le_gber - 9:18 am on May 3, 2007 (gmt 0)

From Adam Lasnik interview on StoneTemple [stonetemple.com] talking about site accessibility, web standards and code cruftiness.

[...] we cannot use this in our scoring algorithms currently: There are a ton of very high quality sites, pages and sites from universities, from research institutions, from very well respected ecommerce stores, of which I won't name any, that have really crufty sites, and sites that won't validate. On some of these you can view the source and cry. And, because this is quality content, we really can't use that as an effective signal in search quality.

I know that some of you may think:
"Google is a commercial entity, why should they play a part in these issues?"
Then I would reply to you:
"Google has so much power on the internet today and they are making so much money out of 'us'. If they can have a major 'positive' impact on the web, why shouldn't they?"

Never has one single company held so much power on the net. If Google said today that standard compliant site, accessible and usable site will get a significant boost in the SERPs, how long do you think it will take for all the 'universities, research institutions, and very well respected ecommerce stores' to get their act together and have their site validate, be more usable and more accessible?

I am thinking that within 3 to 6 months, most of these would. How about corporate CMS merchant, custom built CMS, software vendors etc... How long before they all adhere to the 'standards'?

Who's coming with me to the 'plex to manifest for a significant boost to be applied to standard compliant, accessible and usable sites? :)