Once a site reaches a certain level, there is certainly a case for not bothering with optimising it any more. Once the sheer weight of links reaches a certain point canonicalization issues, heading tags, keyword density, friendly URLs and Meta tags don’t seem to make much of a difference.
You only really need to look at supersized sites like Amazon that have hundreds of validation errors on each page, canonical issues left, right and centre and some of the worst URL and page duplication issues on the web to see that once you reach a certain size you have enough links and PageRank there is little point spending out on an SEO campaign.
I would, however, argue that input from an SEO would be useful. And while I’m sure there is a reason for having a 260 character URL for the movies category for example, surely they would be so much better with long tail results for individual movies and categories if these were cleaned up a bit.
Matt Cutts recently reviewed Google’s SEO performance in his blog and he was pretty horrified by what he found; 404 links, duplicate content, incorrect or missing Meta descriptions and titles, plus canonical issues.
While I realise this sort of thing is hard to keep on top of as a site grows as fast as Google’s has, but surely the company that pretty much wrote the rule book should be keeping tags on this?
Simon Davies
SEO Programmer
