Matt Cutts #5: How to structure a site?
Here’s the fifth in the series of videos posted by Google’s Matt Cutts to Google Video over the past year. These are important for every web developer to see. Please see Matt’s first!
Transcription
OK. As you can see I’ve got the closest thing I could get to a worldmap… Did you know that there are over 5000 languages spoken across the earth. How many does Google support? Only about a hundred. Yeah. Still ways to go.
Alright! Lets do some more questions.
Todd writes in. He says:
“Matt, I have a question. One of my clients is going to acquire a domain name, very related to their business and has a lot of links going to it”. So, he basically wants to do 301 redirect to the final website after the acquisition. The question is, “Will Google ban or apply penalty for doing this 301 redirect?”
In general, probably not. You should be OK, because you specified that it is very closely related. Any time there is an actual merger of two businesses or two domains that are very very close to each other, doing a 301 should be no problem what so ever. if however, you are like a music site and all of a sudden you are acquiring links from Debt Consolidation online, or Cheap yada yada yada, that could raise a few eyebrows. But it sounds like this is just a run of the mill thing, I think you should be OK.
Barry writes in:
”What’s the best way to theme a site using directories. Do you put the main keyword in the directory or on the index page? if using directories, do you use a directory for each set of key words?”
This is a good question.
I think you are thinking too much about keywords and not enough about your site architecture. So, this is just for me. But I prefer tree-like architecture. So, every thing branches out and nice sort of even bounds. Its also good if things are broken down by topic. So, you know, if you are selling clothes, you want to have sweaters as one directory, shoes as another directory or something like that.
If you do that sort of thing, what you end up with is, the keywords end up in directories. And as far as directories versus the actual name of the html file, it doesn’t really matter that much within Google’s scoring algorithm. I think if you break it down by topic, but make sure that those topics match well with the keywords you expect your users to type in, when they try to find your page, then you should be in pretty good shape.
Alright! Jody writes in:
“If a e-commerce site’s url has too many parameters”, so, she’s got like the punctuation monster barfing over the number of parameters, “and it is unindexable, is it acceptable to use the Google guidelines to server static html pages to the bot to index instead.”
This is something to be very careful about, because if you are not you can end up being into an area that is known as cloaking. Again, cloaking is showing different content to users than to Google bot. And you want to show the exact same content to the users as you do to the Google bot. So my advice would be to go back to the question I answered a while ago about dynamic parameters and urls and to basically see if there is a way to unify it, so that the users and Google both see the same directory. If you do something like that, that’s going to be much better. Failing that you want to make sure that what ever html pages you do show, if users go to the same page, they don’t get redirected, they don’t go somewhere else. They need to see the exact same page that Googlebot saw. That’s the main criteria of cloaking and that’s what you want to be careful.
John Wooley writes in. He says:
“I would like to use A/B split test on one of my static html site, will Google understand my php-redirect for what it is, or will they penalize my site for perceived cloaking? If this is a problem, is there a better way to split test?”
That’s a good question.
If you can, I would split test in an area where search engines aren’t going to index it. Because, anytime we go to a page, and we see different content, or if you re-load and you see different content, that does look a little bit strange. So if you can, its better to use, robots.txt or .htaccess files or something to make sure that Googlebot doesn’t index your A/B testing. Failing that what I would do is, I wouldn’t use php-redirect, I would try to use something server-side to actually serve up the two pages in place. The one thing to be careful about and I touched on this a while ago earlier in another session was, you should not do anything special for Googlebot. Just treat it like a regular user. That’s going to be the safest thing, in terms of not being treated like cloaking.
And, lets wrap up! Todd asks another question.
“Aw heck. How about a real question. Ginger or Mary Ann?”
Ah, ha ha, I am going to go Mary Ann (nodding his head).
Alright. That’s enough for another session.
Transcription thanks to Peter T. Davis
