Googles New Webmaster Guidlines, New Guidlines?? Or am I asleep? Options

[mcanerin]

I'm in the process of attempting to write the semi-definitive guide to redirects and have been doing a lot of research and testing.

As part of this, I came to wonder how Google treated a meta-refresh of 0 nowadays and decided to start by looking at the webmaster guidlines. Since I've pretty much memorized them, I didn't expect to find anything helpful on my topic (I still haven't, but that's beside the point of this post)

Unless I'm crazy/asleep/etc, Google has very recently re-done it's webmaster guidelines:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/

Actually, they look way more helpful than they used to. An interesting read.

Ian

[projectphp]

They have certainly changed since I last read them, but I am not 100% how / where.

I actually have that as a Google alert now., so that I can keep track of when they do actually change (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[tempy]

It looks a bit more structured.

It actually looks as if they have addressed some of those irritating and often repeated myths, such as

'We don't penalize sites for "over-submitting." '

They must be sick of reading that kind of stuff.

It's interesting also that they write stuff like this;

If you increase the links pointing to these pages, it'll improve the chance that we'll find your site.

It kind of implies that you will have 'control' over the links that point to your site. Implicitly it also says that they approve of 'active' link building, which I had always assumed they were sniffy about. I.E. I always thought that a site would be considered an authority because other webmasters 'naturally' linked to you because of the high quality of your site.

Also, this caught my eye;

4. The description of my site is wrong in the results.

Google's creation of snippets is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web. We don't manually change sites' descriptions, but we're always working to make our snippets as relevant as possible.

Are they saying that the descriptions for 'Site A' in the results are sometimes pulled from the description of it the 'Site B' (and others that link to it? Or am I being too literal?

This post has been edited by tempy: Oct 8 2005, 04:31 AM

[glengara]

They're a few months old, thing I noticed was the arrival of the R word:
"Have other relevant sites link to yours."

"Submit your site to relevant directories.. as well as to other industry-specific expert sites."

They've also dropped specific mention of FFAs/link-farms for the wider:
"..avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web.."

[Randy]

Are they saying that the descriptions for 'Site A' in the results are sometimes pulled from the description of it the 'Site B' (and others that link to it? Or am I being too literal?

You're not being too literal.

As has been mentioned around here elsewhere, Google is using the [really crappy] snippet from DMOZ/ODP for many of my and other sites.

[sonnyyu]

Ian;-
Nice found.

There is a US version webmasters page at:

www.google.com/webmasters/

last time update is:14 Sep 2005 18:50:16 GMT
last revision time is:19 Sep 2005 23:10:14 GMT

www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/

last time update is:14 Sep 2005 18:50:16 GMT
last revision time is:19 Sep 2005 23:10:14 GMT

www.google.com/intl/fr/webmasters/ (French Version)

last time update is:12 Sep 2005 00:41:54 GMT
last revision time is:23 Sep 2005 22:50:55 GMT


I guess Google use some kind of CMS to manage its site. That will answer why both English versions have same time stamp and base on 23:10:14 GMT/00:41:54 GMT person did update might base at west coast of US.


My $0.01999

[tempy]

You're not being too literal.

As has been mentioned around here elsewhere, Google is using the [really crappy] snippet from DMOZ/ODP for many of my and other sites.

I remember reading that, I think. But are they also using other sites, other than DMOZ? If I link to all of my competitors web sites using completely irrelevant descriptions and keyword link text, could I subvert their results descriptions?

<disclaimer>All the above is fictitious, I don't actually have any rivals, as such, and would not do this in any case</disclaimer>

[Randy]

I've not seen any snippets other than those from DMOZ.

Frankly (Google are you listening???) I find the whole thing silly and quite troublesome. DMOZ is okay, but it most definitely is not an authority.

What ever happened to being linked to from another site not being able to hurt you?

DMOZ links are hurting my business for sure, and I have no way to get rid of them now that there's no Resource Zone anymore. Sure I know some people who are Meta's there and I could abuse that friendship to ask them to remove the sites, but that's just not my way. To me that would be akin to me asking people I know at any of the search engines to give my sites an artificial bump. Both would simply be wrong and totally unethical in my book.

The aforementioned really crappy DMOZ descriptions have hurt me on those sites that carry those really crappy descriptions are certainly hurting my click-thru rates from Google. And being the stats geek that I am, I've got the both the data and financials to prove it if Google needs something like that to convince them to re-think their decision.

<edit to add>

Unfortunately I don't expect any change in Google's policy in the near future. When will it finally be changed? Shen, not if, some DMOZ editors who have a vested interest in certain markets start going in to completely hack the the descriptions of their legitimate competitors. And it'll have to happen a lot to get anybody's attention. My prediction is that only then will Google see the light and start trusting their own internal systems to pick up a legitimate description for the snippet.

This post has been edited by Randy: Oct 8 2005, 05:36 PM

[discountdomains]

Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!

The reference to Yahoo is interesting as I thought the Jump text they use would be ignored - maybe not?

Clare

[Erik]

The reference to Yahoo is interesting as I thought the Jump text they use would be ignored - maybe not?

The outbound links in Yahoo's directory are cloaked; engines don't see the long jump URL, only the direct link to the site.

[Jill]

Erik, what do you mean by them being cloaked? How do they cloak them?

[Erik]

They do it via user agent delivery. If you go to any Yahoo directory page and roll over the outgoing links, you'll see a long tracking URL that starts with rds.yahoo.com in your status bar.

But if you "spoof" your browser's user agent (such as by using the PrefBar extension for Firefox or via Rex Swain's HTTP Viewer tool), you'll see that if your UA is googlebot, slurp, or msnbot (I don't know about the others), if you roll over the link, you'll see only the link of the other site, not all the internal Yahoo tracking arguments.

[Jill]

Hmm...interesting, I always wondered why those jump links seemed to count.

Thanks for the info!

Jill :frog:

[projectphp]

Actually, it isn't just Robots, webbug shows the same thing using User-Agent: WebBug/5.0

Seems Yahoo only show tracking links to know browsers! I guess that is a good way to make the stats more accurate.

[RedConvertible6]

They have certainly changed since I last read them, but I am not 100% how / where.

I actually have that as a Google alert now., so that I can keep track of when they do actually change (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Can you tell me how to do this?

<newbie! sorry