PE is good for SEO!
The PE here is progressive enhancement, the better looking sibling of graceful degradation. Progressive enhancement and graceful degradation are common topics in design and accessibility circles, but these are just as important to SEO as well. These techniques are often used along with advanced technologies like JavaScript, Ajax and Flash, but are even applicable to basics like application of CSS.
Let’s start with some basics…using neither of these means that visitors or search engines may come to your Web site and see blank pages not a good presentation and akin to slamming the door in someone’s face.
Graceful degradation was a step to overcome this, where sites were designed for the latest browsers and technology, but were also made to degrade gracefully, hopefully delivering most of the content to the visitor, or at least informing the visitor that he or she may not be getting everything. This was meant to make for a nicer, friendlier Web experience. An overly simple example is the use of noscript tags for JavaScript functions to at least inform the visitor that JavaScript was necessary, rather than leaving the person clicking on something with no result or whatever affects that apparently wasn’t working.
Graceful degradation might be seen as being focused more on the developer than the end user. Progressive enhancement though is the opposite, developing for the lowest-common-denominator, and then progressively building on top of that. PE has delivery of content at the forefront, with presentation and the bells and whistles as added enhancements.
So why is PE so good for SEO? Well, simply put, search engines are rather limited in their abilities. Sure, they may have patents to their names, highly complex algorithms directing them, supported by multimillion-dollar data centers and the most advanced computing technology, all backed by Ph.D.s in various flavors and more engineers than us average folk could ever imagine, but their spiders are pretty much limited to following simple HTML links from page to page.
Without progressive enhancement, many sites add lots of great interactive functionality at the expense of cutting search engines off from the rich content on the pages.
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