I hadn’t thought about it this way, but this is a good overview of the influence Google’s search algorithms have on web design. After seeing this, you’ll start to see the sheer number of websites that follow the same model/design… and this can all be traced back to Google! Such ugly, cluttered designs too.
Another thing that is troublesome is that Google’s algorithm doesn’t really play nice with Web 2.0 (Ajax, Flash, etc), where the data is no longer displayed in HTML that can be parsed by a bot, but rendered on the client. I added links to my website so the search engines would find the pages underneath the Ajax navigation. With more and more sites moving in this direction, I think Google needs to seriously rethink its algorithm
(Or maybe it doesn’t… it will just force web developers to provide and maintain two versions… Bah)