Indexing and site structure

[arutoria]

Dear Webmasters,


I am seeking advises on several topics which I think are relevant to many webmasters but seems to have no definite answer on.

1. Should I put "archive" pages on the homepage? I have seen SEOs advising people to put archive pages on front page because "clicks from homepage" is an important factor in telling Google about the importance of those pages.

Personally I found them annoying, ugly and seldom used by visitors. From a user perspective I want the archive gone but I have also seen some well ranked websites in my niche having archives on them. There are counterexamples of course, as I have yet to see any big brand sites using them. Should I remove archive pages or just leave them there?


2. Site-wide outbound links. Again, I have seen advise on never using site-wide OBL because they reduces the PageRank flowing to your own site. However, I do see benefits from having these links. The sites I linked to are all relevant sites in the same niche and some of my visitors may find them useful. Again, I am in a position of balancing the needs of my user versus the needs of Google.


3. URL parameter. We uses url parameters to check the effectiveness of campaigns. Do I need to tell Google in webmaster tools or should I "let Googlebot decides".


4. Scraped content. As a website listed on DMOZ and referenced in Wikipedia, we occasionally come across scrapers. Sometimes people may just copy-and-paste our content on their own blogs or posting them on forums. Sometimes they even leave the links in the original article intact! Personally I think this helps create conversation but it looks like scraped content could be an issue for ranking. Should I do anything about them, and if yes, what steps should I make?

Thank you very much and any thoughts would be welcomed!

[goodroi]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

It depends on your personal situation. Adding a site-wide link may make sense for a 100 page website, but a 100,000 page site has different issues and it might not make sense.

I prefer to spend less time obsessing over how to conserve pagerank and link juice from within my site and instead focus more energy on gaining inbound links and additional sources of pagerank to all of my key pages (homepage & deep ones).

The best way I find to getting indexed is having great backlinks. Great backlinks tend to easily overcome deficiencies in most other areas.

[arutoria]

Goodroi,Thank you for your reply!

So it looks like the best method in most cases is to do what is best for the user, and not be too obsessed with site structure. This makes sense and is actually the easier thing to do!

[goodroi]

Do what is best for the user but also don't forget to keep your site technically simple so the search engines can easily crawl and rank your content. If you take anything to an extreme it can cause problems.

[Robert Charlton]

Site-wide outbound links.... The sites I linked to are all relevant sites in the same niche and some of my visitors may find them useful. Again, I am in a position of balancing the needs of my user versus the needs of Google.

Beyond the PageRank issues, site-wide outbound links might suggest to Google that there's a special relationship between the linking site and the destination sites. The arrangement can look like a linking scheme (and often is), anything from friends mutually patting each other on the back to purposeful attempts to game Google.

If you think about what's most useful for your users, you might decide that a relevant link from a specific article in your site to a specific article in another site, one that's been carefully selected, would probably be much more useful to your user, then and there, than a site-wide link. That's the way I'd look at all of your linking, on site and off.

[arutoria]

Thanks both for the reply! Looks like we need to rethink our strategy going forward.

>>The arrangement can look like a linking scheme

I had never thought about this issue before. I always thought Google understands a site-wide link does not equal to sending thousands of links to the same website, but it looks like I was wrong.

[Robert Charlton]

I always thought Google understands a site-wide link does not equal to sending thousands of links to the same website...

In terms of linking credit, this is true... ie, Google is not going to give a site receiving thousands of sitewide links from one domain thousands of links worth of credit. Some say the credit from a run-of-site link is closer to one link, and some say the credit might not help rankings at all.

Sitewides often can be a sign of coordination between sites, though, and in that regard they can hurt you.

Depending on the link profiles of the linking and receiving sites, on the quality of inbound links, the temporal patterns of link acquisition, anchor text, excessive interlinking or other signs of link coordination... Google might hold these links against the linking site, or the receiving site, or both.

If the sites involved have strong, "natural" link profiles and have established a high level of trust with Google, an occasional inbound blogroll link might not hurt, but I'd rather not have them. I assume that the linking site carries more responsibility for a link than the receiving site. Run-of-site links from large sites that are not blogs, IMO, are probably much more suspect than blogroll links. I've long thought that ROS links are completely unnatural.