OK, maybe it’s an old topic, but it warrants a revisit- do search engines care whether your website is beautiful, or if looks like it’s been beaten to death with the ugly stick?
In real terms search engines do not “see” websites. What they read or trawl through when a spider/bot/crawler visits the site is the source code. However, they don’t pay attention to everything in that code- blocks of script, for example are skimmed over.
To get a good idea of what a search engine crawler sees use Mozilla’s Firefox web browser and install the web developer toolbar (many SEO’s use this). Turn off all styles, images and script- this will reveal the on-page content and links. Next view the source code and take a look at the page title, and meta tagging. These are the main components that a search engine pays attention too, for each page.
Now, compare what the search engine sees with what you see when you visit a page of a site you think is really ugly- then do the same with a good-looking site page. See much of a difference? Probably not, and that’s why search engines really don’t care what a site looks like.
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