Yesterday I wrote a post explaining about how Matt Cutts allowed the Google Webmaster Central team shave his head. I realized that some of the valuable information in that article that I wrote may have been hidden with all the excitement with Matt having his head shaved, so today, I want to bring the hidden jewels from yesterday’s post forward into this article. Specifically, I want to take a closer look at the 100+ short videos Matt Cutts published on YouTube and explain some things further that will help you understand more.
Should File Extensions be Used in URLs?
As most of you know, I am an avid WordPress user. Unless I am building from ground up, I use WordPress for all my website projects. That said, when I configure the permalink structure, I use the /post-title.php extension rather than /post-title/
The video provided by Matt Cutts confirms why.
Should nofollow links be used for Privacy Policy and Disclaimer Pages?
In the past, I have done this on my blogs. Usually I place sitewide nofollow links on my footer to my privacy policy and disclaimer pages. I am glad that I watched this video because Matt Cutts explains that the only reason why a webmaster would want to nofollow a page is to prevent the page from being indexed. The only reason why you would want to prevent a page from being indexed is if the page were to be determined useless. He further explains that privacy policy and disclaimer pages are very useful and they should not be nofollowed. An example of a page that should be nofollowed is a login page. Also Matt explains that it isn’t necessary to have site wide links to your privacy policy and disclaimer pages. A better idea could be to link to them from your home, about, and contact page instead.
Are Dates In URLs Search Engine Friendly?
I have debated about this for a few years with friends. I never believed that it was search engine friendly to include dates in URLs, if anything I felt like it placed important keywords too far to the right, causing some risk of them getting truncated in the SERPs. Matt Cutts explains that it’s a good idea to have a date stamp somewhere visible on your page for people, but it’s not something required by them, nor does it have any influence on ranking.
When I build niche sites that generate revenue using AdSense, typically I write 50 articles for the site and upload twenty of them immediately. From there, I use the WordPress scheduling feature to stagger the remaining 30 over the course of about three months. After watching these TWO videos, I suspect that doing this is unnecessary. Instead, I can now upload and publish all content in one session, and then use the extra time towards building quality backlinks.
How many pages can Google index from a single site?
Can I publish 100+ pages at once?
For now, that answers quite a few questions for me, I am sure that you’ll find this information useful as well. If you haven’t done so already, now would be a great time to subscribe to my RSS feed. As I drill down and watch more of Matt’s Grab Bag videos, I’ll piece more of them together here as I have done in this article today. Stay tuned… and in the mean time, you should take a look at his videos too. Be sure to check out the entire Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel as well.
You might be interested in learning how to become a better webmaster. Fortunately for you, Google has created a service called Google Webmaster Tools. It’s a free service which allows webmasters to check the indexing status and optimize the search visibility of their websites. Specifically you can use Google Webmaster Tools to check and set the Googlebot crawl rate, view lists of internal and external pages that link to your site, discover which keywords people search to find your site, view stats about how Google indexes your site, submit a sitemap.xml file, generate and maintain a robots.txt file, and set your preferred domain to www or non-www. If you haven’t started using Google Webmaster Tools, you need start today.
That said, if you’re interested in taking your first step towards becoming a better webmaster, I recommend reading the Google Webmaster Tools blog and subscribing to the RSS Feed. Secondly, I recommend subscribing to their YouTube Channel and investing time towards watching their videos. Just announced today, they have 154 videos with nearly 11 hours of footage generating one million views.
In celebration of this achievement, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, honored a lost bet by allowing the Webmaster Central team to shave his head and upload the video to their channel.
It happens that Matt Cutts has been using Google Moderator to compile a list of the most popular questions about how to become a better webmaster. The end result was over 100 videos uploaded into the Webmaster Central YouTube channel in a play-list called Matt Cutt’s Grab Bag. If you’re serious about wanting to become a better webmaster, then I recommend that you invest time into watching these videos. That said, what advice, tips, and tricks do you have towards becoming a better webmaster? What are some other resources that can help too? Share what you know with everyone in the comments below.
Google suggests that it might be worth your effort to request to have links removed that are pointing from low grade sites to yours. The easiest way this can be done is by searching the site for a “Contact Us” page, email address, or a phone number. If none can not be found then a Whois search can be performed. A Whois search will typically return the contact information of the site owner. Sometimes site owners block their contact information with a private registration. If that’s the case, then it may be possible to pass a message to the owner through the hosting company.
Of course if it’s not easy to contact the owners of the sites linking to yours, then it might not be worth the time invested. On the Google Webmaster Central blog, they suggests that efforts be made towards having links removed; however, if there are sites less than desirable linking to yours, Google does offer some reassurance by stating that they have 200 factors when it comes to determining relevancy in the search results. I don’t recommend investing time towards contacting site owners requesting the removal of links. Instead, I suggest investing time towards increasing the number of higher quality links pointing to your site.
Controllable things are another thing that should be taken into consideration. Once again, Google points focus on their design, content, technical, and quality guidelines. Google implies that they understand that certain things fall outside your control. With that, explain that emphasis is given things that webmasters can control such as having a well maintained site with high quality and original content with an excellent linking structure. And I agree. I can’t think of a single popular site that I would consider to be a terrible site. I am sure they exist, and I am sure you can leave a comment pointing me to a few; but all in all, in my opinion, all popular sites I have seen, fall within these guidelines.
My advice to site owners is to maintain a clean, high quality, and organized site that genuinely interests people. Don’t invest time into removing low quality backlinks and only invest some time into high quality backlink molding. I think it’s more important to spread awareness about your site, instead. If people like what they see, then they’ll come back many times over, and also they’ll link to it as well. Additionally, encouraging people to share information is very helpful too.
So what do you think? Do you think that it’s worth your time to remove low quality backlinks? What about spending time towards backlink molding? And what about time spent marketing and promoting your site? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
In addition to the official blog, Google has a lot of other blogs they maintain. For a long time I’ve been wondering how many blogs they operated. I have RSS subscriptions to a few of them, but every day it seems like a new blog surfaces. And that’s ok, but it’s just a little difficult to keep up. However, if you’re interested in learning more about Google and keeping up with what’s going on, reading and discovering as many of their blogs is important. That said, here are a few of the Google blogs that I enjoy reading.
First one is obvious, it’s the main blog. Everyone should read and subscribe to The Official Google Blog. This blog does a great job at bringing forward some of the most eventful news pertaining to Google. It acts as the main channel and many times is used to tell people about the many other secondary channels of communication available.
The next blog I recommend reading and subscribing to the Google Webmaster Central Blog. This blog is essential to read if you’re trying to keep up to speed with Goolge SEO. In fact, I wrote and published an article on SeoHosting.com yesterday based of information discovered on Google Webmaster Central.
Are you crazy about Mac Computers? If so, then Google wants to engage with you on their official Google Mac Blog. On the Google Mac Blog you can keep up news about Mac computers and even learn about and download Google software specifically made for Mac computers. All in all, if you enjoy Google and Mac computers, subscribing to the Official Google Mac Blog is a must.
Another blog that I place a lot of value in is the Google Online Security Blog. This blog keeps people up to date and provides them with breaking news regarding viruses and online security. This blog provides information such as how to improve browser security, which then points to their Browser Secuirty HandBook, and the Top 10 Malware Sites. You can’t go wrong with subscribing to this blog. The information published is geared towards helping keep your online experience more secure.
To learn about all of Google’s blogs, they have a complete Google Blog Directory available. The directory is broken down into five sections: Google-wide, Product, Ads, Developer, and Region. You can easily search their directory to find additional blogs that interest you. The more blogs that you subscribe to, obviously the more you can learn about Google.
In addition to the Google Blog Directory, Google has made reading their entire line up of blogs easy by also creating a very handy iGoogle Gadget and Tab for your personalized iGoogle homepage.
What Google blogs do you enjoy reading and why? Share these blogs in the comments below.
P.S. What kind of SEO articles do you like to read? Contact Me with your article ideas.
