rros - 10:38 pm on Oct 31, 2010 (gmt 0)

Should not be pleasing visitors the primary goal of all webmasters?

Google is no different than a regular webmaster. It is a superwebmaster on steroids. A communion of highly trained and highly specialized brains that altogether peform as a webmasterborg. And when all pieces fall into place the #1 ideal search result would be in accord to the objectives of the user, the creator of the page and Google.

What I can't come to terms with is this idea of us having to convince Google about anything.

A decade ago, when first entering this field I learned the 'old school' dictate that visitors would unambiguously be told what the landing page in question was about. Every comma, every dot and every image on the landing site had to clearly communicate the essence of the page and what was the visitor's expected behaviour. Those were the days of expensive bandwidth so quickly "defining" things was called for. Should the response by the user wasn't the expected one, a door was shown. The door would take the form of narrower and narrower filtering to help such user define his/her own intent as we were aware sometimes some users would be vague. Thus, choices were provided.

Choosing the door would mean sending visitors to other sites with other clearly defined objectives, represented by the information on those new sites. And this routing would go on and on and on... forever, if possible. Or until there was an eureka moment which was the ultimate goal.

Reading this highly intelectual discussion I keep coming back to the idea that a webmaster has created a page/site that is somehow cloudy, therefore Google does not know what to make of it and I keep scratching my head how in the world this may have happened. It is like starting things at the end! The other way around.

Are webmasters not to plan a site ahead of launching by defining the #1 goal for such site and then using all resources available to deliberately delineate/shape/influence the behaviour of visitors that happen to come across these pages?

Maybe the web has gotten a lot more complex now and am out of my league :(