Static websites are dead. How do I know? Because Google says so. Big G became popular because they were the best at providing their customers fresh and relevant content. And in doing so, they have built the biggest database in the world using our collective content. Talk about not being original! But since they have the mighty power to index content, we mortals better listen. So let’s see what type of website design they like better.

Let me share with you a mini-test that I did to validate that Google likes Web 2.0 websites better than they like static sites. I did my standard keyword research on the term “dr phil” and got 6.8 million results. That was way too many results to even contemplate ranking against. So I narrowed down my keyword to “ask dr phil” and got about 6,000 results. Clearly, this keyword was much easier to rank for.

I created two articles. I would post one article as a blog posting. I would publish the other article as a page on a static site. Both sites were about the same age. After I posted my articles, I linked to them via another Wordpress website in order to give them some juice. Thus, the only difference between the two postings was that the blog post also received a ping because it has RSS.

My result? The blog post got indexed by Google in 17 minutes. The article on the static website didn’t get indexed until a week later. So what type of site does Google love more?

Okay, so there are static sites that are still highly ranked. But if you want to get noticed quickly, go the Web 2.0 route. The easiest way that I know to create a Web 2.0 type site is by creating a Wordpress blog that you host yourself.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 1:39 pm and is filed under Website Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.