Comments on: 10 Things Google Wished You Knew

By: Thos003

Thos003 — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 20:34:22 +0000

Have you done any testing on stuffing your keyword meta tags? They may not use it bump you up in the ranks, but they could use it to push you down.

By: jayson

jayson — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 16:58:44 +0000

We don’t do meta keywords…This one is epic, still there are people using this one and expecting that it can help them rank. stuffing meta keyword property with all the keywords that they can put…I’d rather stick with the anchor text targeting. Thanks a lot for this post Ruud:)

By: Rana

Rana — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 16:33:55 +0000

Ruud,

Thank you for clarifying great list of “myths”. There is lot of confusion about duplicate content out there but I think point #1 made it really crystal clear.

By: Jordan McClements

Jordan McClements — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 20:35:22 +0000

In reply to Micky.

OK. Thanks!

By: Ruud Hein

Ruud Hein — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 18:20:54 +0000

In reply to Steve.

Out of curiosity: we’re talking huge amounts of duplicate content then, right? Which would equal a lot of low/NO PR pages.

By: Ruud Hein

Ruud Hein — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 18:19:51 +0000

In reply to Jordan McClements.

No: when you use a ccTLD Google uses that for geotargeting; not the server location.

Likewise, if you have a gTLD like .com, the geotargeting setting in webmaster tools trumps the server location.

By: Sal Surra

Sal Surra — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 16:25:28 +0000

Nice list of items and quotes. It’s good to revisit things like this from time to time to debunk and move on from the past. Most of this was old hat, but I’m surprised to see that Google will still rank a page even though it was block in the robots.txt file. I guess that makes sense since it’s only blocking the bot from crawling the page. When I want to remove a page from the engine I typically put a 410 if gone permanently, like low quality pages, or moved to a good page with a 301 if there is content that is relevant for it. However, even in those cases, we don’t block the engines from crawling because then the redirect or page gone tag will not work.

By: Catherine @ Affiliate Marketers College

Catherine @ Affiliate Marketers College — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 12:06:07 +0000

HI Ruud,
Yes, point number 9 about Geo targeting is interesting – thanks.
We are forever trying to work out what Google thinks and wants!
Regards
Catherine

By: Jordan McClements

Jordan McClements — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 09:31:04 +0000

In reply to Micky.

“the ccTLD is generally a much stronger signal than the server’s location could ever be..”

So this means there is *some* weight on the physical location of your server, yes? If so, are we talking minuscule amounts?

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 04:39:44 +0000

In reply to Dr. Pete.

For what it’s worth I completely agree with Dr. Pete, duplicate content in the wake of Panda can be a huge problem. My site received a -950 penalty which we are starting to shake off now that we have removed our duplicate content.