The
head of Google's anti-spam team
Matt Cutts publicly reviewed some
web sites at the 2006 PubCon in
Las Vegas. Some statements in
these public reviews might help
you to improve your rankings on
Google and Yahoo.
Duplicate content can
create problems
One of the web sites that
Matt Cutts analyzed had a
problem with duplicate content.
The owner of the web site
had more than 20 other web
sites that offered overlapping
content and overlapping pages
on different URLs.
Search engines can find out
which other web sites belong
to you. For example, Alexa
shows the different domains
that a webmaster owns (these
are displayed in the "See
other sites owned" column
on the left side of the
traffic details page).
In addition, the web site
used the same meta description
tag on dozens of pages. This
can cause problems with search
engines.
Matt Cutts suggests to vary
the pages by adding user comments
or reviews. He said that varying
the duplicate pages by adding
a few extra sentences or by
scrambling a few words wouldn't
work.
Very big sitemaps can
cause problems
Another web site did fine
in Google but it couldn't
get high rankings on Yahoo.
The site had a very large
sitemap-type page that listed
hundreds of articles on one
page. This could trigger the
filters of some search engines.
Matt Cutts suggested to split
the sitemap into smaller pages.
You should use the
correct letter case in sitemap
files
The same site might had problems
with Yahoo because there was
a mismatch between the uppercase
URL titles on the live pages
and the lowercase URL titles
according to Yahoo's Site
Explorer. That might trigger
cloaking filters.
You should focus on
quality back links
If inbound links are built
too quickly, they don't have
a positive effect on the link
rankings of a web site (details
can be found here).
Reciprocal links should be
from related sites that have
something in common with your
own web site. Reciprocal links
with unrelated sites don't
help. We recommend ARELIS
to find quality
links.
Avoid session IDs if
possible
Matt Cutts indicated that
it makes sense not to use
URLs with session IDs. Long
URLs with many variables can
cause problems with search
engine spiders. This is also
mentioned in the Google guidelines:
"If fancy features
such as JavaScript, cookies,
session IDs, frames, DHTML,
or Flash keep you from seeing
all of your site in a [simple]
text browser, then search
engine spiders may have
trouble crawling your site."
Having too many web
sites and private WHOIS might hurt
your rankings
Matt Cutts indicated that
it might hurt your rankings
if you have too many sites
and if you use these web sites
just to display PPC ads:
"Having lots of
sites isn’t automatically
bad, and having PPC sites
isn’t automatically
bad, and having whois privacy
turned on isn’t automatically
bad, but once you get several
of these factors all together,
you’re often talking
about a very different type
of webmaster than the fellow
who just has a single site
or so."
If you try to cheat Google
then it's likely that one of
Google's filters will apply
to your web site sooner or later.
Your web site should be useful
and interesting to web surfers.
If you have such a web site,
make sure that there are no
technical errors that prevent
search engines from indexing
your web pages.
Make it as
easy as possible for search
engines to parse your web
pages and get good
inbound links to show
search engines that your web
site is important.
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