What’s the preferred way to check for links to my site?

Well, I’ve explained this before the link: operator is accurate; it only shows you a sub sample of your links. So my preferred way would be to log into Google’s Webmaster Tools and we will show you a very exhaustive list of back links, pretty much everything all the back links that we know of in Google’s Webmaster Console. The nice thing is other people can’t spy on that so your competitor can’t look at you back links. You can start to see other back links from other sites like Yahoo Site Explorer, for example, if you type in a URL into Yahoo Site Explorer just in their search box you can explore the back links in that way. So those are the couple of tools that you can use. But it’s not Link: show a wrong link, it’s just that we don’t show all of the links that we know about. So there are a lot of different options if you have to find out more about back links from different websites.

Should I include my logo text using ‘alt’ or CSS?

Richard M from Australia asks, “If you have a company logo on your site, what is the best way to include the text of the logo for SEO purposes? ALT tag, CSS hiding, or does it matter?”

Yes, it does matter its much better use an ALT tag than to use like I’m hiding some CSS, 9000 pixels on the left of the webpage or something like that. That’s what the ALT tag was more or less built for or ALT attribute or whatever you want to say. But yes go ahead and use Alt and that’s the fantastic way to say this is the text that’s in my logo, search engines can read that and use that, I would not hide it using CSS or anything like that when there is a perfectly valid, perfectly simple way to do it. it does the job just fine.

What types of directories are seen as sources of paid links?

We have a question from Fabio Ricotta from Brazil. Fabio asks “Will Google Yahoo! Directory and BOTW as sources of paid links? If no, why is this different from other sites that sell links?”

I’ve answered this question in the past but since enough people are curious to ask, I’ll do the spiel again. Whenever we look into whether a directory is useful to users, we say, what is the value add of that directory? Do they go and find entries on their own or do they only wait for people to come to them. How much do they charge, how much is the editorial service that they are charged. If a directory takes $50 and every single person who ever apply to the directory automatically gets in for that $50. There is not as much editorial oversight as something like that yahoo directory where people do get rejected. So if there is no editorial value adds then that is much closer to the page links. In fact if you look at our webmaster quality guidelines we used to have a guideline that says, submit your site to directories and we gave few examples of directories. And what we found what’s happening was people would get obsessed with that line and finds a lot of directories and there were a lot of people who were like oh well, if people are looking out for directories, I’ll make a directory and so you saw all these fly-by night directories, that would start up and say “I am the page rank 6 directory, you give me $50 and you’ll automatically get an entry in my directory.” And it’s not as if those type of listing or the sort of things that users really value or do a lot of good in our search results so that we want to do a lot of good. So we ended up taking out that mention in our webmaster guidelines so that people don’t get obsessed with the directories and think yes, I have to go find a bunch of different directories to submit my site to. There are some directories that do carry weight; the yahoo directory does a good job of editorial discussion and actually doing a review and rejecting a significant number of entries that are low quality. So the question in your mind whenever you consider a directory is what is the value add, do they high standards? I have a blog post outright that talk about other different factors of the directory and whether we might consider it as real. But those are some of the factors that you should ask yourself about. So by those measures, no, the yahoo directory is not just automatically paid links. Typically paid links are going to be much lower quality and they are going to be much more automatic people will give you whatever rank or text you want all those sorts of things. So there is a difference. At the same time don’t go overboard worrying about submitting your site to every directory. If you make a great site make sure that the people find out about it. Those are some of the things that really makes a difference not that I have to submit my site to atleast 5 directories or atleast 10 directories or anything like that.

What impact does “page bloat” have on Google rankings?

A question from Deepesh in New York. Deepesh asks, “What impact does “page bloat” have on Google rankings? Most of the winners in SEO seem to have very simple pages (very few image HTML-only design) – sometimes to the detriment to the user in a poorly designed page.”

I wouldn’t jump to conclusions. Back in the early days of Google we used to trunk aid data about a 100 kilobytes. So if you’ve had page-bloat back then, I could imagine that your content might got snipped off a half way through and we wouldn’t see all of it. But Google does a much better job of seeing the entire page now; we don’t trunk aid at 100 Kb’s anymore we can deal with a larger page. So I wouldn’t really worry about page-bloat, we tend to do a very good job of finding the content. So if you have extra images don’t worry about that, if you have extra HTML markup don’t worry about that. I think the assumption that only the SEOed pages that don’t have very many images or they have very thin HTML designs are the winners, I’m not sure I’d agree with that, because if you think about it, there are a lot of really good sites and well known brands, they do well and they often have very big pages, they might have flash they might have a lot of images or things like that. So there might be some niches where you might where you paying attention to and looks like only these focused pages with a lot of content do well. But we try to return the best page the most relevant page no matter what the query is. So don’t worry about it to the degree you are going to start making radical changes pruning down content. Go ahead and do what you think is the best for your users the most informative and relative pages that you can make and we’ll try to return that and we do a very good job of handling bloat and finding what the real content is on the real page.

Do dates in URLs determine freshness?

Filipe Santos from New York asks, “Do dates in the URL of blogs or websites help determine freshness of the content or is it largely ignored?”

Well, I think dates in the URL or the content can be largely useful, but people can also try to optimize that and say that they are always 10 mins old. We have our own measures of how fresh pages are, for example: the first time our crawler saw our page. We also look at revisiting the pages, how much the content changes. So I think it’s a good idea to have the URL clearly somewhere on your page that people can find out how old the content is. But I don’t think you necessarily need to do it for Googlebots. So it’s a good usability thing, but Google has its own ways to measure how fresh various content is. You don’t have to worry about having the date in the URL or the content just convince Google its fresh we already do that complications and figure it out for ourselves.

Are CSS-based layouts better than tables for SEO?

Frankly I wouldn’t worry about it. We see tables we see CSS, we have to handle both, so we try to score them well, no matter what kind of layout mechanism you use. Frankly I would use what’s best for you. A lot of people these days tend to like CSS, because it’s easy to change your site, it’s easy to change the layout. Tables kind of have this web1.0 connotation to them. But if you have the vest site, we will try to find it and we’ll try to rank it highly regardless of whether it’s table-based or its CSS based

What if a search for my business triggers Did you mean?

Alex B in Indianapolis has a good question. Alex says, “When I do a Google search for my business name, Google suggests “Did you mean:” with some other company name. Is there anything we can do to keep that from happening?”

Not that I know of atleast not right now, there is nothing where we a have a form that you can fill out and say this is bad. You can try finding our various helpful web forms and reporting it there. But the hope is that overtime we learn that sort of things automatically. So we have data pushes of content and then we try to iterate and improve, so I don’t have a good answer in terms of, like here’s the simple form that you can fill out. But hopefully overtime Google learns that this suggestion is not as helpful or this isn’t real business. Anything that you can do to build the reputation of your business so it’s more well known so you got a lot of links pointing to you and you are more easily found on the web. These are all the signals that say oh this is a really valid query, so it’s not something that we need to show as spelling suggestion for. But there is no other special form that you can fill out or anything as far as I know. Sorry!

How many pages Google can index from a single site

Chris from the UK asks, “Is there a limit to the number of pages that Google will index from one site?”

Good question! Not that I’m aware of, Chris. So we will index millions of pages if we think the site is sufficiently good and has a sufficient amount of content. You are very unlikely to bump against the limit in our index; it’s purely how useful we think your pages are which in turn enlarged by how much page rank you have, how many people link to you and what’s the reputation of the pages is. So if there is a limit, I’m not aware of it. I really doubt that there is we tend to scroll as much of a site as we think we can use and we budget that relative to all the other sites and how useful we think the site is and how many people are linking to it. So as far as I’m aware there’s not a limit and hope that helps.

Will a coming soon page negatively impact my site?

No, I think a “coming soon” page can be pretty smart. It’s good for users so that they just don’t end up on a black-whole page that doesn’t resolve or something like that. If you some content that’s coming out, I don’t think there’s any harm in having a coming soon page and so you get more content you can put that content out there and then when the full site is ready you can have the full site out there. So I wouldn’t worry about ranking wise that’ll be in a problem, I think it can be a good thing for users and can be a good thing for search engines.

What impact does server location have on rankings?

We have a question from Rob Lewicki from Toronto, Ontario. Rob asks “What impact does server location have on rankings?”

Well, way way, way back in the dawn of Google, it was funny because people would rank in different countries only on the TLD. So fr means you are French, so that’s all that they knew. So back in 2000, 2001 type time frame we started to look at where is the server located, its IP address, so to say it doesn’t end in .fr but it is located in France according to the IP address. So maybe this is really useful for French users. So that’s the primary way you have impact on Google’s rankings. You just stayed in United States, your site’s been in United States, and you’ve never been out of United States, you might never notice any of these factors. But where your server is located whether it’s in US or France or Germany or Britain or Canada or anywhere else can determine our rankings. So for example if you go to google.com and type in “bank” you get different results than you go to google.com.au and type in “bank” or google.co.uk and you type in “bank”. So we do absolutely try to return the most relevant results to each user in each country and server location in terms of IP address is a factor right now.