Archive for November 10th, 2008

November
10

Google Webmaster Chat Wrapup Pt. 7

… it finally comes to an end …

Question: How does Google view content that is placed in divs that are hidden/display none until a user does something? These are also good places to stuff SEO content that a user may never see. What is best practise from Google’s point of view?

Wysz: I’ve addressed this question in the Google Webmaster Help Group here:

http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/browse_thread/thread/b2d09046ab4d5ed/

And here:

http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/browse_thread/thread/5d31cc395fe20b64/

What is boils down to is intent:
If it’s there for the user, you’re probably safe. If you’re trying to deceive search engines… that’s risky. :)

Question: Duplicate content is always penalized by search engines.
Then what is the reason that duplicate news content spread across many sub-domains from yahoo.com and many other popular sites does not gets penalized?

JohnMu: As far as I know, none of the search engines penalize duplicate content — they just ignore the duplicates.

Question: I have reworked a site. I have deleted all of the pages with nasty code. Some of the pages still appear as “not found” by web crawler, even though no links point to the deleted pages. Are they held in a cache? How do I delete?

JohnMu: It generally just takes a while for things to clear out — so I wouldn’t worry about it or try to manually remove them.

Question: How many chained 301 redirects does Google not “like”?

Nathan J: It’s ok to chain a few together; I would avoid doing a whole bunch, like 20 or 30. :)

JohnMu: As far as I know, the HTTP 1.0 standard allows for a maximum of 5 redirects for a URL. That said, search engines might treat it in different ways, so I’d recommend reducing the redirects to a minimal number.

Question: I have a folder (used in URL path), it’s name includes a hyphen, which I read was not friendly for google.

JohnMu: Hyphens and underscores are fine :-) . If you do decide to rename something, I’d recommend making sure that you use 301 redirects appropriately.

Question: I have reported sites that clearly have paid links (e.g. the backlink page says “Advertising” above the link), but Google does not seem to take action. Why would that be the case?

Kaspar aka Guglarz: While paid links and spam reports are being taken very seriously by Google, the results may not be seen immediately for users or even not at all. This does not mean no action is being taken on the offending sites. Also, the TLD of the sites should not be a factor being taken into account. For this reason reporting both, web spam and PageRank passing link selling makes sense and contributes in an important way to the quality of Google’s index.

Question: How often does your search algorithm change?

JohnMu: We change the algorithms all the time – last year we had over 450 changes.

Question: Is it still worthwhile to buy links from good quality, niche directories?

Wysz: Buying links which pass PageRank is not something that we recommend.

Question: Does Googlebot follow the information given on the last modified headers? Does it look at E-tags?

JohnMu: Hi Fer, we do take a look at the lost modification headers. You can spot that in your server’s logs – it should show a 304 response code (“not modified”). That said, many sites are set up in a way that return 200 even for pages which haven’t changed.

Question: How many times a year do you update a site PageRanking?

Matt Cutts: PageRank is re-computed all the time (different PageRanks every day). But we update the toolbar PageRank 3-4 times/year.

Question: Does Google prejudice a link based on having a parameters after URI (e.g. a tracking code)?

Nathan J: Sometimes Googlebot has a hard time crawling pages with dynamic urls that have a ton of parameters. It’s a good idea to keep them to a minimum.

Question: Should I be using hyphens instead of underscores in my URLs to improve a page’s rank?

Matt Cutts: For the time being, I would recommend still using hyphens instead of underscores. If you’re already using underscores and that’s working fine for you and your rankings, it’s not worth switching. But if you’re doing a new site, then I would go with hyphens.

Question: Does link: gives exactly the number of back links to a site?

Wysz: The link: operator only shows a sampling of links to a site, so it may not show all of the links that Google knows about. To find more information about backlinks to your own site, we give verified site owners more information about backlinks in Webmaster Tools.

Question: Do the verification codes for Webmaster Tools have to remain intact after the first verification or can you just remove them once it’s done?

Wysz: We do recheck for those codes periodically to make sure you are still the site owner. So you’ll want to leave that code in place as long as you want to use Webmaster Tools.

Anonymous: Can my site be penalized if I use rel=”nofollow” too much?

Kaspar aka Guglarz: No, you run no risk of an impact on your site’s rankings if you use the attribute

Question: Thoughts on SE Rank Checking software? Are you against them? Would you purposely disable them?

JohnMu: I generally believe that rank checking software doesn’t make much sense anymore (not to mention that they’re against our Terms of Service and could result in us blocking your IP address). We use a lot of personalization and geotargeting in our search results – so what ranks high for one user might not rank high for others. It doesn’t really help you much to know a “ranking number” if you can’t tell how far this ranking is actually something that the majority of your users are likely to see.

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November
10

Google Webmaster Chat Wrapup Pt. 6

still continuing …

Question: Are subdomains considered entirely separate entities if they have no links from the parent domain. e.g. if widget.example.com has no links from www.example.com, is it on its own in terms of reputation, or will it rank through association alone?

JohnMu: We treat each URL separately. That said, if you have www and non-www versions of your site, I’d recommend setting a preferred domain and setting up a 301 redirect. Also, sometimes it makes sense to add both your www and non-www versions in Webmaster Tools so that links for both versions are known (and shown). Susan recently covered that in a blog post.

Question: Can you tell me how Google decides whether to include video on the first page of the SERPS or not? Views? Links? Age? Relevance? What’s the most important?

Matt Cutts: I think relevance is always the top-level answer, because we want the best information (be it search results, videos, or even ads) to come up highly. And relevance for each property will vary–for ads it might be clickthrough, and for video it might be different signals.

Question: You claim that you can identify original content and RSS scrapers, but still why scrapers are ranking better for certain keywords?

Wysz: We do our best to identify duplicates and identify the best URL for a set of content. There are a couple of ways you can help us out with this. In your content, if you’re providing articles or other information that may be syndicated across other sites, include a full link (not just a relative link) back to your site so you can more easily be identified as the originator of the content. And if you find that a scraper site is spamming Google’s search results, please submit a spam report via Webmaster Tools.

Question: What is the minimum time a webmaster should wait before re-applying for a reconsideration & how does a webmaster know that his request has actually been seen by someone.
Kaspar aka Guglarz: The turnaround time for reviewing reconsideration requests is usually very fast, it actually can be as quick as 24 hours. However, the results of it can kick in after awhile. Please keep in mind that once a site has lost Google’s trust, rebuilding it can take some time. If you have applied for a consideration and received a confirmation via email, give it some time first. If your site is positively Google webmaster compliant, try again after a week or two, if there is no change in the SERP’s. However, please keep in mind that if your site has been hacked cleaning it up AND fixing the server/site can be time intense and needs to be done accurately, in order to prevent the problem from happening again.

Question: Will it make any difference between a shared IP and a dedicated IP on SEO or search results, as opinions are divided on this aspect?

JohnMu: Most of the web is on shared IP addresses, so it doesn’t make much sense for us to give those on dedicated IP addresses any advantages. That said, if your server is struggling with the load of your website, it might make sense to move to a dedicated server that helps to make sure that your users are happy when visiting your website.

Question: If I 301 redirect a well-ranked page to a new domain with the exact same content, will all of the rankings be replaced with the new domain once it has been indexed? How long after indexing can we expect the swap? And is the same thing true for 302s?

Wysz: If you’re moving from one URL to another (even if it’s on a different domain), ranking signals can be passed via a 301. A 302 is used for temporary redirects, so this is less likely to transfer ranking signals.

Question: I have 2 sites, one is domain.com and the other one is domain.au. They share a lot of their content, is there a way to keep the content on both sites without blocking it on either, while ensuring they only show on their respective geo locations?

Maile Ohye: It’s helpful that you have separate TLDs. While you can’t “ensure” that your content shows only to certain geolocation, you can use some of our features to help. Here are more resources in case you missed them:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/08/how-to-start-multilingual-site.html

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/10/better-geographic-choices-for.html

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/where-in-world-is-your-site.html

So for Australia, domain.au will help with targeting and Webmaster Tools will not be needed.
For other areas — say Canada, you can use geolation in Webmaster Tools for canada.domain.com or www.domain.com/ca or www.domain.com/canada.

Question: Duplicate content – www. and non www. – I understand the best practice is to have a perm redirect for the non www to the www. some appear to get away with it and rank high, others dont –
Duplicate content agn – domainname.co.nz and domainname.com?

JohnMu: Doing a redirect or not doing one does not significantly impact your site’s crawling, indexing or ranking in Google. I’d still recommend doing that though – otherwise it can confuse users to see different domain names for the same content. If you have a local (.com.nz) and a global (.com) site, then I would recommend using separate content for them (since there are going to be different users) — but I wouldn’t worry too much about it if you have the same content at the moment.

Question: A site has lost sitelinks. No significant changes were made to site architecture, e.g. menu templates. Overall public PR has actually increased. Suggestions as to how to keep dynamically generated sitelinks? How often are they recalculated?

Nathan J: Sitelinks are dynamically generated – more info.

Question: 1000′s of junks sites are spamming Google index & Googlers still find time to penalize or ban more genuine sites. How do you plan to fight spam in longer term.

Answer: As far as how we fight spam, we can’t reveal too much. Spammers might be reading.

Question: I have been experiencing sudden drop in rankings for my sites. One day it would be on #3 and the other day it would go back to #19 or #26. Any specific reason behind this?

Kaspar aka Guglarz: Most likely, you have been accessing different Data Centers checking your rankings. As Google DC’s are being updated continuously but not all simultaneously, slight variations in the SERPs are possible.

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