ergophobe - 3:24 pm on Feb 7, 2013 (gmt 0)

Devil's advocate hat going on and me wandering slightly off topic to respond *only* to this castoff statement by Ted:

After all, why should one site be rewarded for being able to use a plug-in when another is more technically challenged but has great content?

Because, assuming they both have great content and links and to a machine that still isn't all that smart it's not at all clear which one has better information...

1. The URL is part of the UI and an intelligent URL structure does indicate quality in the same way that having logically structured pages does.
   
2. Quality is subjective. You might think good grammar is an indicator, I might think readable URLs are a good indicator and Bob might think getting the video frame rate right is an indicator of quality ;-) So I might reasonably count all of those, and all are, from a given perspective "technical" issues (as of this moment, I will henceforth consider myself a "language technician" when copyediting).
   
3. The technically challenged are constantly being penalized. Why should this be different? Lately I've been doing "first look" SEO analyses of sites for a firm who gets a lot of bites from people at the bottom of the chain. 75% don't even canonicalize their domains. Sure, Google *tries* to work things out for you if your site is accessible and www.example.com and example.com, but they are plagued with the most basic dupe content issues, things that I thought most webmasters had solved a decade ago. Google would *prefer* not to penalize you for being technically incompetent, but they aren't necessarily that smart yet.