JLH Design

Reid from Google Webmaster Help Group fame, search quality fortune, and Google glory offered some more answers to more webmaster questions. You can watch the video for his answers.

Even More Webmaster Questions

He answered an interesting question that’s been tested several times by several people but this is the first official mention I can recall.

….wanted to know if Google will follow links on a page using the “noindex” attribute in the “robots” meta tag. To answer this question, Googlebot will follow links on a page which uses the meta “noindex” tag, but that page will not appear in our search results…

What does that mean for you? Well if you’ve got nosy competitors wandering around your link profile as some like to do you can still feed links to a site but keep that page out of the index and away from prying eyes (besides of course through navigation and other lesser search engines). It’s an old trick now but a good one to keep in the arsenal, specially for initial feeder links.

I originally hinted at this in my Don’t Use Robots.txt to Control Indexing post.

A follow up question I’d have is whether or not pages that are not indexed and blocked from being so have to conform to webmaster guidelines or does the site pay a price for having non-conforming pages that are not indexed?  I’ll leave it to the reader to think of the loopholes that exist for either possible answer to that question.

Nice URL.

What they said:

Google’s help document, “Creating a Google-friendly URL structure” currently says:

Consider organizing your content so that URLs are constructed logically and in a manner that is most intelligible to humans (when possible, readable words rather than long ID numbers). For example, if you’re searching for information about aviation, a URL like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation will help you decide whether to click that link. A URL like http://www.example.com/index.php?id_sezione=360&sid=3a5ebc944f41daa6f849f730f1, is much less appealing to users.

Overly complex URLs, especially those containing multiple parameters, can cause a problems for crawlers by creating unnecessarily high numbers of URLs that point to identical or similar content on your site. As a result, Googlebot may consume much more bandwidth than necessary, or may be unable to completely index all the content on your site

They also say on their “Dynamic Pages” help article:

If you’re concerned that your dynamically generated pages are being ignored, you may want to consider creating static copies of these pages for our crawler

What they do:

The articles above are found at the URLs:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=76329&t [screenshot]
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34431&ctx=sibling [screenshot]

I don’t know about you, as you’re probably smarter than me, but intuitively “76329″ does not mean Google friendly URLs, and “34431″ doesn’t scream click me for information on Dynamic URLs.

What they say now:

In their latest blog post “Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs” they have taken a different position.

Providing search engines with dynamic URLs should be favored over hiding parameters to make them look static.

One recommendation is to avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it look static

I don’t know what to think now. I don’t want to rip an author as my own blog tagline is “Terrible writing and mere conjecture” but this blog post looks like both. It appears that they are trying to help people who cannot figure out URL writing and saying not to worry about it, but it is written so obtusely that anyone that cannot rewrite URLs surely isn’t going to understand that article. The fact that they contradict all previous documentation only further confuses me.

I think I’ll wait for this shit storm to settle out but for now I am going to abide by the old axiom of designing your site for users and not search engines and as a user I am much more likely to understand what:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/dynamic-pages/
Is about than:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34431&ctx=sibling

Since Google cannot figure out that a page which lists every article on the site is indeed a sitemap I cannot believe that they can figure out how to handle session IDs and numeric references to pages either.

I’m sure the millions of readers headed my warning about Twitter caving to mattcuttsean-like pressures and nofollowing everything on your profile back on 7/22/08. So this is no surprise to you, but twitter has finally pulled the plug on that loophole.

The web educated amongst you will add twitter.com to your well maintained nofollow reciprocity list in your plug-ins I’m sure.

As pointed out in my original post, I still find it incredibly stunning that @mattcutts offers @ev advice on furthering the nofollow carnage while ignoring the actually helpful advice that would #1) decrease their server load, and #2) decrease Google’s own crawler load.

I guess we’ll see who twitter is more interested in pleasing, it’s users by reducing the server load with a simple url canonicalization fix or Google with their cure-all rel=”nofollow”, by which is fixed first.

I’m not sure if it’s because lcase() is so hard for them to implement or that bowing to Google’s pressure is more important for the eventual buyout price, but their problems persist, now with the added benefit of HTTPS versions! Nice.

As always and of course follow me on Twitter I’ll follow you back if you #1) update regularly and #2) don’t use it primarily as a bastardized IM service with too many ‘@’ twits.

I’d loose my Google fanboy status if I didn’t mention it. It’s a web browser. Made by Google. But apparently with less flexibility than the current 900 other browsers available, just more Googlier and faster.

This announcement coupled with the recent Google wikipedia Knol project makes me giddy with excitement for the next Google innovation: Google Wheel Beta. This will be a much more Googlier wheel and available in only red or yellow, and of course roundier.

Which will be followed up with the much rumored Google Ten Piece Hammer (pictures not available at time of publication)