Is your HTML expired?
I was obsessing over Page Rank all day today and I was starting to think of the complete list of factors that could possibly effect your Page Rank. (Actually I’ve been trying to devise a similar system that doesn’t infringe of any patents, it’s not going well.) In any case I started looking at HTML tags and how I would process them in a Page Rank type system. One of the things I thought of was tracking the first occurrence of a tag and the last occurrence of that tag in the HTML specs. Then I started thinking about expired tags. My version of Dream Weaver is constantly trying to get me to use the strong tag instead of the b tag. It tells me that it has been depreciated. I continue to use the b tag because I have been doing to forever. But what if the Search Engine Spiders know that the latest version of HTML has depreciated the b tag? What if they now think I am an old foggie and no longer hip. (For the record I have never been hip and I’m not that old.) In all seriousness, what if the HTML tags that you use are used to somehow evaluate the amount of time that the page has existed or the quality and knowledge of the person writing the page? It would be reasonable for a Search Engine Spider to assume that a page using the b tag instead of the strong tag was written prior to the latest version of HTML. Or at least it was created by someone who is not completely up-to-date with the latest version of HTML. The logic could follow that the page that uses the b tag should be less relevant and less fresh then the same page using the strong tag. Now I have no proof of this, it was just a passing thought that I thought I’d pass along. (and scare the hell out of some old timers out there ….)
