Google May 4th Core Update impact on Discourse forums

There’s been long-standing, totally unfounded myth that WordPress powered websites and blogs are somehow better search engine optimized than other websites. Talk to many website owners and some will tell you this. I’m not sure how this myth started but it’s out there.

And it’s totally false. Most WordPress websites are practically invisible to the world. WordPress itself doesn’t ensure a viable marketing presence. Never did. Never will. In any particular subject area plenty of sites that are successful run something other than WordPress.

I am positive that great content, and in particular a high degree of civil discourse, will ensure a high level of of quality traffic. That is, community members will continue to visit your website no matter the google juice afforded. They will also bring new community members in much better than any search optimization will.

I guess the question is of focus: do we point to technology for solving issues of relevance or to the quality of the discussion by the community? I think the latter will always win.

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This may seem logical, but according to the above discussion, it may not be the case.
If you use some technologies, features, functions, etc., which are quite slower on some devices than other websites NOT using these features, you may get penalized. There may be an argument it’s not really about some devices being slower, but about devices being slower running certain kind of websites compares to others.

According to what I understood, here, it’s mainly about infinite scrolling, and it seems Android devices are particularly bad at it, compared to running “pages” websites. So, in the end, it does seem to make some sense (I didn’t really get it at first either, but after some explanations, mainly from Falco as I remember, I think it now does make sense considering browsers like Chrome kick back some informations to Google about the browsing experience).

Is that the case? Isn’t the “fight” on the CONTENT level, all technical aspects aside (except speed)? Which indeed results in some more technically advanced sites (infinite scrolling) being at a disadvantage.

If the goal is a better placement in the results, the competition is on the CONTENT, and after this, technically wise, on the SPEED. There aren’t any classification for “technically similar” sites, or is there? (For context, I’m mainly thinking about infinite scrolling, here)

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This conversation is getting a bit circular. We’ll reopen if we have anything new to add.

See Introducing Discourse Splash - A visual preloader displayed while site assets load

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