is it fair by google to promote rich content? if you trying to sell something tru a site, you're better off with great visual promtion, imho, words are boring for customers. internet is mainly seeing things and clicking on it. why are flashsites punished vs rich content. is this policy a fair thing to do? a professional photographer with more 'words' on his site scores better serps than another who displays his beautiful pictures.
The Internet was original developed by colleges universities, and the government to help share research. Most search engines like to stick with that them. Content is king because the purpose of the Internet is to disperse information. People do look for products, but they will be more inclined to look at pages about the products. ex: if you sell drills on your website, you don't put information there about drills. You put information there about how to make holes. Nobody wants to buy a drill they want to make a hole. So you tell them how to make a hole, and how one of the drills you have for sale can make the job easy.
maybe...i do believe people choose on their visuals. people judge with their eyes. that's why tv is the most and best medium to advertise and the most popular. if i'm wrong....why do people choose the nicest site-layouts? why does google has it's 'website optimizer' and not a 'word optimizer'? people don't want to read, they want what they want...and want it fast. Content???that's the internet 15 years ago, you remember it?....it's all video now.
it just boils down to people search using "words" and if your site doesn't contain the right "words" it doesn't show up. I do agree that people like to see the pictures, but the search engine spiders can't see what is in the pictures they are after all computer programs. That is why alt tags and noframes noscript etc. is so importaint to use. they allow you to describe in words what your pictures flash and other content that spiders don't understand are. You can make a website that does not contain a single visible plain text word show up in the serps by using the tags I mentioned above.
There are other search engines that are much better at ranking any kind of content because they rely on webmasters to tell them what their pages should be ranked for instead of using algorythms to try to figure it out. I know this because I created one such engine and you can see how it works by visiting the link in my sig. Of course webmasters are very lazy and do not like to manually submit pages so google will always be the #1 engine because they take alot of the work out of the indexing process. Flash content will always be hard to index and rank well unless you manually explain everything in the flash content on your page somewhere. But with new generation search engines like the one I created, you can tell it what keyword you want your pages listed on and therefore be ranked for any keyword you want regardless of the content of your website pages. I personally think that google is chopping their own head off by using popularity as the defining ranking method because it cripples new sites for at least a year or more from my experience until you acquire more and better links than your competitors. I say, let the people decide. Rank new sites and new pages high for a while and if it's not what people want, it'll move down the list and the best sites will move up etc... That is how my search engine I designed works. It uses an automated voting system that ranks pages according to popularity of visits and votes. But at the same time, webmasters can submit any page to any keyword and it'll rank well right away until someone votes it down or better pages move up. Then there is a spam reporting feature that is awesome and works like a charm. So, there are in my opinion better engines out there that solve alot of the problems that major engines have but are not known and unsupported by the webmaster community because google is the one who is sending them all the traffic right now so they are forced to focus on google.
What i really meant and don't like at all, is that google wants to people act and do things do their way. They try to rule the net and shape it the way they want it to be. We do not have to obey to google, it's the opposite. They are a company and we are the possible customers, if they want to make real money in the future. Microsoft doesn't tell me how to use my windows, they don't punish me, they don't tell me what content to write in my wordpad. I received a free amount of google adwords a couple of weeks ago, to make me buy some more of their stuff in the near future. Who do they think they are...if i do something wrong my site disappears from the net, tru some new rule that pops up in their minds. What if they decide in the near future: the serps are controlled too much by (fake) inlinks...we punish now all the inlink-sites...
Rich content = informative Flash site = ?? The original purpose of SE in the first place is to help people find information they need not locating seller.
When you develop a technology that can mimic the human brain and interpret images and read text, handwriting, etc. buried in the image, contact Google. I'm sure they'd pay dearly for it and be glad to include it in the next iteration of their search engine. Until then, computer programs generally are made to read text. Is it fair? Sure it's fair. It's their search engine. They can implement it how they want. A beautiful site means nothing if people can't find it. If you want to be found I suggest you stick to primarily text based sites for now or at least make sure that the content that contains the keywords you want to rank for is text-based. Flash presents a LOT of problems for search engines. Search engines are built around the concept of indexing URLs and ranking them based on HTML. Their crawlers, indexers, ranking algorithms, utilities, all backend systems, etc. are HTML based. They've been indexing HTML for over a decade and are quite good at it. The engines are going to require a major overhaul in order to index Flash well. I heard Matt Cutts say in person at Pubcon 2008 that HTML sites will ALWAYS outrank the exact same content in Flash. And that it will be 10 years before Flash sites rank well. Even though they are getting better at indexing Flash (Adobe gave them the specs for indexing their binaries a little over a year ago) an entire site written as a Flash .swf file will get indexed under ONE URL. It's like taking a 20 page HTML site and copying all that content onto the home page. It will kill your rankings since it dilutes the focus of the page. It's always easier to make 20 different pages each rank for a different keyword phrase than it is to make a single URL rank for 20 different keyword phrases. I would suggest writing HTML based sites and then add a link on your home page pointing to a Flash version of it for those that want the "rich" experience.
This is exactly how Google works. Ever heard of the Google honeymoon? They give new sites AND new URLs a temporary boost and rank them undeservingly on page 1 (often position 1) for a day, a few days, sometimes even a few weeks depending on how people react to the new listing. If the page gets enough links while they are being artificially boosted then they'll continue to rank well going forward. But if they don't they fall way back into the SERPs where they should really have been ranking all along. Search engines that allow visitors to "vote" are subject to spam. All the companies with the big budgets will simply pay thousands of people in third world countries to search for their phrases, click on their links, vote them up, and also to click on their competitors links and vote them down. This is a bad design for a search engine IMO. Do you not think Google has thought of this? It's susceptibility to spam is the VERY reason they have not implemented it. Google will allow you to personalize your OWN results by doing this because who cares if you screw up the rankings only for yourself. But allowing people to influence the SERPS by voting sites up or down is simply a recipe for complete disaster... and would be the joy of every third world spammer. Good luck with that.
Well, my engine has been using this voting method for a long time over 5 years sinse I built it and there is not a problem yet. But I actually welcome people voting their websites up to the top. It's only spam if I say it's spam. And so what if someone votes their site to the top? Who says they don't deserve the #1 spot if they are related to the users query. Plus if they are not related to the query, they can be reported as spam and all spam submissions are checked by a real human to make sure, which is a simple method that only takes a couple seconds to see if it's spam or not and then a simple click of a button if it's not spam. If it is spam, I simply do nothing and the pages cannot ever rank again for that keyword. So if a spammer votes his pages up to #1 for hundreds of unrelated keyword, I can simply block an entire domain from showing in the results too. Spam is easy to fight. Also, the way I see it, if a big company pays India to vote their pages up in the results and they are good results, I think it's great. What's the difference in paying India to build links to rank in google and paying them to vote up the results? It's the same thing just different methods. Plus we're creating jobs for people so they can feed their families. I'm just making ranking easier for mom and pop sites who don't have big budgets. Which again creates jobs for new sites who just start out. My point is, why should you be up one minute in a "Google honeymoon" and then down to page 500 a week later, when you could be up right away and stay up if you have what people are looking for.