What if Google Had to Design For Google? 207
An anonymous reader writes "Web developers increasingly grow weary of having to put so much effort into designing their sites according to the whims of the Google search engine. When the most important thing is 'getting indexed' it is increasingly difficult for web site designers to offer the simple, uncluttered user experience they'd like to. Reminiscent of the famed what if Microsoft designed the iPod box here is a humorous look at what would happen to that famed, clean, uncluttered look if Google had to design for the Google Search Engine."
The real question is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The real question is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Or - if a web page is put up on a server, and nobody is there to surf it -- does it make an impression?
Re:If nothing else... (Score:2, Interesting)
It's funny because it's true.
I have to sit through a monthly meeting with our SEO consultants reminding them why we aren't making out site look like the end product of that demo and that the technical reasons for not doing certain things haven't miraculously changed since last month.
Underscores is not SEO URL (Score:3, Interesting)
Well not to be an ass, but just in case people get the wrong idea about how to do a seo url, one needs to know that:
Google sees hyphens as dividers in URLs and body text, and ignores underscores (underscore is not considered as a divider by Google). [webrankinfo.com]
Re:The real question is... (Score:4, Interesting)
There are other techniques for promoting a website other than using Google. One way is through word of mouth. For example there is no way I would have found slashdot because of a Google search. Rather, I found slashdot because I saw a friend browsing the site. Word of mouth is actually better than Google because it builds a trust relationship. For example if you go on Google expecting to buy something, how do you know that you should trust the first, second, or even third result on the page? You don't. But if a friend recommends a website to you because of their experience with it, you immediately have more trust in that website compared to some other random website.
But as geeks, let's ignore that. After all, it involves socializing and dealing with people. Eww. Give me my Google exploits.
looks like iGoogle (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Should read: What if Google was a useless site. (Score:2, Interesting)
My previous employer got around 40% of its business online. We're talking multi-billion dollar turnover.
It's a travel company. When people search for 'beach holiday in thailand' on Google, they don't care whether they get our products or the competitions. Google doesn't care. Page-rank does care. It wants to give the searcher a set of results that talk about beach holidays in thailand.
This makes it very important to make the site attractive and accessible to the Google bot, and get it ranked highly. Sure, we can (and do) buy ads on the search result page. But $20/click for an ad adds up very fast, especially when the margins on the products are $10-20 in the first place. Generating traffic through page ranks has payback in the tens of millions.
Do we bicker about Google's metrics and pagerank? I wouldn't use the word 'bicker'. Does it make a significant difference to the business? Very clearly.
Are our products ones the public wants? Our retail establishments are market leaders in their own right. Does our website suck? Personally I think so, but we get more traffic than our competitors, and we sell more products. We do have the product, it is at the right price, but online the market is hyper-competitive, and pagerank matters.