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It's the end of the year ... just about ... and, if you haven't started already, you should soon be thinking about sketching in some plans for the year ahead. Steve and I have already identified a few areas that we want to target with a couple of new websites and we'll be starting work on those in the next few weeks.

So what are you planning for the coming year and how will the search engines affect those plans?

Over the last few years there have been some incredible benefits - in both monetary and search engine terms - for anyone who has factored blogs into their business plans. They've been incredibly useful and over the last couple of years I've been a great evangelist for blogs but perhaps their usefulness is about to wane.

You see, Microsoft have just applied for a patent that involves blogs and it's potentially bad news for blogs. Included in the preliminary text for the patent application is this line:

'Search engines are increasingly implementing features that restrict the results for queries to be from blog pages.'

Now why would they want to do something like that? Obviously it's because of the increase in the amount of garbage that you find on blogs. Search engines - even Microsoft's - want to deliver the best results they can and they're beginning to realise that they're just not able to do that because of all the rubbish that's turning up on blogs.

And Microsoft may not be the only one out there who is concerned about the quality that might be found in blogs. Even though Google hasn't said anything on the subject Steve and I have noticed that some of our blogs aren't performing as well as they once did in Google.

Now you might think the problems we're experiencing might be due to other factors and there's no doubt that they could be but these blogs all contain original content, are updated regularly and have little or no competition from other sources yet they're not doing as well as they once did and the sites that are doing better than our blogs are regular websites and not blogs.

It's certainly hard to provide anything but anectdotal evidence to support that position but it's certainly been enough for us to not factor in any new blogs in our plans for the coming year. And we might even avoid using a blog script as a content management system.

While Steve's plans for the coming year are for normal websites, built with straight HTML, I'm now thinking seriously about one of my planned sites. While it isn't going to be a blog, as such, it was going to use WordPress as a content management system. The use of WordPress might be an obvious filter that search engines could implement to sift out what they think of as blogs from ordinary websites and that's the last thing I want to see happen to a site that has the potential that this one does.

Of course if you're planning on building out a site that has the potential to become huge then content management systems can make life so easy but if the search engines are going to start identifying straight HTML sites as perhaps being more ‘legitimate' than those that use scripts to manage their content you could be shooting yourself in the foot.

And really I sometimes do wonder about content management systems ... they're so handy but do you really need them? If you're a beginner then they do take a lot of the effort out of designing a site structure that provides easy navigation for users and can handle the growth of the site. If you've been around for a while then you should be able to handle site structure and scalability without the need for a content management system.

Obviously it's going to take a little more work but then if that's what it takes to make the top of the search engine results pages ...

But at this stage who knows what's going to happen with the search engines in the year ahead? It's all just something to think about and keep in your mind as you go ahead and plan for the year ahead because, once you're committed to a design for a big site it's not so easy to undo what you've already done and rebuild it.

We'll certainly be thinking about it in the time between now and when we start building those sites and you can be sure that we're going to be watching what some of the genuine experts are saying about it too. We'll also be doing a little experimenting with a couple of our blogs just to see if they really are being seen as a little less important than a couple of our comparable sites that are straight HTML.

If you have the capacity to do some testing then I'd suggest that you try it because there's nothing better than first-hand experience when it comes to how the search engines work for your sites.