Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies.
149
votes
18answers
21k views
The Sitemap Paradox
We use a sitemap on Stack Overflow, but I have mixed feelings about it.
Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow ...
133
votes
16answers
14k views
What are the best ways to increase a site's position in Google?
What are the best ways to increase a site's position in Google?
121
votes
16answers
12k views
Site too large to officially use Google Analytics?
We just got this email from the Google Analytics team:
We love that you love our product and use it as much as you do. We have observed however, that a website you are tracking with Google ...
68
votes
7answers
4k views
Does a site's bounce rate influence Google rankings?
Does Google consider bounce rate or something similar in ranking sites?
Background: here at Stack Exchange we noticed that the latest Google algorithm changes resulted in about a 20% dip in traffic ...
32
votes
4answers
898 views
What are the most important things I need to do to encourage Google Sitelinks?
My website used to have sitelinks and now it doesn't. It's very possible that it's due to changing the website to a sidebar design instead of having an "interstitial" type landing page which limited ...
30
votes
7answers
8k views
Will having multiple domains improve my seo?
Lets say I have a domain already, for example www.automobile4u.com (not mine), with a website fully running and all.
The title of my "Website" says:
<title>Used cars - buy and sell your used ...
27
votes
1answer
1k views
Why isn't a newly purchased domain showing up in Google searches?
The domain ...
http://trello.com
... was purchased a few months ago and is now live as of a week or so ago -- and has been linked from several prominent places on the web -- but searching for the ...
23
votes
2answers
467 views
How to use rel='canonical' properly
I have 3 URLS that serve the same data:
www.example.com/product/foo
www.example.com/product/foo?id=1
www.example.com?product=foo
For Google's sake I want the URL www.example.com/product/foo to be ...
21
votes
5answers
3k views
Page appears indexed in Google but not findable for any search terms?
(Note that I am going to use screenshots here because I suspect writing about this will change the behavior over time.)
If you do a Google search for
uiviewcontroller best practices
either with ...
20
votes
4answers
2k views
Is using only https bad in a SEO perspective?
I would like to set up a new business site. I plan to direct www.example.com to example.com and only use that domain. My plan is also to only use https and not http. Does this affect the SEO for the ...
18
votes
4answers
1k views
Why isn't my website in Google search results?
I've made a website one month ago and it still isn't indexed by Google.
I haven't change any setting in the robot.txt file. I've tried to search for site:websitename.com but I still can't see it, and ...
18
votes
3answers
2k views
Using rel=canonical with syndication
I work at a site which allows syndication of content (via API's and data dumps). We are finding that a number of sites which republish our content are appearing higher in Google search results, even ...
18
votes
4answers
3k views
How can I prevent Google mistakenly offering to translate a page?
Several of my site's pages are appearing in search results with [Translate this page] next to it. When I click that it takes me to Google Translate and translates my page "from Catalan to English".
...
17
votes
4answers
908 views
How does Google put the “shine” on the “block all foo.com results” link that appears?
To repro:
Go to google and do a search (for example, follow this link to search for Jeff Atwood)
Follow the first result.
Hit back in Chrome.
Observe that the text that appears that says "Block all ...
17
votes
6answers
4k views
Why did Google stop indexing pages from our sitemap.xml?
We're seeing some pages that exist in our sitemap.xml but are inexplicably missing from Google's public search index.
You can't download http://superuser.com/sitemap.xml -- we protect this file ...
17
votes
2answers
843 views
Where can I find the full list of Google/Microsoft CDN hosted AJAX files?
While Google hosts this list and Microsoft hosts this one there are several files missing such as jQuery UI CSS. Where can I find a complete listing of all the resources offered for major AJAX CDNs, ...
16
votes
1answer
205 views
How do I prevent Google from serving a cached version of my site?
From what I understand I can tell Google to remove pages from their archive if I add the header:
<meta name="ROBOTS" contents="NOARCHIVE" />
But won't this also remove the page from search ...
15
votes
2answers
2k views
Does Google penalize .me or .tv sites?
If I am thinking about using one of the fancy country domains such as .me or .tv should I be worried about how Google treats such domains?
Or to put it another way, if all other things are equal ...
15
votes
4answers
8k views
How do you exclude yourself from Google Analytics on your website using cookies?
I'm trying to set up an exclusion filter with a browser cookie, so that my own visits to my don't show up in my Google Analytics. I tried 3 different methods and none of them have worked so far. I ...
14
votes
5answers
639 views
14
votes
3answers
681 views
Many Stack Overflow users' pages have no Google PageRank and they are not indexed, why?
If you go to my user page on Stack Overflow and you check it with the Google Toolbar, you can see it has no PageRank at all (this does happen for almost any user page, even people with much higher ...
13
votes
5answers
210 views
Other than Google, how do I decide which search engines to optimize for?
Google has extensive tools for webmasters, and good SEO seems to be directed at Google first and foremost. But what other search engines should I be worrying about?
I could look at my logs, but then, ...
13
votes
3answers
1k views
How do I get Google to show links to my site hierarchy in search results?
I have recently noticed that for some websites, Google is linking to different locations in the site hierarchy instead of just the destination page URL. For instance, searching for "Malibu Rum Drink ...
13
votes
4answers
331 views
easy tool for creating XML sitemaps? (constantly expanding site)
Does anyone recommend either
a php script that I can run as a CRON
or
somekind of thirdparty tool i can use
to create sitemaps?
My website is events bases and so the pages are pretty ...
13
votes
1answer
3k views
How Google reacts on display:none for CSS media query?
According to Google Webmaster guideline "Hidden text" is not acceptable. Which means I do have a dov containing some good amount of title or paragraph with link or images if I make it display:none in ...
12
votes
3answers
1k views
Why is loading speed of a website important for SEO?
I see everywhere on the internet how to optimize loading speed of a website but no one says why it's important for SEO.
Inevitably, there are reasons why Google has decided to take this factor into ...
12
votes
5answers
354 views
Google+1 button strategy - Combined +1s or separate +1s?
I have included the Google+1 button on my blog. Each post outputs a +1 button on the bottom. Depending if you are viewing the actual post or just the main page the +1 button will "+1" either the post ...
12
votes
1answer
239 views
Should you add version information to images on your website?
If you have images on your website that are likely to change (e.g. have a different watermark), but the same image name, should you add version information to the end of the image name, or would this ...
11
votes
2answers
723 views
Google's 200 ranking factors
When doing research on SEO you most probably stumbled upon Google's statement there are approximately 200 ranking factors. I think it would be nice to have a list of all these 200 factors.
Does ...
11
votes
6answers
2k views
Why should I use a subdomain structure over a directory structure?
I want to do blog.mysite.com but i know it will negatively impact my PR with Google. When is it preferable to structure your site like that vs mysite.com/blog? Is it only for the benefit of PR?
11
votes
6answers
570 views
Is it possible to check Page Rank of a site without the Google toolbar?
I am just getting started in SEO, and I want to check the Page Rank of one of my sites. All google docs say to use their toolbar to check Page Rank. However I'm using Chromium. I could check with ...
11
votes
4answers
421 views
Status of Crawlable Ajax?
I saw that Google had a nice proposal/standard for making Ajax applications crawlable, via #! (hash bang).
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/proposal-for-making-ajax-crawlable.html
...
10
votes
3answers
2k views
Does the Google spider render JavaScript?
Does the Google spider knows how to render JavaScript, or only HTML?
10
votes
7answers
2k views
Do dedicated IP addresses improve SEO?
I've googled that and I've found many opinions on this subject, and I'm not sure, if, dedicated IP addresses actually really improve SEO? Is it that different from shared IP address (of 50-100 other ...
10
votes
1answer
4k views
What is the purpose of google.com/blank.html
Somehow I recently ended up on http://www.google.com/blank.html
(I was browsing as I often do, opening links and doing searches in background tabs, and I usually end up with thousands of tabs, so I ...
10
votes
2answers
258 views
Is Google a reliable document search engine?
I have a site with PDFs and Word documents that I know have been indexed by Google because they appear in search results with filetype:pdf (or doc), and if I search for some very specific terms with ...
10
votes
2answers
758 views
How does experts exchange get away with tricking google/users?
I know from reading Coding Horror one of the reasons stackoverflow set up was
"Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine ...
10
votes
2answers
266 views
How to deal with overly aggressive “Link Take Down Demands”?
I've been receiving a large number of emails recently requesting I clean from link spam from my forum. Initially the emails were very polite and professional, and I was happy to remove the links. ...
10
votes
5answers
381 views
What are the best user data collection and gathering tracking tools?
I know of a few tool that help markets gather data about visitors, Google Analytic, CrazzyEgg, and KISS Insights.
What are other notable tools to help track information? What do you use?
10
votes
1answer
2k views
Is this a good approach to image Lazy Loading for SEO?
For images loaded via AJAX, or that I don't want indexed, use the data-* attribute approach:
<img data-src="path/to/image.jpg" class="js-lazy-load" />
The javascript maps the data-src ...
10
votes
3answers
404 views
Does Google Preview obey Robots.txt?
Because it sure looks like it does. For my sites we disallow the images directory and the previews are all missing images which makes the site look wonky.
Is this the case and is there a way to ...
10
votes
1answer
1k views
Is this inline-block trick involving 'font-size: 0' dangerous for SEO?
A while back, I answered this question on Stack Overflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5078239/how-to-remove-the-space-between-inline-block-elements
The problem is that elements with display: ...
10
votes
5answers
646 views
$100 coupon from Google AdWords - how to put it for the best use?
I keep getting this email with $100 coupon from Google AdWords that doesn't explain much what is it for and what can I do with it. Is it something worthy or as usual? What should I do with it?
10
votes
2answers
256 views
Google +1 something via a URL
Is there a way to +1 something via a URL, just like you would with Twitter or Facebook?
e.g.
With Twitter you have:
http://twitter.com/home?status={url}
With Facebook you have:
...
10
votes
1answer
225 views
Major Google not follow increase since introducing 301 to site
Recently we implemented Varnish in front of our web nodes so that the backend would get some rest from time to time. Since varnish is case sensitive and our app was not we implemented
a 301 in varnish ...
9
votes
2answers
268 views
Is it common, or “smart”, for high-traffic sites use externally-hosted js/css frameworks?
Many popular JS/CSS frameworks are offered via Google's Libraries API (jQuery, Dojo, MooTools etc.). Yahoo also hosts it's own YUI toolkit, as do many others.
Do any high volume/traffic sites ...
9
votes
3answers
322 views
Does Google rate the webpage by amount of visits?
there is quite extensive discussion about this topic on another website and I am really losing my confidence. The thing is that I claim that the amount (count) of visits is NOT a criteria for ...
9
votes
2answers
328 views
How do I control how often search engines visit my site?
I've been using the following line in the <head> of my sites for years:
<meta name="revisit-after" content="3 days" />
I recently discovered that it's not one of the meta tags that ...
9
votes
2answers
2k views
SEO preference for WWW or HTTP:// protocol redirection? Do www websites rank better than NON-www?
After having read various articles on this site about WWW or Non-WWW website setup, here, here and here, and after having setup a correct redirection rule in .Htaccess to at least eliminate duplicate ...
9
votes
2answers
237 views
How is Googlebot finding URLs that are only visible to authenticated users?
Here is one of my customers, performing some action after having logged in to his account. The unique token is simply an encrypted user id + timestamp.
94.254.xxx.xxx - - [02/Jul/2011:22:25:46 ...
