Continuing from yesterday …

Question: Will Webmaster Tools ever give us an option to “disassociate” from sites that link to us? This feature exists in Yahoo’s Site Explorer, but not Webmaster Tools.

Matt Cutts: So far because we work really hard to make it so that one site can’t hurt another site, we haven’t really offered this. It’s something that people have suggested and we’ve thought about though. Part of the challenge would be if a site owner wanted to disassociate a bunch of links from their site. If you have a ton of links pointing to your site, scanning all of them would get really tiring. So that’s a challenge, and since we haven’t seen a need for it yet, that’s why we haven’t offered it yet.

Agreed. This would be a waste of time for a Webmaster as it is more “busy work” and as Matt says, would be “really tiring.”

Question: If my website has an extremely large number of pages, like Amazon.com, should I include every single URL that I want indexed in my XML sitemap? If not, how should I go about populating my XML Sitemap?

Wysz: Feel free to use your Sitemap to list all of your pages… that’s what it’s for. However, if you have many duplicate URLs for the same content, then you may want to only list your preferred versions of the URLs in your Sitemap.

Question: Until recentley (the last six months or so), a high ranking was achievable by submitting articles to article directories (providing they were 40%-60% unique), it no longer seems to be the case. Have links from article sites been de-valued?

Matt Cutts: In my experience, not every article directory site is high-quality. Sometimes you see a ton of articles copied all over the place, and it’s hard to even find original content on the site. The user experience for a lot of those article directory sites can be pretty bad too. So you’d see users landing on those sorts of pages have a bad experience.

If you’re thinking of boosting your reputation and getting to be well-known, I might not start as the very first thing with an article directory. Sometimes it’s nice to get to be known a little better before jumping in and submitting a ton of articles as the first thing.

What Matt is saying is very true: If you want to be an authority, you don’t want to try and build up your authority through free article directories. Market yourself in other ways first, and then submit to article directories. Keep things at a minimum, however, and don’t go overboard.

Question: Are .gov and .edu back links still considered more “link juice” than the common back link?

Matt Cutts: This is a common misconception–you don’t get any PageRank boost from having an .edu link or .gov link automatically. Hah John, I beat you to it! If you get an .edu link and no one is linking to that .edu page, you’re not going to get any PageRank at all because that .edu page doesn’t have any PageRank.

JohnMu: We generally treat all links the same – be it from .gov or .edu or .info sites.

According to recent testing, this is fact – .edu and .gov links don’t pass any more PageRank or authority than other sites of equal value.

Question: In Webmaster Tools, you’ve recently started listing the sites that 404s are coming from. Many of our 404s are from sites that ceased to exist months (sometimes years) ago. How long does Google hold onto 404 errors?

JohnMu: If the crawl error sources do not exist any more, I wouldn’t worry about them — they’ll generally go away on their own over time. Having them there does not negatively impact your site’s crawling, indexing and ranking.

It generally takes 5-8 weeks for URLs to be removed.

Question: In addition to a XML Sitemap, does it make any sense to have also an HTML Sitemap on the same website? Does an HTML Sitemap helps improve the rating?

JohnMu: A HTML sitemap file can help search engines, especially those that don’t use XML Sitemap files. Also, the 404 widget in Webmaster Tools (which you can place on your 404 pages) will use “/sitemap.htm” and similar files to help users to find the content they’re looking for. So yes, I would recommend making HTML sitemap files, however I’d focus on the user and not the search engines.

I disagree. Any search engine that can’t read an XML isn’t a search engine you should worry about. In fact, Google is really the only engine we optimize for currently. I see no need for an HTML Sitemap for SEO purposes.

Question: Suppose my website supports English and French. Should the English version of a particular page and the French version have different URLs? Any other best practices for multi-lingual site architecture?

Matt Cutts: If you can afford it, I would do domain.com and domain.fr. If that’s not possible, I would consider doing en.domain.com and fr.domain.com. If that’s not possible, then domain.com/en and domain.com/fr can work. In webmaster tools, you can geographically target a site (and I believe parts of a site such as fr.domain.com), which will help as well.

It should be stated here that if you have both English and French versions of your site, even though it is the same content, just in different languages, it will NOT be counted as duplicate content.

Question: We recently went through a rebranding of our company name. The old domain name was successful in page ranking, however the new domain name has terrible page ranking. Will doing 301 redirects transfer the link equity from the old domain to new domain?

Answer: This is a pretty common question, so we actually did a blog post about it recently. In short, 301′s are the best way to retain users and search engine traffic when moving domains.

Question: What weightage is given to the links from social networking sites and blogs?

Nathan J: I would treat social sites and blogs the same as any other site.

There is discussion that links from social networking sites are less valuable than traditional types of links.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 at 8:05 am and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.