Recently, Eric Enge, a seasoned Internet marketer, had a revealing interview with Matt Cutts, an engineer who works for the Search Quality group at Google. Cutts is well known in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) community for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spam. Cutts also regularly advises the public on how to get better website visibility in Google.
At the PlumTree Group, we enjoy staying up to date on the new trends in SEO and tirelessly follow any change in the Google’s algorithm. Matt Cutts’ comments are especially valuable as they come from the epicenter of the engineering team that makes Google the number one search engine on the Internet.
Although the interview with Cutts provided loads of input and should be read in its entirety, the PlumTree team has selected six key takeaways, which are listed in order of what we find to be most interesting:
1. A 301 redirect does not always pass the full PageRank from the old site to the new one. Matt confirmed that this PageRank decay is implemented in Google’s algorithm.
2. To handle duplicate content issues (how to assign organic value to two or more pages with the same content), Google compares content between pages, and if duplicate pages are found, Google will decide to use one page as the main and then pass the other pages’ value to that main page. The recommendation is to let Google know, by using a canonical tag, which is the main URL, so that Google does not decide for you which page will accumulate the most value.
3. In order to achieve efficient distribution of PageRank along your site, it is vital to implement optimal site architecture. Matt suggested the following tier link method: establish three tiers and classify your pages in order of importance, so that the most important pages are in tier one, the least important pages being in tier three. Keep your most important pages in the root, then link to up to ten second tier pages from each tier one page. Finally, link to up to ten more from the second tier to the third.
4. There is no hard indexation cap, which suggests a website only has an allotted volume of potential pages indexed. Indexation, however, has limits. Google crawls and indexes sites based on the PageRank of the pages on your site, so that low PageRank pages compete internally with higher PageRank pages. One aspect that might hurt your indexation is having duplicate content on your site, which can be solved either by differentiating the content or by using the canonical tag when needed. Crawling might also be impacted by the number of simultaneous connections your server can handle.
5. Blocking a URL in robots.txt will not save your “crawl budget” because if Google finds the same URL at any other website, it will index it whether or not is blocked in your robots file.
6. Paid affiliated links are usually detected and not counted. It is important to remember that a small number of relevant, high quality links is far better than a lot of paid links or links from unrelated sites.
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