In case you missed the Google Webmaster Central “Trick and Treats” live event today, I’m going to cover several of the myths and misconceptions that were debunked by the Google team in the question and answer segment of the live event.
The event was announced on the Google Webmaster Central Blog and was hosted by Adam Lasnik, Search Evangelist at Google. Matt Cutts was also on the panel and he provided some fantastic answers to questions that attendees submitted before the event started. Here are some of the highlights…
Introducing Crawl Error Source Report
The highlight of the event was Jonathan Simon’s discussion about the “Crawl Error Source Report”, the newest addition to the Google Webmaster’s Tools, which allows webmasters to download a report of all the 404 “not found” errors their site may be throwing. Matt Cutts made it clear why webmasters should pay attention to 404 errors on their site in his article Free links to your site which doesn’t need repeating here because Matt already did a very thorough job of explaining it.
Jonathan suggested a logical path for resolving any 404 errors that the GoogleBot may find. He also stated that fixing broken links will definitely improve your site’s crawlability, which is essential to having your pages properly indexed by Google. His recommendations :
- Fix internal links first
- Contacting external sites to have them fix links
- Setup redirects for external links that can’t be fixed
- Implement a helpful 404 page.
One thing you don’t want to do is let old urls return 404 errors thinking that the GoogleBot will eventually find the new structure. This can cause the GoogleBot to miss crawling pages you want it to crawl because it encounters excessive errors.
Valid (X)HTML Will NOT Make Your Site Rank Higher
One of the questions asked by a webmaster was if Google used (X)HTML validation as a contributing factor in ranking a site. The answer was firmly “no”, Google does not put any precedent on properly validated code. The main reason being that there are far too many older pages with useful information that would be swept under the rug if Google showed preference to properly validated documents.
Shared IP’s Will NOT Cause Rankings to Drop
Another myth that was debunked by the Google team was the old myth that websites on shared IP’s tend to rank lower than websites on unique IP’s. They even went so far as to state that if you are hosting your site on an IP that has “bad neighborhoods” on it because of a less than desirable hosting environment, you will not be penalized.
301 Redirects *DO* Pass Pagerank
Another important question asked by an attendee was concerning the changing of a domain name and using a 301 redirect to the new domain name. The Google team confirmed that if you change url’s and use a 301 redirect, pagerank and all other page attributes will be passed to the new url.
Robots.txt is Not Enought to Prevent Indexing
If you don’t want a page indexed in Google, simply using the robots.txt will not suffice if external pages are linking to it. You must use the “noindex” META tag to keep a page from being indexed by Google. Matt Cutts equated the robots.txt file to hanging a “do not enter” sign on an unlocked door. If you need to keep pages out of Google, you must let Googlebot know on a individual page basis by using the META tag to prevent inadvertant indexing.
Thanks to Google
The event was generally well received except for a few of the typical idiots from DigitalPoint who were clouding the chat room with their stupid pagerank questions. Otherwise, I personally found it very enlightening to hear some of these important answers directly from the Google search team in a live setting.
The WebEx software that was used to host the event functioned smoothly and I listened in using my Sony wireless headphones which allowed me to roam around the house while tuned into the event. Overall, it was a very positive move by Google to bring interested webmasters into a live event like this. Hopefully Google will make use of this format in the future and provide more events for those of us who prefer direct answers rather than listening to all the “self proclaimed” experts and bloggers who might not know what they are talking about.
Happy Publishing
Dave
Too bad I missed out on this but thanks for posting a recap of what went on.
[…] Tricks and Treats" live event you would have heard Matt Cutts dispel this myth along with several other myths The Google team in the event also made it clear that pagerank and all other page attributes will […]
You have pretty much address some of my doubts and one of them is whether PR can be transferred to the new url via 301 redirect but is there any official article from the big G herself.
This article of yours kinda changes my perspective on a lot of issues I’ve been wanting to clarify myself. Thanks for sharing it with us and oh ya, thanks for the visit to my site too.
Yan
It’s great to hear the official word from the Google team, thanks for posting this, cleared up a few common misconceptions.
Finally official news straight from Google. Helped a lot, thanks
I’d always wondered about the 301 redirect/link juice passing. Thanks for the info!
Cheers for the useful info, slightly surprised Google doesn’t rate valid code slightly higher (seeing how they are always on about providing the user “a good quality experience”), nice to know about the 301 redirect (not sure what this means in relation to cloaking affiliate links, does the affiliate site get increased rep?
With Web 2.0 (if you will) things are always changing. It’s good to get some straight talk directly from Google. Weather you like it or not it’s good to be in the know.
That’s a very interesting bit of information, thanks for posting. I particularly found this bit interesting - “Valid (X)HTML Will NOT Make Your Site Rank Higher” as i often questioned that myself and still wondered it until now.
Nice to hear firm confirmation on valid xhtml… their logic of valuing content over coding makes perfect sense.
I think it sucks that a robot.txt won’t stop a page from getting indexed. Noindex is hard to use if you are running dynamically created pages.
Thank you for this great post. On my blog I commented about the downside of this recent change: keywords may show as “active”, when they are really “inactive”. This complicates bidding optimization, and makes it very difficult to accurately judge when it is ok to delete keywords with no impressions.
Finally some news straight from Google.Thanks you helped a lot
This is an excellent blog post. It’s important as I am planning to do a 301 redirect with a client’s site and was wondering about page rank.
“Valid (X)HTML Will NOT Make Your Site Rank Higher” and “Shared IP’s Will NOT Cause Rankings to Drop”.
This were two major myths to kill. I have heard several so-called SEO expert telling that thoose ones could give you troubles.
Thanks for clearing up the ‘xhtml’ myth for me. I’ve spent all day yesterday validating my site for xhtml. I guess it was a waste of time :(
my God, i thought you were going to chip in with some decisive insght at the end there, not leave it with ‘we leave it to you to decide’.
You are a very smart person!
This is extremely interesting to me. Thank You
You have to make your site a Google friend!
nice to read that you think I’m a gold mine, as we actually have professional writers, trained into seo, not the other way around :)
I didn’t know you could get this much information from Google. Thanks for the insights. Keep working ,great job!