Google is God. Don't Upset Her

In web design, like life, it isn't always obvious what's important. On my Daily Sucker page I used a site that looked terrible in the text-based browser Lynx. Here's what the e-mail suggesting the site said:

I sometimes look up web pages with Lynx, the text-only browser. Purely for speed and efficiency when I need to find information quickly, and I don't have time to wait for images to download, or in some cases, when I'm using a system with no GUI.

Now, I'm quite used to pages being a bit mangled when I visit them in Lynx, but imagine my horror when I visited powerquest.com to find out some information on hard-disk partitioning, only to be faced with this new and frightening vision of Mystery Meat Navigation.

I've always said, for a site to be totally accessible, you should be able to browse it with Lynx. If you can use it with Lynx, you can use it with anything.

Just so you understand, here's the page as it appears in the Lynx browser and here's a link to what the site used to look like so you can see it with your "normal" browser.

Here are some links to online web sites that will show you what your site probably looks like to a search engine.

Website 101 SE Simulator
summitTOOLS
SEO Tools Spider Simulator
Poodle Predictor
Spannerworks Spider Simulator

Lots of people were upset that I used such a "trivial" example for the Daily Sucker. The majority of the comments posted to the site (and the e-mail I received) said, "Who gives a sh*t about the Lynx browser? Nobody uses it." Other people said "Making your site look good in Lynx is like accessibility. I'm not selling to the blind so why should I go to the trouble of making my site accessible?"

Why? Because the most powerful Internet force known to God and man visits your web pages and looks at them just like blind people and folks who use Lynx look at them — Google.

Google is blind and reads your sites linearly — as the code is sent to the browser — and then tries to interpret what it "sees" (I like to use the analogy that it reads your site like blind people read using Braille).

Google doesn't give a left-hand, flying farkle about how pretty your page looks in Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Safari, or any other browser. Google cares about content, links to your site, ALT attributes (it seems to be a little schizo on this — there are times it cares and times it doesn't), TITLE tags, and so much more that a whole industry has sprung up trying to figure out what Google likes and dislikes. (One of the biggest arguments is over the question of whether Google likes/doesn't care about web pages that use valid X/HTML code. Google seems to like code that validates.)

Where the accessibility fundamentalists screw up is stressing accessibility as "the right thing" (or even the legal thing) to do. They would be much more effective if they would just drop the term "accessibility" and conduct seminars on how to "Google-ize Your Web Site" so your web pages show up higher in the search results and you get a higher page ranking.

Lynx is important and accessibility is important because that's how Google views the web and Google is god. Don't upset her.