Have you noticed there is no innovation happening in websites in past decade?
The only breakthrough innovations is happening in mobile space like SnapChat, Instagram, Robinhood etc.,
The internet is supposed to be more than a wordpress themes and backlinks. It’s frustrating to see Google still considers age old methods to rank websites. It’s a never ending cycle of mediocre readable content and keywords. 90% of visitors never get past through first page. We would assume Google is dynamic with search results, instead of relying on irrelevant tactics for ranking.
For example, try this experiment select any keyword with the word “quotes” I bet you will see brainyquote in first page no matter what. Which seems like a mediocre website with full of ads and questionable backlinks. We created a web app which is an innovative, modern and dynamic quote presenter with advanced search functions and more. However as we used React and dynamic ajax methods. As a results Google just sees a blank space instead of content. Server side side rendering seems like an expensive band aid that results in slower website.
Now I understand why next biggest popular product is always in mobile space not in websites, because of Google outdated decades olde page rank system. Now I guess we just have to move on and forget about Google and SEO, work on mobile app spending our time and resources there.
The first thing to remember here is that Google aims to return the best results for the person carrying out the search, so it’s perhaps not surprising that a long-established, tried and tested site tends to rank very highly.
I’m not a fan of Google in general, but you really can’t fault them on helpfulness when it comes to SEO. They produce detailed guidelines on how to give your site the best possible chance of success in search rankings, and it’s really little more than HTML best practice.
Start by ensuring your page is well-structured, using semantic elements and the correct hierarchical order of headings. Don’t present text as images; use “real” text with a background image instead. Not only will that be accessible to search engines, but it will also be much more accessible to human visitors. Because here’s the real crunch, IMHO: if search engines are struggling with your site, there’s a good chance that some of the humans you are trying to attract will also struggle.
Search bots are not the only technology that may struggle with JS content; assistive technology such as screen readers may also have problems. (I understand that more modern versions do better, but because of the cost of the software, many users are still reliant on older versions.) Presenting text as images excludes not only those using screen readers, but also those with visual problems who need to enlarge the text size. If the text is embedded into a background image, that then excludes those with difficulty reading text against an image. Use real HTML text, with a CSS background image, and all those users are catered for. (Background images can be turned off, if the user wishes - so remember to use a suitable foreground / background colour combination to cater for this.)
As I said, Google aims to return the most useful results for the person searching, so following best practice is in everyone’s interest here.
