Posted by John Mueller on 23rd March 2007
The “revisit-after” meta tag is often used by web-developers who have fallen prey to a myth that is only wishful-thinking.
<meta name=”revisit-after” content=”5 days”>
The search-engines do not read the “revisit-after” meta tag at all. It is not respected, it’s always ignored.
Posted in FAQ | 2 Comments »
Posted by John Mueller on 20th March 2007
Spam reports that are made through the Google Webmaster tools within your Google Webmaster Central account are treated with more weight than reports done anonymously.
You can access the Webmaster Central tools through http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview .
Posted in FAQ | No Comments »
Posted by John Mueller on 20th March 2007
The official statement from Google is simple, but leaves a bit of room for interpretation:
There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.
“Almost nothing” can mean a lot — how far can a competitor actually harm your ranking? Which methods do or do not work?
Posted in SEO | 1 Comment »
Posted by John Honeck on 19th March 2007
The snippet for a page is sometimes autogenerated by Google, sometimes the “description” you supply, and sometimes pulled from the Open Directory Project.
There isn’t much you can do about the autogenerated snippet. Google automatically configures a snippet that will, in their opinion, best show the bolded key words in context.
Posted in FAQ, Technical | No Comments »
Posted by John Mueller on 17th March 2007
Getting your site hacked is no longer just for the important or high-traffic sites. Whole servers are hacked at once, hacking 1000’s of sites within minutes. Testing 10 consecutive servers of a single hoster, I found one in three to one in four sites were hacked (well over 1000 hacked sites were spotted within minutes). Your site itself does not have to be vulnerable - it’s enough to hack the server.
When Google notices that your site is hacked and when the hacker is using it to trick the user into installing malware, Google will block your site in the search results and include a link to more information.
Posted in Penalties, Hacked/Hijacked, Technical | No Comments »
Posted by John Honeck on 14th March 2007
It has been suggested many places that all someone (a competitor) needs to do is submit several spam reports on your site and you will be deindexed by Google.
While it seems unlikely that it would be just this easy to harm someone Else’s site, we look to Adam Lasnik as the ulitmate authority on the subject, and the answer is NO.
Posted in Penalties, FAQ | 3 Comments »
Posted by alandoherty on 13th March 2007
here I am only discussing server side re-directs
[as all others are really just methods used to achieve the same effects by those who have no access to the server, and as such are not professional and should be avoided]
they are of two types main types [301 /pemanent] and [302 /found …] {302 is now replaced by 307/temporarily-moved but hardly in use yet}
Posted in FAQ, Technical | No Comments »
Posted by John Honeck on 13th March 2007
I wrote a rather long post about this subject, but thought I’d open it up for discussion here.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in FAQ, PageRank, SEO | No Comments »
Posted by John Honeck on 12th March 2007
When searching in Google often you will find the first result has an extended list of links to pages on that site. For example a search for Microsoft returns a result like the following:
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in FAQ, Infrastructure | No Comments »
Posted by sebastian on 12th March 2007
A huge subset of URLs posted as “why did Google deindex/downrank my site” are e-commerce sites, and in many cases the shop respectively the product pages have vanished from the SERPs. That’s not an eCommerce penalty. The cause is the nature of the beast.
Many software shops selling shopping carts have great programmers and UI experts, but no experienced Web developers and search engine experts. The result is in many cases a nice looking software suitable to guide visitors to the right products and close to perfectly supporting related business processes. The crux is, that such systems can be extremely destructive when it comes to search engine crawling and indexing.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in FAQ, SEO | No Comments »