Is Google now too unreliable to bother optimising for?

[colin_h]

I'd be very interested to know if anyone still thinks they can 'optimise' their web pages with Google in mind. IMHO Google has been so unreliable over the past 12 months or so that when I put a page together I only think of Yahoo and MSN where my layout optimising is concerned and my readers where content is concerned.

Does anyone think that this 'unreliability' may be viewed as a positive 'unpredictability' by Google HQ?

Maybe Google would sacrifice a bit of search result relevancy for in favour of ridding itself of webmaster interferance ...

All the Best

Col :-)

[kidder]

Optimise for the user first...As they say

[Gimp]

We have done zero optimizing for google. We put up web pages with content designed for the user. Our site saw some drop in visitors for a while but it is now performing better than is has historically.

We will continue making clean pages designed for the visitor. That is what the search engines want and they will work on finding those pages.

[annej]

What do you mean by 0 optimizing? For example do you make sure your page title has important key words from the article or other information on the page? If so you are optimizing.

Basic good sense optimizing like that won't hurt with Google and it might help.