Hi all, Was listening to an interesting interview with Vanessa Fox of Google sitemaps with WebProNews. Check it out at http://videos.webpronews.com/2006/12/06/vanessa-fox-clarifies-the-role-of-google-sitemaps/ Not being an expert myself I found the part about Google ignoring the code of a page and only looking for usable text very interesting. How I understand it is that Google doesn’t care about code to text ratio or if your text is on top of your code. Also, does this mean Google doesn’t care about html validated pages? I am putting this into the Google forum rather than in the sitemap section since some of the points discussed are more general Google related.
That was an interesting video. Google does care about html validation at least to some degree. My experience has been if you have a page with a lot of html errors on it then the Googlebot will have trouble figuring out how to read it and put it in the supplemental index and the toolbar will show PR 0. If you fix those errors then the PR reappears. It was good that she addressed duplicate content but I wish she would have talked about cases where more than one site have some of the same content instead of just duplicate content on different pages within the same site.
Given that my website is an partially an article directory, I was hoping she would talk more about offsite duplicate contect as well. Maybe some discussion about getting out of the supplemental index would have been good, especially if the content you have isn't duplicate.
Does Google care if a web page validates? Not really. In fact, most web pages do not validate. If Google et al refused to index or penalized these documents their indexes would be much smaller. To validate your code has to meet the specific requirements of the format you are using. However, to Google and other search engines they could care less if you use <br> or <br/>. The important thing is that your code appears properly in text browsers. For example, having a mis-configured <A HREF…> tag might render just fine in FF or IE, but in a text browser it may screw-up everything that follows. As for all of the other things Vanessa said, it’s all true but you have to think about whom she is addressing. Google’s public voice is designed to be reassuring to ALL website owners. They want you to feel reassured that your documents will be indexed as long as you do not try to fool Google. What she is not saying is that good SEO techniques will help yield better results. (She’s not saying that they will not help either.) Why? Probably because Google doesn’t want to scare beginners and novices. Here is an analogy: Have you ever read one of those ‘tune-up you PC’ articles in PC Mag? The article will offer good advice that is accessible to anyone, but if you are a seasoned PC user you will probably know several better techniques, ones that a less seasoned user would be uncomfortable implementing (like hand editing your registry file). _
Yes, that would have been nice. Maybe Vanessa Fox could continue the discussion over here. She has posted on this forum before.
I'm not sure if it was the Vanessa Fox interview or another one on the site but they were saying that the PageRank in Google Webmaster Tools is more accurate than the one in the toolbar but I don't see any PageRank listed. The closest thing I see is in the Crawl Stats where it says High, Medium, Low and PageRank not yet assigned. Do you guys see your PR in there?
Brian, This is the thread you must have seen: ttp://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=192724 (add h, no live links for me yet)
It was in the same interview and as far I can see Crawl Stats is the only place showing PR which is not specific to any page.
I thought it was funny that they showed the main interviewer (sorry I don't remember his name) halfway through, looking somewhat pissed off and having a drink in the casino or bar.
weird... my crawl stats aren't showing PR. Anyone else not seeing PR in their webmaster tools crawl stats and what country are you from?