May 2, 2014
Deadly Declarations of the Web Pathologist
Everything on the Web is dying and there is nothing we can do about it.
“TDD is dead.” — Doug Hanson, creator of Ruby
You heard it here first, folks: test-driven development is dead. It makes sense, as the lifespan of any technology is short-lived. The birth of TDD happened coincidentally the same day JavaScript was created, April 20, 1999, and its death on the day that Rails became relevant again for just about a weekend.
Lots of people were rightfully outraged at this declaration. Who is Doug Hinson and who made him the head pathologist of the World Wide Web morgue? But this is the nature of our industry — things are created, they get hyped up aka popular, and then they die. It takes bravery to not only admit it but tell the masses.
This is bravery we had only been used to seeing from Google during the Spring/Summer months of every year:
“Collaborating with people is dead.”
-Google, April 30, 2012
“RSS is dead.”
-Google, July 1, 2013
Google has had a history of putting to rest something that is so prevalent to the Web that each sunset email spurred a million blogs. SEO evangelists feared the worst when Don Hansen announced the death of TDD. They worried if Google would try to one-up him by sunsetting something even more important. This week, their fears became real:
“The URL is dead.”
-Google, May 1, 2014
URLs have become the DNA of web application development, the true identifier of what an app is in the browser and the way to share and use said app. By literally killing off the URL, Google is disrupting the Web, changing the landscape of browsing, and shifting the paradigms of application development.
So what does this mean for SEO experts like us, who thrived on pretty permalinks to determine search results included ours and our clients sites? It’s too soon to tell, but I imagine that meta keywords are going to become king again. Instead of URLs holding all the key info of our page, we’ll need to use header tags (<h1>) to make our important content bold. Also, we’ll need to resubmit our sites to search engine databanks for bot rescraping.
The exciting thing about SEO is that our industry is so fast-paced and forever changing. Instead of worrying about the latest death by the hands of Google, we need to adapt. We did it when they invented no-follow links, we can do it again.
Jenn Schiffer used to skateboard off rails, but now she develops SEO and Google-juice-strong Rales apps.
