Whether you love them or hate them, Google is the number one search engine and they are not about to change the way they do things because you or I like or dislike the way they do things. Over the last few months Google have opened up a little more on ways to improve your rankings. Their latest Q&A session brought up a few good questions and some rather interesting results. Over the next couple of days I will review their answers and try to deliver back to you in simple English.
The overall theme I get from these Q&A sessions is that Google wants us concentrate on our readers. If we do that we will ultimately receive our fair share of search traffic. Concentrate too heavily on SEO at the expense of our readers and we will lose traffic. Smart operators can do both but I will leave that for the end of this series.
A good example of SEO v User Experience comes from a question on age – do older sites rank better. The short answer was no with Matt Cutts stating that Moms/Dads sites that have quality content should not be disadvantaged because of age. A new good content site will outrank an old poor content site any day. Good news for Mom/Dad sites – or any other site as well.
What about Links - links in, links out, internal links, no follow and do follow. I will leave the do/no follow situation for a minute and just look at links in general. The answer from Matt Cutts and Co was interesting and falls into what I have suspected for a while. Again, user experience. What is good for your readers? What is Natural? And – It is supposed to be the world wide web right? Can you see where this is heading.
Google expects to see links leaving as well as arriving. If you have written on the recent US Presidential election, you are one of millions. A well written site will point to others that have the same view as you, or who perhaps have a counter argument. In other words, you should have links to other sites. It is only natural that you link back to any other articles/posts that you have you written on a similar topic. As you can see, Google want a full and rounded experience for your readers. Of course, if everyone starts to linking to other sites, your site will earn it’s fair share of links as well.
What about comments – This one will surprise you. Yes, go and leave comments on blogs or social media, but be sure to welcome comments on your site as well. Comments on your site are a vote of confidence and may over time take on more value that inbound links. A page with fifty comments is a valuable as a page with fifty links coming in.
The most interesting aspect of links and comments that I derived from this Q&A session related to the no follow – do follow argument. The general suggestion was not to go out of your way to add no follow to links unless they were really needed. Their is a practice of ‘page sculpting’ which is the practice of controlling ‘link juice’ to improve a pages rankings. Google does not particularly like this practice.
I am surprised at the number of blogs I visit that nofollow on their comments – it comes standard on WordPress. If you install the do follow plugin you may find that you get a lot more comments. Their one additional benefit. If you have 50 comments, all with not follow, the search spider may consider this an excessive use of nofollow. You may have 50 nofollow links to only 10 dofollow links. This is not a ‘natural’ situation in Google’s opinion. Enable the dofollow plugin and you can turn the whole situation around.
In summary. Your page should focus as naturally as possible on the user. It should contain links to further information on other pages, either within your own site or on other sites. It should all be natural. The more comments you can generate, the more ‘votes’ your site is receiving. Users get a good experience – you get a good ranking. Sounds natural to me. Tomorrow I will continue by looking at other aspects of improving your rankings.
that part about comments as votes of confidence is interesting. it does seem intuitive, but it’s only now that i’ve seen it discussed.
would be hard though to imagine no follow blogs being penalized somehow. removing the no follow tag is probably already too technical a task for the majority of mom and pop blogs out there, after all (including for me). :O
Nice article, did they say anything about video? I am a video producer who has a site http://www.website-video.com.au/ for website video production. my site shot to first page ranking on website video production in google, but my PR is still 0 frmo just uploading videos to youtube etc, do you know of any reason why google might rank videos?
I read the transcript from the Q&A and I was actually really suprised at how bluntly they answered all of the SEO questions. In some respects, SEO is a big guessing game, but they made things a lot more clear. I was very surprised!
Great post Les! Keep them comming. I often wandered how valuable links were, I have had site park on the front page of Google with no links.
I always thought commenting (on your own site) was for user participation. it is lovely to hear they can actually carry some weight for page importance.
Thanks, great post