Half’s SEO Notebook

Some memorable quotes I came across so far this week in SEO forums and the blogsphere. None of them may be revolutionary or news breaking, but they resonated with me and hopefully with you too.

the reason some did not believe it for a long time is that — as is true with so many of G’s algo elements — things are co-dependent. So the addition of x 1,000 pages for site A will not have the same effect as the addition of 1,000 pages for site B, and the difference is not just limted to the pre-existing number of pages on each site. Many other factors involved.

- caveman, on the fallacy of ignoring the “co-dependency” of factors when determining the effect of one

I think many people who listen to Matt are those who are trying to rank “legitimately” in Google. That is, they are mostly concerned about sending false positives, or getting caught accidentally in a Google net intended to catch spammers. This is one good reason to listen to what Matt says — there is usually enough meat there to at least help you steer clear of big problem areas, and sometimes problem areas that only recently rose in importance.

In this case, one comment that is worth paying some attention to, I think, is

“So this is not something that a typical site owner needs to think about or worry about if they’re not adding hundreds of thousands or millions of URLs very quickly.”–Matt Cutts/SER

Here he gives some sense of the scale that would trip this particular flag — and it’s not in the thousands of urls, or even the tens of thousands. Certainly seasonal changes at completely legitimate ecommerce sites can require a couple thousand new urls at once. And Google would also have a historical record of that kind of seasonal change to help boost their confidence and trust….

- Tedster, Matt Cutts’ Adding Too Many URLS Raise a Flag

Probably just index churn. The Supplemental folks already had a fix for this ready, so it’s a matter of when some executables will be pushed. I’d expect highlighting to be working again within the next few weeks. Thanks again for mentioning this..

- Matt Cutts, regarding text in cached supplemental pages not being highlighted

Since I took Kimberly to task in a public blog I feel that the apology should come from the same place.

So, Kimberly and anyone else I offended with that particular post, I apologize. I never intended any harm but I think I may have caused some. I’ll be more careful in the future.

- G-Man, A Tip for your life…