Webmaster World has given GoogleGuy a thread all to himself (pretty much) to allow his comments on the Bourbon update to not get lost into over-post oblivion… that thing which happens whenever Google changes it’s algorithm. (Thanks to SEO Roundtable for the heads-up)
I pulled some quotes which I thought were interesting and worthy of comment.
I recommend absolute links instead of relative links, because there’s less chance for a spider (not just Google, but any spider) to get confused.
For those who don’t know and absolute link contains the full URL (https://www.polepositionmarketing.com/emp/common_sense_algorithm_chasing/) while a relative link, used only for linking internally, contains only the path needed to get to the destination (common_sense_algorithm_chasing/). I’ve always thought that there really was no difference between absolute and relative links, though I read somewhere that absolute links place a heavier burden on the server. (I don’t know this is true, if anybody does, please let me know). I would not have considered that the spiders might get confused with relative links, after all the browser certainly doesn’t.
There are definitely more pro’s to relative linking, a single example, when we changed our URL from www.PolePositionWeb.com to www.PolePositionMarketing.com, none of our relative links needed to be changed. If we used absolute links we would have had to change every link on the site to reflect the new URL. Of course, this can easily be done with a global find/replace in Dreamweaver.
Also, I would use a 301 redirect or rewrite so that your root page doesn’t appear twice. For example, if you select http://www.yourdomain.com/ as your root page, then if a spider tries to fetch http://yourdomain.com/ (without the www), your web server should do a permanent (301) redirect to your root page at http://www.yourdomain.com/
Search engines can pick up your home page in a number of ways: http://www.site.com/, http://site.com/, http://www.site.com/homepage.htm and http://site.com/homepage.htm. This potentially creates 4 duplicate pages in the search engine index, as as we all know duplicate pages is bad. Eventually the search engines figure out that each page is really just the same page, but anything you can do to make it easier on the search engine the better off you are. I just implemented this on Pole Position Marketing so it always reverts to the ‘www.’. What I hadn’t considered is doing the same so ‘index.htm’ reverts back to just https://www.polepositionmarketing.com (without the ‘/index.htm’).
If you have an apache server you can place the following into an .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yoursite.com/ [R=301,L]
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com/index.htm
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yoursite.com/ [R=301,L]
I got the above code from the book ABC of SEO. If anybody knows a better way, feel free to pass that info along as well.
We typically show new backlink sample sets every 3-5 weeks or so. We have a bank of machines that computes PageRank continuously (and continually, I suppose; I wasn’t an English major), but we only export new visible PageRanks every 3-4 months or so.
This has been widely known (or assumed). What does that mean? That at any given time the PageRank bar is up to 4 months out of date.