Yesterday google released their SEO Starter Guide. Quite cool and useful information for webmasters. Google says on the URL part of this document that it’s a good habit to rewrite your URLs so that they can crawl it more easy. Besides that it has many advantages for users and CTR in search results pages.

Well, I totally agree with that!

But what surprises me about this guide? Right, as you may know Google said something totally different a few weeks ago. So, Google, what should we do? Why did you publish this post about not rewriting the URLs?

Anyway, whatever Google may say about this: I think it will always be better to rewrite your URLs. As well as for users as for search engines. And Google, please don’t be so confusing in the future, because you aren’t helping webmasters this way.

Google and URLs: very confusing is a post from: arjansnaterse.nl

A little while ago I did some searches on the internet and I saw something very surprising. In the Google result pages I saw some results of http://www.google.it/notebook. Well, how can this be? What’s the only way you can show up in the SERPs? Right, to get indexed. So, would it be for real that these pages on google.it were getting indexed by Google itself? It’s time for a test!

After a check on the robots.txt, robots meta tag and nofollows there seems nothing to be that exluded these public profiles. The next check was to see for how many pages it was about. This showed up that not only google.it/notebook was indexed, but all the Google Notebook pages were getting indexed. And if you do some research on these pages you’ll find some nasty/dark links…… Was this for real?

To test this I created a new page with some non-existing text on it: asdqwertyfgh. I put a link to it in my Google Notebook (click through to see the test page) and published it. Because I don’t think the notebook are indexed by themselves I added a link to it from my blog. And what happened? After a few days my new page was showing up in the SERPs and it still is right on top (including the notebook page itself)!

So, would Google Notebook help you with link building? To be honest I don’t think it will help in Google very much. When I put some tests on more difficult keywords the results weren’t very great. However, the results in Yahoo! and Live were totally different. A link to my friend Martijn with “local search optimization” as an anchor text moved his website (In Yahoo! and Live) from #7/#8 to #1. After removing this link he dropped again to #8/#10. So maybe Google filters his own websites in there own rankings algorithm, but it definitely seems to work in other search engines.

How long does it work? I don’t know. Does Google know about this? I think they do, but they can’t do very much about it for other search engines. So, don’t wait, get some Google accounts and boost your rankings in Yahoo and Live ;-)

Update: Google seems to watch these notbooks, because a lot of ‘dirty’ notebooks are removed and give 404′s now.

Let Google.com help you with your link building is a post from: arjansnaterse.nl