Matt Cutts Gives Talk on White Hat SEO - Google Doesn’t Hate You
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Cutts started his presentation by talking about the web site of someone who is selling patented magnetic rings which, when worn, are supposed to give the wearer immortality. The site owner claimed that he was being kept out of Google as part of a conspiracy by the pharmacy companies, who supposedly fear that the invention will put them out of business. Cutts revealed that the reason the site was banned from Google was a bit more mundane: keyword stuffing. The site boasts a 20 pixel text box; when you look at the source code, you see that the text box contains hundreds of keywords, most of them irrelevant gibberish (what does an “alien cemetery” have to do with immortal humans?). It underscored an important point: if you think Google hates you, check the webmaster guidelines.
Cutts also revealed some important details about the way Google handles various things. For instance, does the file extension in your URL matter? Matt’s answer: no – unless it is .exe. Otherwise, it will not affect your ranking in the slightest.
How about slashes in your URL? In other words, does it matter how many directories deep your page is? Surprisingly, Matt said no to this as well. So you no longer need to be concerned about this affecting your Google rankings. Matt did hint, however, that this might matter for Yahoo and Microsoft’s Live Search, so proceed with caution here, especially if you’re getting significant traffic from these search engines.
Matt mentioned one important change to how Google handles URLs that has either already been implemented or will be implemented soon: underscores will be treated as word separators. Google used to not treat them as word separators. Matt first discovered this back in 1999 – and from his point of view it was a good thing, because it allowed him to do some very geeky searches, such as FTP_BINARY, and get meaningful results (rather than pages that returned hits for either “FTP” or “BINARY”).
Of course, a lot of searchers these days aren’t quite so geeky – and even more importantly, neither are a lot of the people who create URLs. TypePad and Movable Type blogs used underscores by default rather than hyphens to separate words, so this change on Google’s part will certainly help them. Matt still recommends using dashes to separate words in your URLs, followed by underscores; either way, it is very important to separate those words! If you don’t separate the words in your URLs, the search engine will get confused and must make some kind of guess.
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