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Google's Matt Cutts talks about search engine
optimization traps
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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