Website usability interfere with rankings?
Do search engines care about the usability of your web pages? Does it make a difference whether your web pages are easy to navigate or not?
A recent patent application from Yahoo indicates that search engines might take a look at your web page design. The document includes a long list of factors that search engines can consider to determine the usability of a web page.
Why can usability be important to search engines?
The patent application contains a short paragraph that explains why search engines might consider the usability of web pages:
“It can be important to make web pages easy and pleasing to use, which can be particularly important for web pages it is desired to monetize. [...].
If such web pages are not easy and pleasing to use, the money-making potential of those web pages can be jeopardized. One conventional indication of whether a web page is easy and pleasing to use is called ‘clutter.’”
Web pages with good usability usually have a higher conversion rate than cluttered web pages. Web pages with good usability often have a higher quality than other web pages and search engines try to return high quality web pages in their search results.
The HTML code of your web pages must make a good impression to search engines. If search engines find that your web pages don’t have the right content then these pages cannot get high search engine rankings.
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