Shaping of the Web Around Search Engines

Search engines are best at determining relevancy of text based websites. Its simply a much easier technical problem to understand what text is trying to convey vs pictures and video when it comes to search engine technology.

Over the last several years search engines have become critical to supplying traffic to millions of niche websites across the Internet. As webmasters realized that the majority of their traffic was coming from search engines, they began to optimize for better rankings to get more traffic.

The key to getting more traffic from search engines isn't great pictures and video, but it's more text. So webmasters began pumping out short text based articles, rich with keywords and phrases in the hopes of getting more traffic from search engines.

Companies that had built beautiful (and usually slow) sites with flash technology, javascript, and lots of images were forced to either ad text to their sites or shelve them completely for a more search engine friendly site. How many times have I heard and seen SEO consultants explain to people that have spent tens of thousands on great looking websites that they are better off to scrap the site and go with a text based site? Your great looking flash site just won't perform as well as an easily crawled text based site. Why? Search engine crawlers are just much more skilled at following standard hrefs (links) and consuming text data.

The marketing folks cringe, the devs chuckle because they never liked the flashy site and told you this all along. The consultants hand over a document outlining the architectural changes to make the site more search engine friendly and the engineers go to work.

So, these are the rules of the search engine game. Its difficult to imagine the effects of search engines have had on shaping the design of websites across the Internet.

When will webmasters and engineers truly focus on building great sites for people?

Not until niche flash, video, or image sites have another traffic alternative or search engine technology advances beyond text based websites.