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I've spent most of the day going through and through and through these various google related threads and they have made interesting (contradictory?) reading. However they have raised many question, so while they are fresh I thought I let them rip.
Bit of Background
Almost all the sites that I make are database driven, mostly they are small sites with a CMS hanging off the back. I try to stick to reasonably standards compliant markup, aim for accessibility (within reason) and try to encourage my clients to avoid spam and other *devious* tricks.
Maybe I'm idealist, but I like using the web and try to make pages that I would find useful/usable. From my perspective google is primarily a tool for users (not promoters, advertisers & pimps) and a pretty damn good one at that.
Most of my pages do ok in google and I want to keep it that way and hopefully improve them a bit. Some of the things I have read to day scared me.
Question Time
A) I read SEs like html 3.2 and don't really handle recent versions that well. As one who is considering going to xhtml from here on this is a bit freaky. Should I be worried or not?
B)I used to write pages with normal url variables (ie. [dummydomain.com...] Several months ago I began implementing a different scheme where all?,& and = are replaced with a / character (ie. [dummydomain.com...]
This seems to have worked pretty well on some sites. Other sites that are still done the old way get indexed pretty thoroughly, while other old style ones don't get indexed past the homepage :(. Can anyone shed some light on this? What best practice? Is subsituting? for / considered cheating?
C) On all site I make these days I do a dicreet text link back to my homepage in the footer. I format these links like this: [mydomain.com...] so I can track it back. Lately I've been questioning the logic of this. Will google consider this duplicate content? Will it google consider these seperate pages and spread the PR accordingly?
One other thing that maybe related but probably worth mentioning is that google did no deep crawls of my site in Sept, just freshness checking. However deep content did move up in some searches.
D) A few months ago I clicked the cached link in google for one of my sites and freaked when I saw a fairly dated version appear. I have since begun putting NOARCHIVE everywhere I can. I am not cloaking, I am not being a deviate, I just want people to see current info on my sites.
I can't see that I have been penalised for this in my rankings but from GG's comments (re: 96% of people using NOARCHIVE are cloaking or otherwise tricking the googlebot) got me worrying. Again do I have reason for concern?
E) Lastly I noticed today that I have PR0 in dir.google.com, but the same site has PR5 in the toolbar? What's with that? And why? Have I done something wrong?
Cheers & thanks in advance. Hope google danced to your tune :)
C) I _think_ that will dilute your PR - someone more knowledgable will deny / confirm, no doubt.
HTH a little.
welcome to WebmasterWorld!
B. [dummydomain.com...] should be OK.
Though Google has become better in spidering dynamic pages so it seems.
>don't get indexed past the homepage.. Did you make real static links towards the inner pages (not javascript links which Google does not follow).
C. >On all site I make these days I do a dicreet text link back to my homepage in the footer..
Many Webmasters do this for various reasons. I would think Google has discounted this effect without penalising it, but maybe you could cool down a bit on this and put some of them in javascript. Then you can still log them in your statistics?
D. >I have since begun putting NOARCHIVE everywhere I can.
Check WebmasterWorld, you will find no cache for the pages. No harm in doing that. Many people feel Google has no business infringing their copyright or serving old data.
Just, if someone reports you as being spam, google might look a bit more carefull at what you are doing..
E. > PR0 in dir.google.com, but the same site has PR5 in the toolbar?
could it be that your site was recently added to Dmoz and that Google directory still has to update this fact?
Yup, all static. The site has not really changed in the last month, in August google ate the whole thing. In the last day or so its started looking a bit deeper, so I'm not really worried about this.
>Check WebmasterWorld, you will find no cache for the pages.... [snip] ...google might look a bit more carefull at what you are doing.
Sounds like common sense. I never worried about it until I saw GG's post.
>could it be that your site was recently added to Dmoz and that Google directory still has to update this fact?
Recently? Is two months ago classed as recently? If so then yes. Will hang loose and see what happens in the next couple of months.
Thanks for the replies guys.
