Comments on: Improved SEO documentation galore!

By: alex_borsody

alex_borsody — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:34:49 +0000

pshhh! how is someone from google so involved with SEO, its like the judge dining with the mobsters, the whole system is skewed, it should be based more on relevant content then all this hoopla about links.

By: Jamie

Jamie — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:31:51 +0000

Very good post matt, interesting read

By: Arul

Arul — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 13:02:16 +0000

Where can I find the complete SEO documentation?

By: yossef

yossef — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 22:02:41 +0000

Hello Matt,
i’m running a very large site and having sub domains to support local sites to each of the markets/countries.
i registered all sub domains in google webmaster tools and defined each of them to it’s relevant country (Geographic Location)
most of the sub domains recognized by google and updated BUT the German on (de.mydomain.com) is not set during the last 12-14 weeks!!
can you provide with some tips about what need to be done in order to “help” google update this info?

thanks

By: Sean Davidson

Sean Davidson — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 16:20:24 +0000

Matt, you say (and have said in many different ways, many hundreds of times): “The short answer is that Google wants to judge the same page that a user is going to see.” – which I get. But as a guy just trying to get relevant links in front of users at Google, its not that simple. It would be, if the web were little more than text, and some illustrative images, but Web 2.0, and an “engaging” and “dynamic” user experience fly in the face of such assumptions.

Take for instance my dismay, that after having developed a cutting edge image searching technique/platform in flash (actually, lean AS3), I find that presenting a greatly simplified version of search results to Gogglebot, along with any non-flash, non-js-enabled browser/user is considered to be cloaking. Is it Google’s position that Flash, Silverlight and other such technologies are only for cute, and minor “bling” on a site, and never for the main method of content delivery?

Isn’t progressive enhancement, just cloaking? You’ve said no, but I’m pretty sure that the only USER of my site that can’t use CSS, JS or Flash is a search-bot (or a Blackberry user, and they are not likely a user of our site/service). And so, by serving the same search results, but in a radically dumbed-down form, to non-JS, non-flash users (or Googlebot), I am only trying to get *relevant* links in front of Google’s users.

If a Google user wants to buy a “happy family on beach photo”, and I’ve crafted the crawlable results such that a link to our flash-based search engine results for a “photo of a happy family on beach”, have I not applied the cardinal rule: “keep the users first”? – But to do so, I have no “sanctioned” methods to apply other than to “cloak”.

Look, I think spam is the petulance of the Internet, and loathe link farms, and “cloaking” has been one way those offenses have been perpetrated. But I strongly disagree with you, that “cloaking” is always a “black-hat” approach. It is becoming more and more necessary as the bot-to-browser capability gap has increased. And it is only going to get worse, as the next generation of browsers are being built with no assumptions of a “primarily text-based static web page” in mind.

-respectfully

search flies in the f simple site designer, that

By: David

David — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 07:01:21 +0000

While we are on the subject of documentation I am wondering if I can find an answer to a question that has been bugging me for a long time that I have yet to see an answer documented for it.

I have a website that ranks between 4 on page 1 and 11 (top) on page 2 for the most popular search terms for this site. I notice that when I rank high on the first page on local results (google.com.au) I am usually low on the web results (google.com) for that search term (2nd page).

Where are the stats on what is the most popular search engine (google.com versus localized, eg google.com.au or google.co.uk etc) people use for local searches.

It seems to me that your average surfer would not be web savvy enough to use the local google search engine and would just use google.com instead of the search engine for their country.

If this is the case then knowing which search engine to optimize for would be crucial for those wanting to make sure that their website can be found.

By: Shawn Olson

Shawn Olson — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:41:32 +0000

I disagree with the concept that different content based on the user-agent is necessarily cloaking! For example, I make sure to use the exact same CONTENT for a user visiting most of my pages but often strip certain elements based on user-agent; thus I can keep the absolute address of a document the same no matter what platform is getting it, but leave out irrelevant objects for some browsers (in the case that a visitor is viewing on an smartphone, a document will serve thumbnails instead of large images, some JavaScripts/CSS are stripped, iframes are dropped, etc; the same document will be essentially the same if viewed on a desktop browser except presented in a desktop-friendly fashion).

There are also times that a developer may opt to serve different JavaScripts or CSS files based completely on desktop browsers that still do not affect the actual content–a Firefox CSS file vs an IE CSS file, etc. Or loading various CSS and JavaScript based on OS as well!

As long as the end-user is still getting the same information, then Google should not punish a site for changing the exact format of the presentation–that should not be labeled “cloaking”.

That’s it for a rant/concern.

I do have one question regarding the use of services such as Blogger. I just posted an article on a Blogger account as a way to introduce myself to the Blogger community. After posting it, I wondered if Google would frown on it as duplicate content as I have posted the same article on my own site. If so, how can a content producer share his content across multiple avenues without being labeled as spamming? From my personal perspective, I see the posting of an article on a system like Blogger, etc the same as a syndicated columnist publishing his work in multiple publications. I know that there would be readers on Blogger who had never been to my site to begin with… and here is a new avenue to share content with them.

The question is how do honest people actually use the internet as an honest tool without getting punished by Google?

By: paisley

paisley — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 20:03:52 +0000

Great summation… just finished reading one or two of the posts that you covered here…

p.s. doorway pages have been around since 1995… they still suck for a user.. now… if you can just provide a form to have google remove domain place holders since they ABSOLUTELY provide NO benefit to the user… AND they screw up Google’s reading of bounce behavior..

By: Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 06:01:29 +0000

Harith, I just did a post.

By: Daniel Tetreault

Daniel Tetreault — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:48:57 +0000

Hi Matt, how are you?

Mr. Cutts, with respect to ‘doorway pages’ could you provide some clarity?

Is it not possible that a supposed ‘doorway page’ does indeed provide some, and I will others to challenge me, content and end-user benefit, regardless of there or not this supposed ‘doorway page’ is actually in fact optimized for a particular keyword or keyword phrase(s)?

For example, would a direct response site be considered a doorway page? After all I would love all search engines to index my order page which is directly linked to my sales page…I mean my doorway page. Semantics perhaps?

What about a very long, one page website that pre-sells an audience on an affiliate product one is promoting; one that targets an audience and delivers a great product review and links to other cool resources. Would this still be considered a ‘doorway’ page?

Sincerely,

Daniel Tetreault.