Archive for May, 2011
Can I publish 100+ pages at once?
We have a question from Dave in the Philippines, who asks “If you have a lot of blog content for a new section of a site (100+ pages), is it best to release it over a period of time, or is it fine to just unleash 100 pages?”
I think in most pages especially if it’s a high quality content, I would just unleash the 100 pages. Now if you are talking about 10,000 or 100,000 or million pages you might be a little more cautious. It’s not that it would cause sort of automatic penalty but if we see a site that was nothing the other day and suddenly there are 4 million pages at our index that might be a sort of thing where someone might come and take a look of that site and just say is this a legitimate content or is this some sort of auto generated junk or that sort of thing. There is no value add to this content. So 100 pages I really wouldn’t worry about but I would make sure its high quality content. A lot of the times when you are creating content organically you’ll end up at a page at a time and I would say just go ahead and publish it when you have that new page. You don’t necessarily have to wait till you get a lot of different content and batch it up and release it, it’s totally fine to release one page at a time but specially for small scale stuff and especially for high content I wouldn’t worry about it.
Will DiggBar create duplicate content issues?
A question from Remiz Rahnas from Kerala, India. Remiz asks”Will DiggBar create duplicate content issues? For example: my site is www.example.com and now when you add digg.com before my site’s address (digg.com/example.com), it is showing a page from Digg.com with my content (exactly the same).”
The short answer is no. So as Digg originally launched it, it could have caused duplicate issues and infact it could have resulted in pages being removed from Google. But they made a number of changes to make things better. The big one in Google’s point of view is that it had a meta no index tag. So that itself says anything that we know of that’s on Digg that’s one of these framed short URLs, we’ll have a no index tag that tells Google not to index that page. We just don’t show any reference to it at all in our search results. So the fact that we see two copies and one is a meta no index means yes we won’t show this one and so we should correctly assign all the page rank and all the other characteristics to your original content. So the Digg bar as originally implemented was a little dangerous. But they quickly adjusted and integrated and made some changes that made it such that you shouldn’t have duplicate content issues. Now as a webmaster do I like framing my site without my permission? I’m not a huge fan of that so there a lot of people who think the Digg bar is rude but if I put on your search engine policy hat it is no longer a violation of search engine quality guidelines or Google’s guidelines and it shouldn’t cause any duplicate content issues for your site.
Can Experts Exchange be excluded from search results?
Here’s a fun question from Joshua Starr in Indianapolis, Indiana. Joshua asks “Is it possible to exclude Experts Exchange from search result? Why are they ranked so high, with such a spammy interface?”
Alright there are lots of different new answers to the answer to this question. We are not going to remove that Experts Exchange because they don’t violate our quality guidelines atleast they currently don’t and that they don’t cloak. Some people think that they do cloak but if you go in and look at the cash page you try to get an answer and then you click on the cash page and you go to the very bottom the content is there. So it’s not as if they are showing a different content to Googlebot than they are to users. If they did that would be a valid reason for removing Experts Exchange or any other site. However if you use search wiki you can remove Experts Exchange from individual queries and it’s not just for that one query we’ll often remove it from related queries. So if you really don’t like a particular URL or Experts Exchange or even the site you can click to remove that, do a search for them and remove and all that sort of stuff through search wiki. And we’ll try to learn overtime that you do not like Experts Exchange. Why are they ranking so high why don’t you take action and they look spammy? If they are not violating our quality guidelines, just because someone does or doesn’t like a website is not a good enough reason to take somebody out. We try to maintain that quote by vote tag I may not like what you said but I may but I’ll defend to the dare to the ability to say it. So, just because someone says something about something objectionable to us doesn’t mean we’ll remove them from our index. So whether you think its spammy is upto you and you can use search wiki but it doesn’t violate our quality guidelines we try to be very careful about that. You don’t just remove a site just because you don’t like it for example it has to an actual violation of our quality guidelines or something like a legal removal or something like virus or malware changing those sorts of things, so you can still do it for yourself but unless something changes I don’t expect us to remove results.
What are the factors that go into determining the PageRank of a Twitter page?
We have a twitter question from Atul Arora in Fremont. Atul says “What are the factors that go into determining of PageRank of a Twitter page, e.g. it is the followers, backlines?”
I gave an answer about twitter where I said that we treat twitter pages just like regular web pages. So it’s the exact same thing we don’t look at the number of followers that you have on twitter, we look at the number of links that you have to your profile or to your specific tweets. So if you have a lot of page ranks or lot of linking into one particular really interesting status message that one might be more interesting or more likely to show up in our search results but we don’t look at how many followers you have or anything like that. We certainly assume that the followers can be gamed pretty easily on a lot of different sites. So what we find tends to be back links and the reputation of those back links is the way that we score how reputable the page is on twitter just like any other site across the web.
How much does a domain’s age affect its ranking?
We have a question from JZ in Ohio, who asks “How much weight does the number of years a domain is registered for have on your ranking?”
My short answer is not to worry about that very much, not very much at all infact. Danny Sullivan had asked about this recently because there were some registrars sending around emails saying ‘did you know that Google give you a bonus in ranking if you register your site for three or more years.’ Just to clarify that’s not based on anything that we have said. The only thing that might be coming from is that we did file a pattern that basically said we could use historical data in our ranking so you could in theory look for how many years your site has been registered for. Just like you could look at the history of the site to say whether it’s high quality or low quality but we have a lot of ideas and we file a lot of patterns that doesn’t mean all of that gets used in our rankings. So I don’t want people to jump to that assumption just because there was one pattern filed in 2002 and 38 claims down somebody said well, you can look at how many years your site is registered for and to jump to the conclusion that we use that in our ranking. so my short answer is make great content don’t worry nearly as much about how many years your domain is registered for just because someone sending you an email that says Google does or may use that in your ranking doesn’t mean that you should automatically take that to face value. What makes the big difference is the quality of your site and the sort of links that are pointing to you or not, is my site registered for three or four years instead of one or two years.
Can you talk about the change in Google’s referrer string?
Hey folks! Whenever we started off with a bunch of questions, I threw a couple of example questions in and some people wanted to hear the answers. So people asked “Can you talk about the change in Google’s referrer string?” so that was one of my questions that got voted up. And I would be happy to!
The short answer is that there is a change on the horizon and it’s only a very small percentage of users right now but I think that it probably will grow and will grow over time, where Google’s referrer, that is whenever you do a Google search and you click on a result you go to another website and your browser passes along a value called a referrer, that referrer string will change a little bit. It used to be google.com/search for example, now it’ll be google.com/url and for a short time we didn’t have what the query was, which got a lot of people frustrated. But the google.com/search, the new Google referrer string will have the query embedded in it and there’s really interesting tit-bit that not everybody knows it also has embedded in that referrer string a pretty good idea of where on the page the click happened. So for example if you were result number 1 there’s a parameter in there that indicates that the click came from result number1. If you were number 4 it will indicate that the click came from result number 4. So now you don’t necessarily need to go scrapping Google to find what your rankings were for these queries. You can find out, I was number 1 for this query whenever someone clicked on it and came to my website. So that can save you ton of work. You don’t need to worry nearly as much; you don’t need to scrape Google, you don’t have to think about ranking reports. Now we don’t promise that this will be a feature that we guarantee that will always have on Google forever but definitely take advantage of it for now. There’s one interesting twist which is, Google’s universal search or blended search is also taken account into the results. So imagine that you’ve done a search for sunset and maybe we have three images of a sunset and your website is number 1 for sunset, you might show up as if you are at position number 4 because those images are treated as if they were results 1, 2 and 3. Or if you had a news result, the news headline and the two or three links after that might be treated as regular results. So in theory you could think you are at position 4 when it just was that you had an image or 2 or 3 up ahead of you. But for most parts it gives an accurate idea of where on the page you were and so you get all kinds of extra information that you can use in you analytics, and to compute your ROIs without having to do a lot of extra work. Or if you can it’s a great idea to look at that referrer string and try to take advantage of that information. Again this only affects a small percentage of users right now but we expect that it’ll grow overtime.
Why aren’t penalized sites notified in Webmaster Tools?
We got a question from JP in Los Angeles. JP asks “When a site is penalized by Google, why isn’t a message sent to the owner via Google Webmaster Tools telling them how/why it was penalized? Currently site owners are left grasping in the dark trying to figure out what they did to cause a penalty.”
But the fact is we do, we don’t do it for all penalties because there are some bad guys, some spammers and black hats who you don’t want to clue in. But for things like hidden text, if we think your site is hacked or even vulnerable to hacking, we’ve even talked about sending messages to people who we think have all Google analytics packages. But we do send a large number of people warnings about their site that sort of say ‘hey! Heads up we had to penalize your site because of hidden text or for some other reasons. We don’t do it for every single site we don’t do it for every single penalty, because there are people who try to see how far they can get away with and if they’ve been caught and if they know that they’ve caught they’ll start it on another site. So we’ll try to find out ways to let the good guys know that they have issues without clueing in or alerting the bad guys. But we’ll never be able to tell or probably never be able to tell every single person that they’ve been penalized. We’ll keep trying to do a good job though.
How are load times displayed in Webmaster Tools calculated?
We have a question from Deepesh in New York, who asks “How does Google calculate site load times in the data it exposes in the Google’s webmaster statistics? Is the calculation simply average time to get and receive the HTML content for a page?”
I think the answer is yes. It’s pretty much it! Googlebot sends out the request and starting from there we time how long it takes for us to see the request back. So it is the end to end time for us to fetch the page or fetch the data from the server and that’s pretty much it. We are looking at it from Googlebot’s perspective, we have no idea how long it takes for any given user to fetch a page; we can only look at how long Googlebot takes. But that’s essentially what we are looking at.
Should I use nofollow in links to my disclaimer and privacy policy?
We have a question from Michelle in Netherlands, who asks “Is it good thing to put ‘nofollow’ in links to a disclaimer, privacy statements and other pages like that with the internal PageRank in mind? I hear different stories about this.”
Good question! The reason that I would use nofollow is if you truly don’t want your page indexed at all. So for example a login page, Googlebot does not know how to login, and that’s not of any value for users to have. I can imagine that the disclaimer or privacy statement could be kind of useful. So you can put those links on, it’s not that it’s going to cause you a spam penalty but truthfully I would tend to worry more about having enough good links because you have enough great content that you tend to get a lot of people linking to you, you tend to get a lot of good coverage in Google’s index. It’s a second order effect the best, I really wouldn’t spend a lot of time in saying that I have nofollow on my links on the stuff that I don’t care about. Typically you do better by may be linking or by not linking to stuff. Link to the privacy policy for once but you don’t have to link to it on every page of your site or something like that. But really I would only use it for the pages that you really don’t want to be in Google at all. Don’t worry much about sculpting that tends to take a lot more time and not really be a bigger bang for your buck compared to just putting your efforts on making a good content that will attract links.
Will domain registration changes ding me in Google?
Hello! We have a question from Scott Clark in Lexington, KY. Scott says “When you move a domain from one register to another or your registrant information changes slightly (e.g. new phone number) will Google ding you for instability at the registrar?”
And my answer is No, probably not. Certainly people need to change their information, sometimes they change the registrars, that’s completely normal, that’s completely expected behavior. The only times that we try to really keep an eye on that is if we think that someone as a spammer might be trying to buy someone’s domain only for the links or buy an expired domain or something like that. But there’s plenty of times when you are switching to a new address, you are switching to a new phone number where it does make complete sense where that information does need to change. So we try to be very smart about it and you should never see any difference if you are a regular person and the hope is if you are trying to do something sneaky or spammy then we might pay a little bit of a closer eye. But in the typical case I really wouldn’t worry about it.
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