Google Responds to You

What’s one of the most interesting things to read online at the moment? Google’s latest answers to some very interesting questions. You can read an article at WebProNews for a brief look at some of the responses and how they can be interpreted.

The WebProNews article focuses on the more interesting questions and answers, namely:

- does the age of a site really affect the rank of the site (sometimes),

- do links from bad sites actually harm your site (not if you don’t control them),

- how do directory links affect sites now that “Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!" has been taken out of Google’s guidelines (possibly going to be discounted)

There are a lot of other questions relating to

• sub domains


• sitemaps


• redirects


• backlinks


• duplicate content


• Geo-targeting

You will find the answers to these also very useful. I have seen these specific questions being asked in quite a few forums but no one is really ever able to give a definite yes or a definite no. Now, finally, answers directly from Google are available:

- Is both a XML and HTML sitemap necessary?

“Google: 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 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 don’t

Google: 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.”

- Should websites have different URL’s for different languages ie different subdirectories or different sudomains?

“Google: Both versions are fine. I personally generally recommend using a subdomain when the sites are completely different and using subdirectories when it's more or less a shared site, but it's up to you.”

And this is one of my favourites (I have always wondered but since I have never experienced any penalties I didn’t know):

- “Anonymous: Do you feel that the webmaster should be informed in case of a manual penalty & the reconsideration requests should be looked into more seriously in case of a manual penalty.

Google: That is a very good question, that we are being asked on a regular basis. So, imagine you have a site on which you add original content and/or tools on a regular basis.

If it has been hacked and contains hidden content/links or you are a website owner and your webmaster did something he/she was not aware of being outside Google webmaster guidelines, like a 0 seconds redirection. In that case chances are high you would be informed about a temporary removal from Google results via Google Webmaster Tools. The message will surely contain hints regarding the problem on the site. Once you have fixed it, your reconsideration request will be reviewed very carefully.

On the other hand, if you have a couple of hundreds of identical sites with - for example - scraped content from other sites, these are not adding any value to the Internet and I would not expect any notifications from Google.”

The Q&A is certainly worth a read and covers a lot of ground that would make a very long list if I were to put it here, I’d rather just entice you to go and have a look – its more beneficial to you all.

I have read it three times just to make sure I got everything!

Personally, I like how their answers aren’t all related only to the bots, and that they make a few points to remind internet marketers and web developers to keep user experience in mind when working on sites.

If you ever needed proof that our SEO software analyses and rates your sites according to best practises, the Google Gods themselves have just given it to you.

What did you think of the responses? Did you see much of the famed Google ambiguity?