Posted by John Mueller on 7th May 2007
Many people have a lot of meta-tags in their pages. These meta-tags in the head-section are usually luggage that they carry around from revision to revision, only to have new tags added as friends and “experts” recognize that some are missing.
Which meta-tags does Google really look at, which ones do I need and which ones should I drop? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in SEO, Technical, Sitemaps | 1 Comment »
Posted by John Mueller on 14th April 2007
If a page is missing, it needs to return the code 404 (”not found”). With that code, the server can return any kind of content that the browser will display. The user will still be able to see that, but a crawler will stop at code 404 and not index the rest. There are some really good ideas about how to make a user-friendly 404 page on the web, it makes sense to read up on that.
The 301 redirect serves a different purpose: it moves the visitor and the search engine to a related page. The technical background to this is that it generally takes the search engines less time to process a 301 than to recognize a 404.
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Posted in Technical | No Comments »
Posted by John Honeck on 13th April 2007
Google hates stolen content just as much as you do, luckily there is an official channel to get that content removed, which outlined here.
Often if you file notice with the host of the site that has your stolen content on it, they will remove the site during their investigation. Since the site will then show 404’s for the pages while the site is down, you can then have it removed from Google’s search results.
Posted in Technical | No Comments »
Posted by John Mueller on 7th April 2007
Many domain registrars have a simple way of allowing you to use your domain name to point to your content on some other web-server / domain. This is often done to save costs - you can usually activate this service free of charge and use it to point to content on a free web-hoster. There are several ways of doing this and the registrars sometimes call it by different names.
The problem is always the same: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in SEO, Technical | No Comments »
Posted by John Mueller on 4th April 2007
When moving to a new domain name (with the same site) you will need to use a [301 redirect]. The 301 redirect tells the search engines that the old address is no longer valid and to pass all value to the new address. There are some details that you should look into and correct if they are incorrect.
Posted in SEO, Technical | 10 Comments »
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 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 sebastian on 9th March 2007
Operating a Web site with an incomplete setup can result in search engine invisibility, because misconfigurations can prevent search engines from crawling. Hosting services usually don’t install error handling or robots.txt for new accounts, so the Webmaster has to implement it. Here is a bullet-proof setup for Apache Web servers.
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Posted in Technical | No Comments »
Posted by John Mueller on 9th March 2007
Website redirects can be hard to check - and they can have an influence on crawling and indexing. Search engines can follow [301] and [302 server side redirects] as well as meta refresh redirects. They can not follow [javascript redirects].
If a redirect is made within your site, it is vital that you confirm that the redirect is exactly how you need it to be.
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Posted in Technical | 1 Comment »