Comments on: How does Google see my site?

By: jarvi

jarvi — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:10:17 +0000

thanks etienne, this is all realy helpful for a beginner with average intelligence like me. easy to understand, with loads of good tips to help me with my work. keep them coming and if possible plse put up some pics with girls in small bikinis to go with the blogs.

By: goodseo

goodseo — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:40:44 +0000

Hi Emil, thank you for the great questions. I do not want to reinvent the wheel but your questions surrounding the tags are covered quite well in this article. This tag typically blocks Google from indexing this page and following links on this page. However using a robots.txt file to block entire folders/files or sub-directories is the way to go if you want to deny Google access to certain areas within your site. The nofollow HTML attribute was originally designed to stop comment spam on blogs. Googleblog also covers this tag quite well and Wiki has a nice definition of the nofollow tag. Regarding your question whether one risks the fact that your website could become staccato, forced or unnatural is a real possibility if you do not create that good balance I spoke about earlier. Yes, write for humans but make sure you treat the critters the same by allowing them to see what your visitors see and steering them to a page you want them to find. Showing your visitors one thing and robots another could be construed as "cloaking". Hope this sheds a little light on this rather heavy subject :)

By: Emil

Emil — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:09:40 +0000

Thanks. This has been a great help in understanding those little critters that crawl around on my blog. I have one question, though: how does the linking to context-sensitive pages effects that other incomprehensible items such as follow-index, no-follow-index, no follow-no index etc.? Is there any relation?

Ok, that’s two questions. And a third: in following the above structure, does one not fall in the trap of actually writing for Google, instead of your readers?

By: Bronson

Bronson — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:59:20 +0000

Great post Etienne, thanks.

The site map page is like the skeleton key to your website for Google and other spiders, but it definitely helps to make other keys available throughout your site as well.

Switching off the styles and/or using a lynx viewer is a great way to get a sense of how your site looks to spiders and often helps me to find better ways to structure pages in order to improve my on-page seo.

By: Robert Bravery

Robert Bravery — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:24:40 +0000

Once again, a really good informative, down to earth article. You cover so many good basic things, with fantastic examples. This makes SEO so much easier to understand, where many might think it as some mystery guru mastery.
Although I do realize that there is so much more to SEO, what you show here is how we can o the basics right

You have to get more people to read this, as I believe they will benefit from it.