Invision-Graphics

Author: Billy Horner

The chief of Google's anti Spam department Matt Cutts reviewed web sites at the 2006 PubCon in Las Vegas. Some statements in these public reviews might help SEO companies to improve the rankings of their clients web sites in Google, Yahoo and MSN search results.

Duplicate content is creating problems for web sites

One of the web sites that Matt Cutts analyzed had a problem with duplicate content. The owner of the web site had more than 20 different web sites but re-used the same content over and over again for all the different pages.

In addition, into the head section of the pages of the different web sites the same titles, meta description and keyword tags were implemented. This is calling for major problems and certainly does not boost the ranking in search engines.

By identifying the IP addresses of the sites you own, search engines can find out which other web sites are owned by you.

Matt Cutts said that varying the duplicate pages by adding a few extra sentences here or there or by changing a few words, wouldn't work either. This means that your content needs to be original and unique for each web site, displaying information about different themes and interests. Just copied content and pasting it, will not help the web site. This additionally applies to content copied from other web sites, which is really not a clever idea.

Very big sitemaps will cause problems for search engines

Another web site had top rankings in Google but it couldn't get any meaningful ranking on Yahoo Search Results. The site had a very large sitemap (more than 100 links) that listed hundreds of articles on one page. This could trigger the filters of some search engines and the danger exists that these pages could be identified as cloaking pages. Matt Cutts suggested to split the sitemap into smaller pages with not more than 100 links on one page, this actually can prevent being black listed.

Good SEO should focus on high quality back links

If inbound links are built too quickly, they don't have a positive effect on your rankings in search engines.

You can easily create oneway links to improve link popularity in search engines:

Reciprocal link exchange should however be from related sites that have something in common with your own web site. For example if your web site is SEO related you should specifically exchange links with SEO, web design, SEO software web sites. Reciprocal link building with unrelated sites won't help much.

Avoid session IDs and query strings in URLs

Matt Cutts say's that it makes sense not to use URLs with session IDs (?=id-76). Evidence is that long URLs with many variables can cause problems with search engine spiders and crawlers. This is also explained in the Google's help centre:

"If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a [simple] text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site." It's therefore not a bad idea at all to use a text browser and take a good look at your web site. It may show you where you actually can improve the framework and set up of your site.

Having too many web sites and private WHOIS might hurt your rankings

Matt Cutts indicated that it might hurt your rankings if you have too many sites and if you use these web sites, just to display PPC ads:

He explains:

"Having lots of sites isn’t automatically bad, and having PPC sites isn’t automatically bad, and having whois privacy turned on isn’t automatically bad, but once you get several of these factors all together, you're often talking about a very different type of webmaster than the fellow who just maintains a single site or so."

If you try to cheat Google Yahoo or MSN then it's likely that one of the filters will apply to your web site and you could get banned from the search results.

Your web site should be informative and search engine friendly. If you are the owner of a web site, make sure that there are no technical errors that prevent search engines from indexing your web pages and only hire a professional search engine optimisation company to improve ranking in search results, if you cannot manage yourself.

About the Author:
Billy Horner, is one of the founders of Visual Orange Co., Ltd., a European managed web site design, seo and web based application development firm in Thailand. Permission to reprint this article is granted if the article is reproduced in its entirety, without modification, including all information. Please include a hyperlink to: Visual Orange web design company or Seo Watch when using this article in newsletters or online.