Can I tell Google not to use the posting date in my snippet?

Can I tell Google not to use the posting date in my snippet?

Here’s an interesting question from Brazil, Fabio Ricotta asks “In some queries I can see the date of the post/article in the description snippet (at Google search). Why? Can I tell Google not to use it? If yes, how?”

Right now I don’t think there’s a way to say please don’t do this. Our snippets team is always here to show really helpful descriptions or what we call snippets of our search results. If you are on a forum maybe we can show ‘oh there’s been 4 replies’ or if you are on a blog may be there’s been 30 comments on this blog post. So we are always trying to think about new ways to have helpful descriptions or helpful snippets. And one of those is to highlight the date on which you blog post or forum thread appeared because, if you know that something was recent that might be really useful to you as a user. So we do deserve the right to show the snippet that we think is best for users. Sometimes we provide a way to turn that off; no ODP is a midi tag not to use the open directory projects descriptions. But in general we deserve the right on do we show part of a page, do we highlight the date of a particular post went live, those sort of things we do deserve the right, because we want to return the best results for users.

Can rel=”canonical” index my hostname and not my IP address?

A smart question from Sweden, Anders has asked “Will the new canonical tag help with issues where you by accident (stupid editors linking to wrong addresses) have indexed sites by IP address rather than hostname?”

I’ll have to double check, but that’s the sort of thing that you’ll be liked to able to do. You’d like to take that IP address and put that over to the hostname. Now that I’m thinking aloud, we might consider the     IP address different than the hostname, so we’ll have to confirm on that. But I don’t think it would hurt to go ahead and have that. And ideally that is the sort of thing where you don’t want your IP address to show up, you want your hostname or domain name to show up instead. So I think that would be a nice thing to do. I’m not sure whether we supported for IP addresses yet but I’ll ask Yalcom, the guy that wrote and did the heavy lifting on this code and see what happens.

What do I do after being hacked?

Question from Laura Thieme from Columbus, OH. “I have a client who was hacked. The SEO consultant said the things were cleaned up, but they weren’t correctly. All 30,000 Viagra/cialis types and paid links have been removed but no improvement in SERPs. We sent reconsideration. What do we do now?”

I would send another reconsideration request, I would also do a site: search and look for site:example.com Viagra, cialis, porn, free sex any nasty spammy terms you can think of jus to make sure all the pages are gone. And I would also look at the keywords at the Webmaster Tools Council to see which keywords you are showing up for, if any of them look like spam or porn or anything like that. Do a fresh look.  You might also invite someone to take a look on the webmaster help forum and say ‘hey, is anything wrong with my site?’ Because sometimes people can spot things there. And make sure you have the current patched version of your software, if you are running wordpress, make sure you update your wordpress installation because sometimes you clean it up and you just get hacked again. So if you do search on Google Webmaster blog hacked there is two or three posts that we’ve done and you can read more about that. And if you really think it’s all completely cleaned up, do another reconsideration request and we’ll hopefully get that back in.

Is eating the same sandwich every day duplicate content?

Here’s a question from Canada. Quentin from Vancouver says “Hi Matt, I have the same sandwich for lunch every day. Will I be punished by Google fro duplicate content?” NO! “Can the canonical tag help me here?” Not really! It doesn’t work in meat space yet or sandwich space it only works in web space. “I just can’t get enough Reuben sandwiches!”

Power to you! Although Reubens are a little bad for you, you might consider turkey ham you know a little thin BLT So tasty. Anyway that don’t worry about but the canonical tag is helpful to splat canonicalness so that you can clean up the architecture of your site. Don’t worry about having the same sandwich for lunch

Should I use underscores or hyphens in URLs?

A question from Ontario, Canada. Tripstar says “Underscores vs hyphens in URLs, does it make a difference? my-page vs. my_page?”

It does make a difference; I would go with dashes or hyphens if you can. If you have underscores and if things are working fine for you I wouldn’t worry about changing your architecture. A while ago I said we are looking at using underscores as separators and the reason why we typically never talk about stuff in the future is that it gives us the freedom to change our mind. In fact the people who are working on that project worked on something slightly different for scoring in the URL that was actually higher impact and a much higher win. We might still get around to that, thanks for the ping I’ll try to ask some folks on our quality triage team, hey, can we take a fresh look at this. But for the time being underscores are treated as separators, sorry dashes or hyphens are treated as separators and underscores are not. That might change in the future but that’s the way it stands right now.

Does rel=”canonical” make it safe to use tracking parameters?

Here’s a perfect question from Nick in Chicago. “Does the new canonicalization tag make it safe to add tracking arguments to some of my internal links without fear that Google will split the quality signals between the two addresses?”

So I believe you can do this. I would try it out on just one directory or small set or URLs at first to make sure it’s completely safe. If you can’t fix it upstream like if you can do something with your cookies or analytics package where you can say “oh I’m getting into this point of my page so I’ll track that event.” If there’s a way to do it that way that’s just a little bit better because then there’s no , suppose someone copies and pastes a URL and they might copy and paste it differently may be that URL goes away or the tracking code changes. So if you can’t make the URLs unified that’s still better, but I believe that this sort of thing can work totally fine with the new canonicalization tag. Again just start out cautiously, make sure it works for you make, sure that there’s no problems, but this is the sort of thing that you can do, two conceptually same changes, may be one is, I came in from the work front page may be one was I came in from the help pages so you have slightly different breadcrumb parameter or something like that, you can use the canonicalization tag and say really these two are the same pages and the same pages without this breadcrumb parameter.

Is SearchWiki or Analytics data used for ranking?

We’ve got a question from Boston. Micahn asks “Is Google aggregating Search Wiki data with Analytics for ranking?”

No. I’ve said before that my team; the web spam team will not go over and ask the analytics team for data so we don’t get any feed from the analytics team and we’ve said that we are currently not using SearchWiki data. Is it possible then in the future we might, may be, but at least right now if you are spinning it up all day everyday voting up or submitting your URLs in SearchWiki you are basically wasting your time. We are not using that data right now. And if we ever did use that data we’d be very cautious about how we used it such that we try to prevent any sort of abuse. So instead, better to make great sites, get lots of visitors, build lots of buzz and that’s a great way forward and you don’t have to worry about SearchWiki data or anything like that.

Does Google Analytics work with Web 2.0 and social media?

We have a question from Indainapolis, Indiana. Benji says “Does Google Analytics have plans to start adding specific tools around web 2.0 or social media websites?”

Well Analytics is a tool for your website right, so the question is if I have a web 2.0 can Google Analytics help me? And I think the answer is yes, as I recall, I’m not the expert in Google analytics and I love those guys but I don’t talk to them that often, I think that we do provide analytics solutions for flash these days and also for AJAX. So there are ways to track internal events on your page, there are hooks where you can say so I’ve got to this part of the HTML fire-off some sort of things that analytics can use. So double check and do a little research to verify that, but if you do have a rich website with all sorts of interesting things I think you can still use Google Analytics for different events and track that. You have to do a little more work if it’s just static HTML but you’re already doing more work to make a really rich web 2.0 experience anyway. So I think it is possible, you just have to do some thought on what are the events that I want to track and then can I insert those hooks to track the visitors as they go through the funnel and how they convert.

Has Google changed the relevancy it awards to social media?

HandH in Chichester asks “Has Google changed its relevancy it awards to Social Media sites in the last six months?”

We tend not to think about like oh just links from social media sites just like we tend not to think about oh brands or things like that. We tend to think about links whether they are useful or whether they are not useful and so we use that as our limits test. We try to give more credit or more trust to the link that we think are really valuable. For example we roll out over 300 or 400 changes per year. so I was in a meeting just before this one where we were talking about a change that has a slightly different weighting how we do some types or links some types of anchors. And so could that have an effect on social media site, it could but that wasn’t the intent of it. So have we made relevancy changes that would change how we do various social media links and how we weight them in the last six months? Yeah we’ve probably have but it hasn’t been lets change how we think about social sites. That said, what we said about put out a call for what people want to see the web spam team do in 2009, I was surprised six different people even in one day said oh change how you weight social media links. So we are open to doing what we need to do to have the best search results and things that are really useful for users but at least so far we haven’t gone after that as a dedicated project or anything like that.

Should we expect more spelling corrections in search results?

Let’s have a question from Florida; Marjy in Boca Raton asks “Recently, Google has been more proactive in providing results that feature “corrected” spellings. In what way will smart guesses be employed in search results in the future? Can we expect more synonyms in search results for example?

I think as we look forward we get more and more users and some of those users are not savvy and some of those users don’t know how to spell well. So one figure that I’ve heard is if you look at random queries something like 10% of them might be misspelled. And when we realize just how many queries were misspelled that’s when we decided to write what in my opinion is one of the world’s best spell checkers. But the fact is even if you do that even if you have like a huge click through on ‘did you mean’ there are always some people who didn’t realize that it was there. And so we have introduced a change recently where we will spell correct what we think is the right answer or one or two results and then we’ll show the normal answers down below. Then if you are a user who just didn’t know how to spell it correctly that really helps you out a lot. And in fact it helps the web spam out a little bit as well because people who were just using typos and misspellings you know the regular users don’t stumble on spam as that much as they stumble on good results first. Now if you are really really are a power user and there are a ton of people who are you can always put a + in order to say this is the exact word I’m searching for you can even put it in double quotes you can also put those double quotes even on a single word. So there are lots of ways to tell Google no this is what exactly I meant to search for. We try to be smart so if somebody types something that looks like it’s a misspelling but it’s not, we’ll try to figure that out over time. So it’s not the case where we roll out something and we’ll never make changes for the several more years. Instead we try to come up with something that’s pretty reasonable which works well for the vast majority of users, power users can still have the escape hatch the + sign or the double quotes and if we do make mistakes we try to figure out what can we do to improve it in the next generation of our algorithms or in the next time we push out new data for the spell correcting code. So I think we do a pretty good job about that we are always open to more suggestions ways that we could improve the interface. But that’s probably I wouldn’t be surprised if we continue to improve how we use spell corrections to help out regular users who don’t want to learn the intricacies of search engines who are probably not watching this video they just want to get where they want to go as quickly as possible.