Questions range from very simple and easy to answer to incredibly complex. Questions that I can’t answer usually end up being assigned to Rand or to one of our developers. I give legal questions to Sarah, and the Distilled guys take on a fair number now too. In the eighteen months we’ve operated the service, I’ve at least read just about everything.
Thus I present to you The Best of Q&A. There is no way that I’ve managed to cover the entirety of our Knowledge Base, but this is at least a sample of some of the content that has made its way through the Q&A queue.
Topics come in cycles. For a while, many questions, both public and private, dealt with PageRank. It seems that, as people’s understanding of toolbar PageRank, real PageRank and how it works improves, people worry less about what is shown in their toolbars.
It’s hard to pick which topic comes up the most, but here are a few that are recurring:
- What can is the most a website can get away with / how should a site serve different content to search engines than it does to humans without suffering any penalties?
These questions come in all shapes and sizes, from those about age verification concerns, to whether it’s okay to serve different content based upon cookies based upon returning visits. They can be difficult to answer because, as this post shows, there is plenty to debate about when this practice crosses Google’s magical line. Matt Cutts’ comment on that post seems to indicate that no cloaking is permitted. This isn’t what I want to tell people, however, as they usually present situations where I know Rand’s “pearly white hat” cloaking would be appropriate, would work and would never result in a penalty. - What can we put in our Hx tags for maximum impact?In my opinion, there is no point getting clever with links in H1 tags. Why? Because H1 tags are supposed to denote the important information on the page in question. Linking to another page with optimised anchor text suggests that the linked-to page is more relevant for that text than the page on which the link lies. So why put that in a tag that is designed to describe the current page’s content? This comes up quite a lot, mostly phrased as a question about whether this will get a site “banned.”
Other questions deal with image replacement, stylistic concerns and how many instances of each tag are acceptable.
- Duplicate content.In every way, shape and form. I don’t care how many times SEOs and search engine reps claim that duplicate content is no longer an issue, it will always be a problem for a large number of sites and for a number of reasons. People have concerns about everything from whether trailing slashes create duplicate content (and whether search engines can work this canonicalisation issue out for themselves) to how to fix massive duplication problems in large e-commerce sites.
- Internationalis(z)ation.Q&A often reflects the frustration of non-US based webmasters and SEOs who struggle with “international” problems. It frustrates the life out of them that Google representatives say things like, “I would recommend not redirecting users based on their location. This can be a bad user experience. It’s better to allow a user to choose his version based on his searches” when, as Rand points, out, Google itself geotargets its home page and its results.
It is fantastic to have the Distilled team around to look at questions like this, as they have often dealt with the issues in real life.
- Confusion over what type of links need to be nofollowed and whether one should link at all.
The FUD over paid links has made people paranoid. You knew this. However, it still surprises me what people have convinced themselves of and how much misinformation and misunderstanding flies around about links. I have had people fret about being picked off for banner advertising (which is in no way a direct, crawled, PR-passing link). In many ways, I believe last year’s crack down on paid links did more to strike fear into the hearts of regular webmasters than it did cut down on spam. Of course, it was never Google’s intention to make people fear linking. The search engine would be ineffective without links. However, the process of inflated, exaggerated information and hysteria convinced a lot of people that they were constantly on the verge of a penalty.
- Best practices for robots.txt and meta noindex, a.k.a. epic exclusion misunderstandings.
The differences between different meta robots tags and robots.txt is widely misunderstood. Many times, people can’t work out why search engines aren’t doing as they’re told, given a set of exclusion instructions. Pages excluded via robots.txt can still show up in some engines’ search results as URLs.
If a page is excluded via robots.txt and if a robot does its job properly, it won’t visit the content of that page but could still index it as a URL. Thus, any instructions a webmaster has left therein are at risk of being ignored / not seen. If a page isn’t excluded via robots.txt but contains a meta noindex tag, its contents, including its links, can be visited and taken into account by search engines, but its URL won’t appear in search results. This is why it’s still necessary to nofollow links on pages that are noindexed if you don’t want the page to pass PageRank, either at a link level or a page level.
I’ve had a few “back away from the keyboard” moments, such as when I came across a question from [very competitive, enormous website] about their money-page that ranked for [one of the web’s most competitive keywords]. I’d liken that feeling to showing up at the swimming pool and having Michael Phelps ask me for training advice.
On occasion, we receive some incredibly amusing quotes and questions as well. What follows is a small collection of excerpts from some hilarious things we’ve been asked / told over the past eighteen months. Ninety-nine percent of the time, questions are serious, but I absolutely love the ones that also make us laugh out loud:
I want to make sure that this site NEVER GETS PICKED UP AND INDEXED, CRAWLED, SPIDERED OR FONDLED IN ANY WAY BY ANY SEARCH ENGINE.
It took me a while to compose myself after thinking about what it would be like to be fondled by a search engine. My immediate mental image involved Googlebot tugging on the leg of my jeans and making suggestive comments.
Hi there. Can you recommend an attorney who knows technology and the Internet? Someone with tech patent experience is a must, so please don’t suggest your Uncle Buck.
I have a client who knows enough SEO to get me into trouble.
A little knowledge is far more dangerous than none at all.
We’ll impatiently look forward to your opinion!
We try to get to questions pretty quickly (and we’re sorry when we get behind), but this certainly made me hop-to.
We usually get visited by the G-force about once a week. BTW her indoors says that if I do not stop reading SEOmoz Tips & Tricks at gone midnight, she will sue for divorce. Great work!
Submitted just yesterday, we are a bit concerned about contributing to divorce rates, but we’re delighted to be considered essential reading!
I’ve taken a photo, chopped the person’s head off in Photoshop and put mine on it. I think it’s an improvement, but I’m wondering about the legal implications.
Undoubtedly, but I referred this one to Sarah.
And finally, one of the most intriguing question ever submitted, from one of the better SEOs in the business. I was a bit worried when I saw that Rob Kerry had submitted a query, as his SEO knowledge is pretty scary:
If SEOmoz had a pet, what type of animal would it be and what would you give it for a name?
This one had me stumped. Any suggestions?
We’re constantly trying to streamline and scale the Q&A section, and there’s definitely still room for improvement with speed of response (although, with Distilled on board, we’re getting better). That said, I should really get this published and look at today’s responses and submissions 🙂
