… 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.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 11:35 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.