Hi, I am working on Google Gurgaon office. I am watching this forum for fewdays and would like to make this points here. The Myths: 1. Links will take you to #1 - Obviously Google consider the number of links that pointing your domain, but this has nothing to do with #1. 2. Penalty on duplicate content - No, for example AP,Reuters and NYTimes has deep links with various new agencies around the world, at a specified time thousands of news websites publish the same story which is driven from a single database, so we need to penalize all 1000 websites? 3. SEO techniques and tools will take you at #1 - Up to certain limit, you can't mislead google with SEO techniques. The Truths: 1. Content of your website will attract Google and take you to #1. 2. Quality or quantity? both! 3. Your website or posts title is very important. 4. Regular updates on your content - google loves it.
harini thanks a lot for these info they match what matt cutts always say. can you tell us some details about penalties and their types? how long they last?
You are wrong. 1. Content alone cannot alone help a site to be ranked #1, you need quality backlinks to support the PageRank model.
First of all I doubt very seriously you are a Googler... Very few Googlers are approved to be able to speak out their technologies and very few would want to risk their job to do so. And 99% of all Googlers don't know much more than some of the people here about the actual ranking algorithm any more than the typical employee at Bank of America would know what was really behind a particular decision made by the board of directors. But who knows. The Myths: This is not really a myth... Enough links from relevant sites with the link text containing your targeted keywords will take you to number one regardless of the content of the page. I'm not talking about crappy, low quality blog comment links or article submission links or forum signature links. I'm talking about real links from authoritative websites. Otherwise, 1) Google wouldn't be so against paid links and 2) companies like Verizon, ATT, Travelocity, Citibank, etc. wouldn't spend millions per year each in paid link budgets to achieve rankings if they weren't getting results. There are companies paying $200-500 PER LINK PER MONTH from well know newspaper sites... just for a single targeted link w/ the link text of your choice. And they buy literally hundreds or thousands of those. You can make almost any page rank on page 1 for any term with the right inbound links from the right sites with the right link text even if the words never appear anywhere on the page. I've never thought there was such a thing as a duplicate content penalty. A penalty will keep your URL from ranking well regardless of what you do. For example, if I'm have been on page 1 for years and get penalized I might instantly be dropped to position 60+. No matter what I do from an SEO perspective I will not be able to claw my way back to page 1. But if I correct whatever was violating Google's guidelines, request reconsideration, Google reviews the site and lifts the penalty... BAM! I'm back on page 1. Duplicate content is different. The originator of the content gets full credit. The duplicate sites get their content devalued. But the duplicates can still rank on page 1. The originator just has a slightly higher score on certain content based ranking factors which gives them a slight edge, but not a guarantee that they will outrank duplicates. In fact with a few extra links duplicate pages can usually outrank the original. So I've never believed there was a 'penalty' per say. Cutts has said openly multiple times that there was no such penalty... SEO techniques can take you to #1... People mislead Google every day. If they did not then Google wouldn't need a Quality/Spam team trying to combat those fooling them with algorithm changes. SEOs will always be figuring out ways to "fool" Google... Google will always be trying to figure out ways to catch those fooling them and deal with them. However, a good SEO leaves no footprint for Google to discover. And until Google develops ESP there is a lot that goes on that they will never be able to catch or prove. The Truths: This is a total myth IMO. Content alone will almost never get you to #1 for any keyword phrase of any value. There are millions of websites and webpages out there that don't rank on page 1 but have incredible content. If I publish a page that has incredible content, but my site does not rank... that page will likely never rank because no one can find my site. But if I publish a crappy page and throw enough links at it, the page will rank. Links take you to #1... Content does not. Good content keeps people on your site once you get them there with rankings you've achieved through links (not content). Good content will likely entice other webmasters to link to your site, but content alone does NOT make you rank. It's the links which carry FAR more weight than the content. I'm not sure if you're talking about links or content... But I agree you want quality and quantity for both links and content. This has been known since the beginning of time... No new news here. I would clarify that this does not necessarily mean changing existing pages. I have pages that haven't been changed in 5+ years that rank in the top 5 for VERY competitive keywords so obviously content on a given page doesn't have to change to rank. Constantly adding new content to your site in the form of new pages is a great way to get Google to crawl your site more and more frequently and to index more and more of your pages... especially if those new pages are also getting backlinks from other sites.
Canonical did a very deep analysis, would love to see how Harini will respond to this... i also feel backlinks are important but they have to be related ones!
good post, agree with everything there except maybe the duplicate thing. we dont know that the original gets credited, and it generally looks like the version with highest PR or best links inbound wins in the SERP.
Thanks for sharing the information.....In seo content is the king..........good content and backlinks will help you out to promote your website.
4. Regular updates on your content - google loves it.- this is just may applicable on blogs but all mention are true and tested..
re the duplicate issue, Google tries to determine the definitive copy of a document. Thatdoesn't mean who posted it first, who the actual author was, or anything else. It means what google's algo wants it to mean And if the OP works for Google, I'm Serge Brin, and you're fired.