More tips from Google’s Matt Cutts

December 13th, 2006

The head of Google’s anti-spam team, Matt Cutts publicly reviewed some web sites at a conference called PubCon 2006 recently, and made some interesting points on SEO and spamming. Here are some of the main points that were talked about:

Duplicate content

One of the web sites that Matt Cutts analysed had a problem with duplicate content. The owner of the web site had more than 20 other web sites that offered overlapping content and overlapping pages on different URLs. Search engines can detect this across multiple domains and penalise the owner for it.

Most of the pages also had duplicate description tags which would automatically trigger the spam filters and put those pages in to the supplementary results.

Large sitemaps can cause problems

It is always a good idea to have a sitemap page linked from your home page so that Google can spider your site quickly and efficiently. The problem rears its head when your sitemap page has too many links on it (over 100) and Google may stop spidering it due to it thinking it is a spam page. Try and keep the number of links on any page below 100 and if you cant, use paging.

Use the correct case in sitemaps

Use the same case on your URLs and all of your links and sitemaps. Search engines may think that your pages are employing cloaking if some of your URLs have different cases.

Focus on quality links, not quantity

Having too many inbound links of low quality or inappropriate content can hurt your rankings, especially if they are all obtained at the same time. This will trigger the spam filters. Inbound links should always be related to your site, and be of good quality. Unrelated link farming will not help your site.

Avoid session IDs if possible

Although Google has recently changed its guidelines about dynamic URLs, it is always good practice to rewrite these URLs into search engine friendly paths. If Google comes across too many URLs with session IDs, it may not spider them.

Having too many sites may hurt your rankings

Matt Cutts indicated that it might hurt your rankings if you have too many sites and if you use these web sites just to display Pay Per Click adverts:

“Having lots of sites isn’t automatically bad, and having PPC sites isn’t automatically bad, and having whois privacy turned on isn’t automatically bad, but once you get several of these factors all together, you’re often talking about a very different type of webmaster than the fellow who just has a single site or so.” - Matt Cutts

Remember, if you try to cheat Google then it’s likely that one of Google’s filters will apply to your web site sooner or later. Black hat techniques may work in the short term, but they will fail eventually when you become reliant on them. Search engines are always working on better ways to combat spam so keep it white!