Is returning a 200 instead of a 404 considered spam?
Matt Cutts: I wouldn’t necessarily consider it spam. A lot of the time it’s not done on deliberately because if it were then people would return a 404. We do have a name for this at Google. I’m not sure whether we’ve talked about it externally before but we call them crypto 404s; crypto from the Greek meaning hidden.
So a crypto
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Yay or Nay: putting a canonical tag on individual product review pages that each points to the ‘all reviews for this product’ page for the particular product. Assuming we’re not really that keen on the individual review pages ranking.
Matt Cutts: If I understand what you are saying, imagine that you have a product page for a red widget or something like that and you’re saying you have individual pages for
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Matt Cutts: This is a little bit of a “have you stopped beating your wife” type question in that there is an assumption baked in that is not necessarily true. Specifically you are saying, “many webmasters are linking only in No Follow and that’s killing the natural way of links.”
Whenever we look at the percentage of No Follow links across the web it’s actually a very, very small single digit
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Matt Cutts: What Mcdot is referring to in this question is that if you’re registering a new domain name and you want to try and compete in some particular niche in SEO you can take a couple different strategies. You can go for something really brandable like Twitter that people will remember but isn’t necessarily keywords in the domain name or you can go for strictly the keywords in the
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Matt Cutts: Great question. So, let’s start off by pretending that you really do control everything within the website and you’re a really smart SEO and you have complete buy in from your CEOs, CTOs and all that sort of stuff. One thing I would pay attention to is optimizing for speed.
It is a slight factor in Google’s rankings. Lots of people have run tests and they have discovered if
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Matt Cutts: Honestly I’m not a huge fan of article marketing. I mean if you think about it you’re writing an article and you try to include a link at the bottom and you’re hoping a bunch of other people put up copies or mirrors or duplicates of that article and that those links might flow through.
Typically the sorts of sites that just republish these articles are not the highest
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Matt Cutts: Today we have a guest to answer today’s question. Danny how would you answer that question?
Danny: Well a lot of websites can have invalid code but render just fine because modern browsers do a good job dealing with bad code. And so it’s not that the code has to be absolutely perfect but whether or not the page is going to render well for the user in general.
It
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Matt Cutts: We relatively do a good job about that. If you only do the query “boxer” then we really don’t have any idea which one you mean for that particular query.
But suppose you take “Sterling Silver” vs. “Stirling Engine” and you misspell both of those with ‘sturling’ we’ll correct ‘sturling engine’ with an ‘i’ and ‘sturling silver’ with an ‘e’.
So we do look at context of queries to try
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Matt Cutts: Today’s question actually comes from. I seeded the page with various questions such as what are some of the projects the web spam team might tackle in 2011 and that one actually got 40 or 50 votes so I thought I would go ahead and give a quick preview of the sorts of things we are thinking about for 2011.
One of the big ones
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