Hello fellow MS members ,
My name is Arindra Datta. This is my first Review on MS and I decided on this topic as, like any other webmaster , learning more on Google is The Most Important thing to me as well. I was quite impressed by achougoo’s review but found quite some points to debate further on as well impart a bit of my own knowledge as well.
Google - everyone’s favourite search engine , powers not only Google.com - the website , but also feeds the Yahoo Search Engine as well the AOL search network.As opposed to the general idea , Yahoo is NOT a search engine but a classifieds directory . It’s search results / web page matches are fed by Google.
In this review , I will concentrate on unraveling some of the Myths about Google since a nice round up was already done by achougoo on the Pro’s and Con’s and debate on that as well.
Google’s PageRank technology works on 2 factors . Before I dwelve into them , lemme say that - a higher Page Rank doesn’t necessarily mean a higher listing on search engine results(SER). The , General Page Rank is calculated from a formula derived from the no.of incoming links to your page and the outbound links from your page .
Specific Page Rank is calculated in a way where the context of the incoming links that lead to your page is valued . Meaning if a search on Indian Actress leads to your page and your site is on Fashion Design , you don’t ge point for that link. As a example , I will cite Chris Beaseley ’’if PageRank equated to search engine results rank then Yahoo, the site with the highest PR, would be listed #1 for every search result.’’
Google Toolbar doesn’t also however always show a true value. It is a approximate valuation in integer on a scale of 1-10. A change from 2-3 maybe a easy to break , whereas getting from 6-7 may take ages and you may hardly notice
when you have come down from 857 to 356 in SER pages. Also pages on highly popular networks tend to have a high page rank as Googlebot(the spider) hasn’t yet spidered Your page but only has managed to do so for the root domain i.e for e.g Yahoo ( when your site is on Yahoo/Geocities).
People also seem to think that a higher number of incoming links to their site tends to increase their PageRank. To quite some extent , this is wrong as a well medium but well organized network of sites with proper calculations and good
content can be as much helpful. It is not always the numbers . If the sites that link to you. Also at the same time , it is better not to share your reciprocal links with sites stat do not totally relate to you or your site’s content . When you will have a higher page rank , several people will be offering you Freebies to exchange links with you , do not be tempted .
A listing in DMOZ.ORG and YAHOO doesn’t give you any further bonus to your page rank :) DMOZ is a manually edited / driven directory that feeds along with Google several other SE as well. True . But the only benefit you may reap is getting your Site Description(as you had put in) printed in SER. And another thing is you may also get a automatic Local Listings (Internet/WWW/Directories/India/WestBengal/ ) and thus you have multiple listings on Yahoo.
Like many other Search Engines(SE) , google doesn’t believe in using Meta Tags, so even if you fill up your pages with Meta Tags, it hardly matters . However what does matter is to some extent the concentration of keywords and their
placement on the page . I have recently come to know that H1 tags and a Title with approximately 7-12 words is optimal for Search Engine Optimization (especially Google) .
People have a general idea that Google doesn’t index Dynamic Pages . This is because of the usage of what is known as Query String . Search Engines do not suffer from any limitations in their technology but they do know that it is possible to have infinite no. of query pages and hence they didn’t want their crawlers to be caught up spidering these as they can send it in a infinite loop.
Also many of you may have seen sites that put session informations in the url .
Like if you visit https://thatweirdpage.com and in the location bar you get to see https://thatweirdpage.com/en_US/english/index.cfm?ses=122&dt5 . Every time you revisit , this is different . Since Google has several machines crawling the web from different IP’s as well, this will tend to create problems , so it is better to hide these and have a proper and unique URL . Much can be said in this topic -
Search Engine Friendly URL’s -- maybe on a different day :)
Further-ing on a Myth I explained above , people tend to add their site’s URL to sites which are called Link Farms and FFA Pages . Google has a definite policy regarding this -- YES. Google does penalizes you when you spam search
engines and add your URL to FreeForAll(FFA) sites in order to increase the number of sites linking back to you. This happens when webmasters uses programes like SubmitWolf , Add Web Pro etc which promises to add your site to over 3
million search engines. BEWARE , 3 million search engines do not exist and Google and similar SE looks very angrily on such spamming .
But, however in spite of this , Google can’t directly penalize you for being linked ON a Link Farm . But if YOU add a link TO the link farm , you are commiting a suicide. It may so happen that not you but your competitor added
your URL to the Link Farm to hurt you. Hence , don’t worry as such. Also these sites themselves have very poor page rank , so having your link there , won’t ever help you.
Google is Unfriendly for Web Designers - ?
I beg to differ in a way , when people mention about the cache which shows a older page and not the current . But this is totally a developer’s thing to present a current version fr every visitor . On your page , you can highly use a META REFRESH tag with a value of 10 seconds so that even if the link you get from google shows a old cache , you will get a newer version immediately.
What’s more , you get to see a cached version only when the current page can not be displayed due to whatever reason or you are searching for cached version specifically. However , design wise , there is another blockage while trying to get indexed in Google i.e till date , Google doesn’t index or rank sites developed using Flash and simmilar tools . From my experience I have seen ,
pages totally or mostly created with simple text/html is ranked/indexed easily and much higher . Quite a few factors are liable for this. Like a HTML page provides you with option for having a Title, Body, keywords, alt tags, CSS and
many more such elements .
Advertising on Google does work but in a methodical way as well. If you pay money to google, you might get a small box over search engine results , but can you get a higher page rank with that ? Also people have a general tendency to
avoid advertised links ( personal opinion).
One more thing I wanted to add - Google dance , thats what it’s called - i.e the updation of it’s index happens on a monthly basis. And with every new entry , the site gets a starting bonus point or such . So don’t worry , with good content and some friendly network links will do wonders for your site on Google in no time .
I hope this writeup if published will help clear some lesser know facts on Google . If possible I will try to follow this with some more interesting tidbits on Google sometime later .