Googly Goodness
This most recent Google dance left Kickass in good shape. The main page went from PR4 to PR5, the WebGeek Resources section, which was added since the last update, went from 0 to 5, and the WebDev Blog held steady at 6. My feelings are that my increase in both backlinks and content since the last update have factored into my increased ranking. I also feel that my clean and slim xhtml/css code helps my overall effort, since the ratio of content to code is much more in favor of content than in a traditional table layout site.
Rob Sullivan wrote recently in his article “The Good and the Bad of SEO - From Google’s Mouth!” in the SEO News Newsletter October 20th issue about a conference call he had a few weeks ago with Google Staffers which seems to validate what I feel about why my Google Pagerank increased.
Content. That’s what Google is all about. And that’s what Rob got from his conversation with Googlers. “That was a common theme throughout the call - content is king. Sure optimized meta tags, effective interlinking and externalizing JavaScrïpt all help, but in the end if the content isn’t there, the site won’t do well.”
About clean code, Rob says, “First, externalizing JavaScrïpt and CSS helps reduce code bloat which makes the visible text more important. Your keyword density goes up which makes the page more authoritative. . . Similarly, minimizing the use of tables also helps reduce the HTML to text ratio, making the text that much more important.”
There are some other things mentioned in the article, things that won’t ever apply to my own site but often come up in conversation with clients, usually because I’m trying to talk them out of this stuff. The first is the use of Flash, especially for navigation. The second is the use of javascript for navigation. These are both very bad ideas since either will almost guarantee your inner pages will not be spidered. Yet over and over again I get requests for “that fancy navigation dropdown menu like the one on such and such a site.”
Validation on this one is very clear. The Google Folks told Rob that “While Googlebot can identify links in JavaScrïpt, it cannot follow those links. Nor can it follow links in Flash.” So if you have a commercial or professional site and search engine ranking is important to you, these are hugely damaging.
Now, is this all stuff that’s been talked about before, both on my blog and in other authoritative places on the web? You betcha. But the difference here seems to be that all the points I’ve been making over and over again have been validated by people who work for Google. I just hope my clients choose to listen.
