Now I’ve heard it all. I recently ran into a thread that was touting a cms (content management system) also known as an online web builder as being comparable to the web builder system at Webflow. We happen to use Webflow and absolutely love it as being much easier to use than for example, Bootstrap for building responsive websites. I used to say that responsive websites are the future of web design and well, now, the future is here. Because it makes perfect sense to have a website that is user friendly regardless of the screen size of your visitor and responsive websites are about doing that exactly.

So when I saw this thread naturally I was curious to try this web system and see how it compared to Webflow. I could not find any comparison at all, in fact, in my opinion, I found it to be the exact opposite of Webflow. Not only did it not seem to be able to build responsive websites it really came across to me as simply another one of those “templated” online web builder programs for people that have no idea about building a website. And as far as online web builder programs go I wasn’t very impressed. Sure I am biased but the I personally think that the online web builder program we offer at gotowebbuilder.com is a much better program with much better templates, if you are in to that kind of thing. But even then, our program is no Webflow either. And don’t get me wrong, personally I really have nothing against this program touting itself to be like Webflow, at least insofar as it is a web builder program, I just believe in something called truth in advertising.

Which leads me to my point and the title of this post. I received an email from this webbuilder program (a solicitation). And one of the bullet points they made in trying to convince me to become a paying customer was that they “Have all web servers strategically located next to Google’s main datacenter allowing your website to get better ranking on Google.” What? Since when did having a webserver close to Google have anything to do with getting better rankings in the search engine? Rankings are about relevancy and certainly a myriad of technical factors but last time I looked location of your webserver as to whether it was closer to Google or not has absolutely no merit on your ranking. Not one iota. If this was true we’d all be located next to Google. Too, I think part of the argument is that because you are closer you get crawled faster or more frequently. I don’t believe that to have any basis in truth either and even if it was true getting crawled faster or more frequently still in and of itself is not going to have anything to do with your rankings..

As far as I know, generally speaking, the only way a client website is going to get priority when it comes to search engine ranking in Google is by good, old-fashioned search engine optimization, overall relevancy for the search terms that will help you most succeed, social relevancy, and all of the technical factors that make for solid search engine marketing. And you can put a period on that.