Issue #1 – Title Tags

Google Quote (page 4):

Use the space provided – Most major search engines display approximately 60 characters from a page’s title tag in the title of a search result. These 60 characters are an opportunity to tell both users and search engines what the focus of the page is. There’s no need to go past this many characters, as most search engines will display ellipses ( … ) after this limit. Also, search engines may give less weight to words after a certain point.

Analysis:

This snippet might actually be the list revealing of all the quotes I will be discussing here. The problem is that they expanded their recommendation to include other search engines. I’ve seen 70 characters of a Title tag displayed in Google SERPs, so that’s the guideline I typically use. Google says that “there’s no need” to go beyond that character limit, but I suspect that they were talking about click through rates and not SEO. The next sentence says that they “may” give less weight to words after a certain point, which implies that you can get some benefit from words beyond their 60 character recommendation.

I see no reason to be bound by a hard length restriction. Remember that if your pages get scraped the full Title tag could end up being the anchor text of your inbound link (i.e. not just the truncated version). I won’t cut it really short for that reason. However, I do try to keep the length fairly reasonable. In a nutshell, I keep my Title tags under 12 words, but focus heavily on getting the top page keywords into the first 70 characters. Click here for more information about how to optimize Title tags.

Issue #2 – Meta Description Tags

Google Quote (page 9):

Take control of your snippet – The snippets above are great examples of why to use description meta tags. Although description meta tags don’t count in Google’s ranking (nor do keyword meta tags), the text contained in them is sometimes used in the snippet of search results. In the examples above, Google may have chosen to display a description meta tag, but as it didn’t exist, the alternative option for the snippet was the page’s content. Since the main page of Google Sky doesn’t have much text on it, the only text Google could find was the page’s navigational and boilerplate text. The Google Gadgets main page is light on text as well, so the legal disclaimer at the bottom of the page was chosen. Neither of these snippets are attractive to search users. Since you have the chance to take control of your snippet with a description meta tag, do it!

Analysis:

The underlines within the quote are Google’s, not mine. They wanted to be very clear to their product teams that Meta Description tags do not count in Google’s ranking calculation. I’m sure that most informed people knew that Meta Keywords tags are ignored, but prevailing opinion on Meta Description is still all over the place (myself included). I choose to optimize them to influence the snippets that appear in search results. However, I also think that in certain instances Descriptions can have an indirect influence on rankings as well. If spammers scrape your pages/search results often, then the Description may appear as part of their scrape along with a link to your site. In other words, you can possibly influence your off-page relevance with a well-optimized Meta Description. They may not have a direct effect on rankings, but there’s no reason you shouldn’t try to use keywords in your Descriptions.

Issue #3 – 301 vs. 302 Redirects

Google Quote (page 27):

Don’t use 302s when 301s would be more appropriate – When a 302 (temporary redirect) is used on a URL, the search engine is told that the destination URL is a temporary one and that the search engine should keep track of both URLs (the one with the redirect on it and the destination). In the example above, users will properly reach the canonical version through the 302, which is good; however, search engines won’t transfer the reputation from www.google.com/friendconnect to the canonical version through a 302, only through a 301. With a 302, the search engine says, “This destination is just temporary, so I’ll hold the reputation at www.google.com/friendconnect in case it’s used again in the future.” Avoid this situation by using a 301 to consolidate reputation.

Analysis:

I don’t recall Google summarizing the 301 vs. 302 redirect issue so clearly before, but then again I don’t read their blogs religiously. Essentially, a 302 redirect will not allow PageRank (or reputation as they referred to it in the Report Card) to consolidate at the destination URL. I’ve always stated this as essentially fact, but now we know for sure.

Issue #4 – URL Consolidation and Redirects

Google Quote (page 19):

Consolidate URLs – Although the highlighted results above all go to the main page of the service, users should never have to ask, “Which one do I click and how are these different?” Choosing one version of a URL and consolidating the others with 301 redirects or the canonical element makes everything easier for the search engine and for users.

Prevent dilution of reputation – If the same content is accessible through multiple URLs, this could cause duplicate content. This content may rank worse because its reputation is spread over multiple URLs. Consolidation of the URLs, as mentioned above, resolves this.

Allow crawling for 301 redirects – A URL must allow crawling before the search engine will recognize that it redirects. www.feedburner.com’s robot.txt file currently disallows search engines from crawling pages on the domain, so its 301 is never seen. In some cases, a site might choose to allow crawling for just its main page and block crawling on the rest of the site.

Google Quote (page 20):

Google products’ URLs take many different forms. Most larger products use a subdomain, while smaller ones usually use a directory form, with or without a slash (note that www.google.com/product is considered a different URL than www.google.com/product/ by search engines). With so many products and different forms of URLs, users face a daunting task knowing which URL format to use for which product. Such varied URL behavior can lead to 404 pages (users following broken links or directly typing the URL in) and split reputation between multiple URLs, hurting the ranking of content. The following recommendations can help with this:

• choose the easiest to remember form of the URL as the canonical (likely product.google.com/)
• be consistent with this canonical form across all products
• think of the most common URL forms visitors may try and 301 redirect these to the preferred/canonical URL or use the rel=”canonical” link element if you cannot redirect

Analysis:

As SEOs we’ve all dealt with this issue to some degree. I don’t think that they’ve said anything too insightful here. Basically, you should choose a canonical that is easy to remember and 301 redirect the others to the canonical to prevent PageRank/reputation dilution. However, there are two sentences worth noting.

The first is from page 19 in the paragraph labeled “Allow crawling for 301 redirects”. I’ve had several clients that changed their URLs and decided to disallow their old versions to prevent the “duplicate” content from being indexed. But they neglected to consider that this would effectively eliminate any link relevance that may be going to the old page from external links. Disallowing the page prevents Google from following the links and consolidating the link relevance. The same issue could theoretically arise from non-preferred forms of URLs. A robots.txt disallow in that situation would also prevent the reputation consolidation.

The second noteworthy sentence is from the last bullet in the page 20 quote. They suggest using the rel=”canonical” link element “if you cannot redirect”. This implies to me that the rel=”canonical” is not as reliable as a 301 redirect. I rarely suggest using the rel=”canonical” because I always assumed that to be the case. Reading between the lines here confirms that for me.

Issue #5 – Logo Image Linking

Google Quote (page 39):

Logo image link destination
Logo images on our products’ pages play an important role in both users and search engines’ navigation of our sites (most logos link to the main page). Making sure these link to the main page’s canonical URL can improve the flow of internal reputation and prevent 404s for users.

Google Quote (page 42):

Logo image alt text
Using brief and descriptive alt text for our linked logo images helps search engines know more about our products’ homepages. Also, the search engine learns more about the image itself, as do users who don’t load images due to accessibility or device reasons.

Google Quote (page 43):

Good! – These product main pages have logo images with alt text that includes the product’s name. Since many of our logos are used as home/main page links, the alt text of these images is basically treated as anchor text by search engines.

Be descriptive – Like many optimizations in this document, using brief, descriptive text in the alt attribute-which is treated like anchor text for linked images-is best. Above, it’s good that “Google” is present, but this doesn’t tell the search engine which Google product is being linked to.

Google Quote (page 44):

Remember that alt text on an image link is essentially anchor text – You wouldn’t create a text link to Google Analytics with no anchor text (e.g. <a href=”http://www.google.com/analytics/”></a>), so the same applies to image links.

Analysis:

I’ll be the first to admit that I abused logo image ALT attributes on many sites that I’ve worked on in the past. A couple years back Google seemed to really clamp down on their effectiveness, so I backed off that tactic completely. I suspect they discounted their value by changing the way they interpret outbound links to pages that have both a text and image link. Prior to the change, logo images were treated as the anchor to the home page because they were generally the first link. I confirmed through testing that Google now uses the first text link to a page as the anchor text. The only time an ALT attribute is used is if the page is only linked to with images. The following quote from page 43 would seem to support this viewpoint: “Since many of our logos are used as home/main page links, the alt text of these images is basically treated as anchor text by search engines.”

I find it interesting that Google would suggest using ALT attributes in this way. I got the sense that they didn’t want people to abuse it. However, they do say to keep the ALT attributes brief and descriptive, so they are not exactly condoning keyword stuffing. Also, I think they know that they won’t inadvertently trigger filtering of any Google pages since all of their products presumably have a significant amount of external relevance to validate the keywords that would be used in the ALT attribute.

Issue #6 – Triggering Sitelinks

Google Quote (page 27):

Webmasters can’t choose when sitelinks are shown; however, they can optimize their site’s organization and internal linking to improve their chances. The following can help:

• use a hierarchical site structure
• use descriptive anchor text for links pointing to internal pages
• avoid deep nesting of content behind many subdirectories

These optimizations assist both search engines and visitors as they navigate your site.

Analysis:

Okay, this actually tells us nothing in my opinion, but it is more than they’ve stated in the Google Webmaster Tools Help section. What they are essentially saying is build a user friendly and SEO friendly site with good anchor text and hope for the best. That’s pretty much what I suggest for my clients, so I guess technically this is a Google confirmation of that recommendation.

Nevermind that the comment is a blog post in itself. I think you can see why I wanted to post it here. Essentially, what all of my Google searching told me is that it is very possible to take advantage of your Google Profile for SEO purposes. I’m certain it passes PR and link relevance. However, I’m also certain that the only way you can get benefit from it is if you build some links to it. Take for example, the two other Google Profiles I mentioned in my comment. Both of those pages are clearly in Google’s supplemental index as this query shows. You can read more about researching main index vs. supplemental index Google results here.

In the end, if you just launched a site and have virtually no inbound links (like me, yay!), then you’d probably be better off developing some links directly to your site. But if you’re a little further along in the search engine optimizing of your site, then building a Google Profile might not be a bad idea. I’ll probably do it at some point. Just remember the SEO value won’t come out of nowhere. You’ll have to get some PR and keyword relevance going to it before you’ll see any benefit.

As we discuss in the basics section of our site, PageRank is a measure of a page’s relative importance on the Web based on the pages it links to and the pages linking to it. You need to be at least somewhat important to have a chance of ranking in Google. However, remember that PR is just one factor in Google’s measure of link relevance. If a 3rd party page is linking to your landing page, then the keyword relevance of that page is more important than its PR. Otherwise, paying for links from high PR pages would still be relatively effective.

You need to have some PageRank to rank well—that much can’t be disputed. Exactly how it helps is what the debate is. Essentially, the more PR you have the more benefit you will get from your internal search engine optimization strategies. You need to build a strong inbound link profile for that reason. However, you can always overcome PR deficiencies for a certain keyword by obtaining external links from highly relevant pages.

Historically, HTML site maps were created for users to find certain pages on sites more easily. This made sense because usability was not great and most sites had a relatively small number of pages. Over the years sites have grown in size and site navigation has improved significantly. For that reason, they have become relatively obsolete from a human visitor standpoint. However, they have also become unimportant to search engines for the same reasons. Improved navigation means that search engine robots will be able to find your pages, so a site map won’t be needed for that reason. If search engines can’t find your pages without a site map, then you need to improve your internal linking structure. Besides, the search engine optimization benefit of a text link from a site map page, even if it’s linked globally, will be minimal since the page will typically contain nothing but links.

As for XML sitemaps, we simply don’t see any significant benefit from having them. The only benefit we can imagine for SEO would be if your pages weren’t indexed before you created the sitemap. But since the XML file does not really pass much PR (if any), the page is most likely going to be supplemental even it gets indexed. A supplemental page won’t rank for anything and any outbound links it has won’t have much SEO value, so in the end you haven’t really gained anything.

If you don’t have anything better to do, feel free to build an HTML site map and/or XML sitemap. It’s obviously not going to hurt anything. However, you should try to find something to do that would potentially be more beneficial. Brainstorming ideas for new content or doing some link building research would be a better use of your time no matter where you stand on those two SEO fronts.

Any internal links going to your landing page are going to contain normal anchor text. However, when other Web sites link to your site, they will often link with the URL as the anchor text as in the following example:

<a href=”http://www.seocipher.com/”>http://www.seocipher.com/</a>

The anchor text in this example is the URL of our home page. If someone linked to the SEO Cipher home page in this way, then the word “SEO” can be parsed by the search engines and there would be some anchor text benefit passed through the link for that keyword. Although the benefit might not be as high as it would if the anchor text was “SEO Cipher” or “search engine optimization”, it is still better than having no anchor text at all.

So to sum up, the SEO ranking benefit you might see from having a keyword in your URL is not necessarily going to be direct. You’re not going to suddenly start ranking for a keyword simply by publishing a page on your site with the keyword in the file name. However, you might see some benefit in the long run if 3rd party sites link to your page because you are much more likely to have a keyword in the inbound anchor text. You should try to get the page’s main keyword phrase in the URL for that reason. With that said, you should avoid stuffing too many keywords into your URLs. There isn’t enough benefit to warrant the negative effects on readability. Additionally, people might think your site is filled with spam if there are 10 words and hyphens in all your URLs.