “white hat” you might drop?

Code errors and proper coding are two different animals, Dave. Just because code “validates” doesn’t mean that it’s good code…it just means that the code validates.

Adam, the topic at hand IS W3C validate code being given weight in the Google SERPs. So now you believe Google should be subjective in ranking based on “good code”, whatever that is. Who decides “good code”? Why should a page that is potentially less relevant & important to a search term be given a extra boost in the SERPs just because it has “good code” when both display just fine for the vast majority of users?

And look at all the sites that are still “optimized for Internet Explorer at 1024 x 768 resolution” out there…it’s a problem.

Code “optimized for Internet Explorer at 1024 x 768 resolution” is smart coding IMO, as that is what the majority of users browse with. Don’t confuse “optimized for” as not displaying in other Browsers or screen resolutions.

I browse the Web all day, most days, I would guess you do to. Very rarely do I encounter a site that gives me problems due to coding, in fact, it’s extremely rare. I, like most users, couldn’t give a hoot about the underlying code, it’s the content that I and most users want.

Trust me, when the day comes, it wont be in their main SE.

Trust me again when I say, if giving *extra* points to Accessibility coding, W3C compliant code or “good code” were advantageous to Google users of their main SE, they would already be doing so.

Sorry Adam, that is not true at all. The BEST website is the one that gives the user what they want. Users could not careless if the site they are browsing has code errors, they only care that it displays in their browser. Which 99% of sites with code errors do.

Code errors and proper coding are two different animals, Dave. Just because code “validates” doesn’t mean that it’s good code…it just means that the code validates.

And your percentage guess of 99% is way off. There are a large number of browser issues with both bad and good code…webmaster boards are littered with them. And look at all the sites that are still “optimized for Internet Explorer at 1024 x 768 resolution” out there…it’s a problem.

Better coding = a better user experience and is an important part of giving users what they want, browsers displaying crappy coding or otherwise. There’s nothing in the world that can be said to indicate anything else.

This still doesn’t even take into account the single best reason for including code in an algorithm: it forces people who want to rank to learn how to code properly and build websites that are better for users.

Sorry Adam, that is not true at all. The BEST website is the one that gives the user what they want. Users could not careless if the site they are browsing has code errors, they only care that it displays in their browser. Which 99% of sites with code errors do.

Why do you think the 2 most popular browsers are displaying ‘bad code’ just fine in most cases? Let me tell you, it’s because they, like SEs, cannot afford to be fussy about strict coding.

Google cannot afford to be the slightest bit transparent in their algos so don’t expect any announcements any time soon

Also, I’m not so much assuming spammers would adapt, I’d bet money on it. History is the best predictor of future behavior.

Trust me Adam, Google will use a separate SE for accessibility and/or W3C compliance IF it becomes a meaningful factor and/or they are forced and/or their is money in it. They have a separate SE for accessibility already, so that’s a clue right there

Just as Browsers cannot afford to be too strict on coding, neither can SEs.