The Good and the Bad of SEO – From Googles Mouth!

I recently had the opportunity to ask questions of some Google staffers. There were some questions I felt I needed to get verification on, so when I had the opportunity via a conference call I took it.

In this article I highlight some of the points made during the call so you know what Google thinks.

You know its bad when you take time from your holidays to come into work to attend a conference call. But that’s what I did a few weeks ago. You see I had to because I was going to have the opportunity to ask some Google employees specific questions on things that I’d been pretty sure about, but wanted to hear it right from the horses mouth.

The call lasted less than an hour, but in that time I found that there were many things I figured were indeed true. So lets start with the most obvious:

Is PageRank still important?

The short answer is yes – Page Rank has always been important to Google. Naturally they couldn’t go into details but it is as I suspected. Google still uses the algorithm to help determine rankings. Where it falls in the algo mix, though, is up for speculation. My feeling however is that they’ve simply moved where the Page Rank value is applied in the grand scheme of things. If you want to know what I think, be sure to read this article.

Are dynamic URLs bad?

Google says that a dynamic URL with 2 parameters "should" get indexed. When we pressed a bit on the issue we also found that URLs themselves don’t contribute too much to the overall ranking algorithms. In other words, a page named Page1.asp will likely perform as well as Keyword.asp.

The whole variable thing shouldn’t come as a surprise. It is true that Google will indeed index dynamic URLs and I’ve seen sites with as many as 4 variables get indexed. The difference however is that in almost all cases I’ve seen the static URLs outrank the dynamic URLs especially in highly competitive or even moderately competitive keyword spaces.

Is URL rewriting OK in Google’s eyes?

Again, the answer is yes, provided the URLs aren’t too long. While the length of the URL isn’t necessarily an issue, if they get extremely long they can cause problems.

In my experience, long rewritten URLs perform just fine. The important thing is the content on the page.

That was a common theme throughout the call – content is king. Sure optimized meta tags, effective interlinking and externalizing JavaScript all help, but in the end if the content isn’t there the site won’t do well.

Do you need to use the Google Sitemap tool?

If your site is already getting crawled effectively by Google you do not need to use the Google sitemap submission tool.

The sitemap submission tool was created by Google to provide a way for sites which normally do not get crawled effectively to now become indexed by Google.

My feeling here is that if you MUST use the Google sitemap to get your site indexed then you have some serious architectural issues to solve.

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