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Archive for May, 2011

Is excessive whitespace in the HTML source bad?

A question from Funkman at an undisclosed location. “’Excessive White space’ in HTML source is bad. Fact, myth or somewhere in between?

We really don’t care that much. We’re pretty good you know, every time we see white space we separate stuff and we ignore the white space so it doesn’t really cause us a lot of harm in either way. The only thing to pay attention is to I have seen some sneaky people who will try to do hidden text or whatever and they’ll start off their HTML with 60 new lines. So whenever you view source you will be like oh man its blank there is no source, dude you just blew my mind. Anybody who is savvy is like or I can use the scroll bar and see what’s down here. So I would just use white space wherever it’s reasonable for you. I think some clean HTML with some nice indentation and all those sort of stuff looks good it makes your site more maintainable and makes it easy to upgrade and see what’s going on with your source and Google does a very good job about finding separators and breaking it. So don’t make one word for every 200 blank lines but otherwise if you are doing normal reasonable stuff I wouldn’t worry about it that much. I do whatever is best for you as you are maintaining the site.

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Can I disallow crawling of my CSS and JavaScript files?

A fun question from SEOmofo in Simi Valley. They ask “If I externalize all CSS style definitions and JaveScript scripts and disallow all user agents from accessing these files (via.robot.txt), would this cause problems for Googlebot? Does Googlebot need access to these files?”

I personally would recommend not blocking that for example the white house recently rolled out a new robot.txt and I think they blocked the images, directory or CSS or Java Script or something like that. You really don’t need to that. In fact sometimes it can be very helpful if we think something spam is going on with Java Script or if somebody is doing a sneaky redirect or something like that. So my personal advice would to let Googlebot to go ahead and crawl that and then it’s not like these files are huge anyway so it doesn’t consume a lot of bandwidth. So my personal advice just let Googlebot access to all that stuff and then most of the time we won’t ever fetch it. But in the rare occasion when we doing a quality check on behalf of someone or we receive a spam report and then we can go ahead and fetch that make sure your site is clean and not having any source of problems.

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Which is more important: content or links?

Here’s a funny question from Jeff in NYC, “As Google’s algo evolves, is it better to have exceptional links and mediocre content, or exceptional content and mediocre links?”

I’ll stop right there rather than finishing the question. Google always has to trade off the balance between authority and topicality for lack of a better word. If somebody types in Viagra which is one of the most spammed terms in the world, you want something that’s about Viagra you don’t just want something that has lot of authority something like news week or time that is talking about or writing an article and they have one mention of Viagra and they say oh this is something like Viagra or something just to throw-off phrase. So you do want authority, the sites that are trust worthy, that are reputable but you also want topicality you don’t want something that is off topic you want to about what user typed down. So we try to find a good balance there. So I would like to say have a well rounded site, great content has to be the foundation of any good site because, mediocre content tends not to attract exceptional link by itself and if you try getting exceptional link on really really crappy content you are going to be pushing uphill it’s going to be harder to get those links you have to do stuff that we can set as bad or scuzzy for the web like paying for them. So it’s better to have great content and to get those links naturally and then you get both, you get great content and you get great links. Then trying to have something that’s really really not that interesting and trying to just push and push and push and bug people and send out spam emails and ask for links and those sorts of things. So you want to have a well rounded site, and one of the best ways to do that, is to have a fantastic, interesting, useful content, great resources, great information and then that naturally attracts the links and then search engines want to reflect the fact that the web thinks that you are interesting or important or helpful.

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Archive for May, 2011

Is excessive whitespace in the HTML source bad?

Can I disallow crawling of my CSS and JavaScript files?

Which is more important: content or links?

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