News Home > SEO News
Google Engineer Reveals SEO Tips for PageRank
Google software engineer Matt Cutts revealed some interesting tidbits about Google’s search algorithm in an interview with Eric Enge which should be extremely helpful for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) purposes.
Although the interview was extensive, some of the choicest morsels revolved around page redirects and duplicate content.
Chief among these for developers concerned 301 redirects. Mr Cutts confirmed that 301 redirects do not always attribute the full PageRank from the original URL to the new URL. This had never previously been confirmed by Google but had been suspected by the SEO community for some time.
Google has implemented a natural PageRank decay for 301 redirects which means companies will have to be careful when they implement page redirects and how often they do so if they want to maintain a decent PageRank in Google search.
Mr Cutts revealed that in Google’s push for original content, duplicate matches on multiple pages of a website will pass PageRank to just one of the pages. The PageRank of the duplicate URLs is effectively passed on to the main URL chosen by Google. “What we try to do is merge pages, rather than dropping them completely,” said Mr Cutts.
Whilst this a better outcome than losing PageRank altogether for duplicate content, the important point is that Google decides which URL is given the PageRank, not developers, so in order to maintain solid ranking for important pages, developers need to avoid duplicate content.
Large websites will also need to be backed by strong servers, as Mr Cutts said that PageRank can diminish if Google’s spiders can only crawl a couple of pages at a time.
SEO News posted by Lily Townsend on 17 March 2010
Stock Tickers: GOOG
