About 10 days ago, Google published a post about comment spam on their WebmasterCentral blog. They have warned that they have the means for understanding the link graph & they can determine and tackle comment spam links using algorithmic methods. They can even determine the fine-line spams that some webmasters deploy like instead of blunt spam they will say “great site!” as a comment with a keyword as their name. So in best case, you will receive a little or no SEO value at all for posting meaningless comments in other websites & blogs.
But still I doubt if spammers will stop spamming. These may be hard facts about comment spam, but comment spammers are hard nuts to crack. They perhaps just like to spam 
October has just started. Last month Google cleared their point of view on two so-called SEO factors. One is duplicate content problem & another is using keywords and description meta tags. As you might have found, this blog was down most of the time last month, thanks to the previous hosting! So I thought of updating you quickly on these two things if you have missed.
Google won’t penalize a site for duplicate content. That’s the bottom line. So actually it breaks a general myth as you can say. So what Google actually wants is diversity in results. So if you make some little adjustments your site may also be shown in search results. Otherwise there’s possibility that your site may end up as one of these.
It is a negative effect no doubt. But Google consider that most duplicate content sites are not spam. They have their own methods to detect spam & they banned them for being spam, but not for being duplicate 
Now I am coming to meta tags. Here Google confirmed the long time predictions. Google simply don’t consider keywords meta tag in SEO. The reason is simple. It has been abused quite extensively for keyword stuffing to manipulate SERPs. Suppose, you are targeting keywords that are not in your niche & getting hits for that where users find nothing about the topic. That’s why Google removed it as SEO factor years ago.
In case of description meta tag, it can be useful if Google don’t find a suitable search snippet & will use it instead. Check the above screenshot for an example. But from SEO point of view, it has no effect.
If you want to read the original posts, here is the link for duplicate content & here is for meta tags. They have cool videos attached too. Nowadays Google seem to be publicly releasing more of their point of views on SEO. It is better to know what are going to need to do clearly. When I started it was not like this. If you are a beginner, you are going to like this more
I was going through a post by Matt Cutts on PageRank Sculpting. And it really explains a few basic things on PageRank mechanism from Google’s point of view. It undermines the importance of PageRank Sculpting. If you don’t know what PageRank Sculpting is, then for a primary knowledge I can say that it is a way of controlling link juice flow within your site by making certain link portion nofollow artifially. For example, consider making “Archives” & “Category” part of your Wordpress blog nofollow. Here are a few quick things that you should know from that post:
- Nofollow link doesn’t pass PageRank juice at all. You can be sure of that.
- Now I am giving an example from that post about the link juice flow. Suppose you have 10 PageRank points on a page. The page contains 10 outbound links & 5 of them are nofollow. And there is no decay of link juice while passing. So you will think, 5 dofollow links will get 2 points each. But that is not the case. Rather 5 dofollow links will get 1 point each.
As you can see, even though nofollow links doesn’t pass PR, it consumes the PR points. So even if you mark certain links nofollow, you are loosing points depending on the number of nofollow links. So there is not much of value in doing PageRank Sculpting. That’s what you need to know as a new one in the webmaster field.
By the way, if you have some sort of knowledge & want to explore the post if you haven’t already, here is the link to the blog post.
Yeah! I have to say it is unexpected, as it happened within a month of last public PR update. As you know the last update took place on 27/28 May. And now from 23rd June people started reporting changes in PageRank. Usually toolbar PR update is released by Google in two-three moths span. So there is a reason to get a bit astonished.
By the way, this blog retained its PageRank to 2. I am quite busy with my work lately. And my posting has gone a bit irregular. But really I never get detouched to blogging. Though I am not a pro-blogger, but it is more than a hobby to me
I have seen quite a few people asking for instant-approval directory list in webmaster forums like Digitalpoint. They look for auto-approval directories so that they can get some quick backlinks. But don’t just concentrate only on it. Not only the number of backlinks but also the quality of backlinks matters, and in a big way too.
Search engines like Google consider the neighbourhood the link is coming from. If you get a link from a bunch of relevant high quality sites, it will give your site a boost. Obviously sitelinks in auto-directories can be irrelevant, less-quality & even spam. No one checks them before publishing. And spammers are always there to take opportunity of it. So backlink to your site from there may yield almost no link value. Rather if you gain an approved link from a well-moderated directory after 15-20 days, it may increase your site auhority. So don’t just run after some quick automatic links. Create a good site with content & then submit it to some well-organized manual directories. It will help you in long run. You can’t gain much instantly in SEO.
Recently I posted on a forum about a site of mine. It’s brand new & pagerank is n/a. But I mentioned it as PR0. A member was quite precise & he corrected that
Then I thought I should write a post about the difference between PR 0 & n/a. It may look same but there is a subtle difference between them.
What PR0 means: PR0 means that your site has been indexed. But due to the lack of quality of backlinks it is somewhere between PR0 to 1. If you have quite a few backlinks & your PR is still 0, then your backlinks are not relevant & quality enough.
What PR n/a means: It can mean two things. Either your site is fairly new & haven’t been online between two public PR updates (usually 3 months), or your site has been penalized by Google. So if you have a old site that had PR before but now showing a gray bar in pagerank, you should check your site address in Google search. If your site is still there in search, you can relax that you are not banned.
By the way, PR n/a can be shown in case of slow connection where the server fails to connect. So, don’t forget to check again.
Most of you register & verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools pretty soon as you start a new website. But have you verified your site with the similar service from Yahoo? As a newbie you often miss the point for using Site Explorer. Registering your site with them will allow you to access detailed stats & a few cool tools to optimize your site for Yahoo search. Detailed stats include:
- Crawled Pages
- All Known Pages
- Known Hosts on This Site
- Hosts linking to Site
- Domains linking to Site
- Hosts Outlinked from Site
- Domains Outlinked from Site
Besides you can see if Yahoo has found any errors while crawling your site so that you can rectify it.
Now I am telling you a very important thing if you use dynamic urls for tracking session ids or referrals (like http://example.com/store?prod=4&sid=jnd7234x or http://example.com/blog?src=feed). Then same pages of your site may get indexed with different dynamic parameters. Yahoo tries to resolve these duplicate pages to one. But still problem may persist. In Site Explorer you can enter default action for these parameters like removing it or replacing it with default value while indexing. Thus you can remove the problem of duplicate pages & increase your site ranking by reducing fragmentation of links & anchor text. You can learn more about it here.
You can even delete a specific url/path of your site that you don’t want to get indexed. All in all, a pretty handy tool to do SEO for Yahoo. So don’t just concentrate only on Google tools.
It is a long standing method for webmasters to choose one url version, either www or non-www (for example: http://www.yourdomain.com & http://yourdomain.com) while link building. And there is a strong point to do so. Google gets confused with these two versions of the same url while crawling links. They can treat them as separate references to separate pages even if they point to same page actually. Here lies the danger of duplicate content. Besides it may take long time before Google merges these links. So your total number of backlinks gets reduced leaving you with a less PR score. So choose one version at the start & stick to it all the way to your link building.
But what about others who may link to your site? You can’t control what url they will use. But here comes Google Webmaster Tools to help you. Register your site there & verify it, if you haven’t done it already. Use Preferred domain option from the Settings page. Now whatever your link url may be, Google will treat & convert it to your preferred version if necessary while indexing. The current links that are already indexed will get modified when the pages containing them will get refreshed in Google search index. It may take a bit of time. But you don’t have to worry about it once you are done choosing. Let Google worry for you.
I was surfing through the net when I saw some DP members pondering over if Yahoo takes care of nofollow tag in a link. I have seen people getting confused about it in some other places too. So I thought of quoting something official from Yahoo Help to remove the confusion:
Yahoo! Slurp obeys the rel="nofollow" attribute for links. web publishers and blog owners can apply a rel="nofollow" attribute to any hyperlink on their page to indicate that the link may not be an approved or trusted link. Note: Slurp may use a “nofollow” link for discovering content, but the link will not be considered an “approved” link for consideration for ranking of the target page.
This attribute works to reduce the benefits of comment abuse. For instance, websites with public comment areas can apply a “nofollow” attribute to publicly entered links to fight comment spam.
It says pretty much everything. Yahoo may use a nofollow link to find a new page but won’t consider the link while determining the rank of the page in the search engine. So you can safely say that nofollow link has no value in determining the SERP of the page as per as Yahoo is concerned.
When Google started as search engine it used to consider hyphens as blank spaces between the words in file names but not the underscores. This trend went on for several years. As Matt Cutts wrote in his blog in August 2005, Google was still considering only hyphens as the word separators. But situation has changed ever since. In mid 2007 Matt Cutts wrote a post that Google was then looking into the matter of considering underscore as word separator. The matter was not still fully resolved then. But Google’s idea & technology continued to evolve. Now they use a better word parsing method that can find words even if you don’t separate them. But still it is better if you separate them so that Google doesn’t parse it into some unwanted words.
Both underscores & dashes can be used as word separators now. I am just giving an example. I searched Google with the words “ppc web spy” screenshot. As you can see from below ppc web spy has been highlighted in the url name even if it is separated by underscores. There is hardly any difference between underscores & hyphens.
But as I have asked the question in the title “Which is Better?” Now from Google’s perspective I can quote Google support:
Consider using punctuation in your URLs. The URL http://www.example.com/green-dress.html is much more useful to us than http://www.example.com/greendress.html. We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.
So if you are a stern Google follower you will still follow the long standing word separator. Isn’t it
By the way, if you don’t know what PPC Web Spy is, I have previously written a post on it. You can check it.
