Google’s Search Engine Optimization Documentation

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Wednesday, 4 of June , 2008 at 7:22 am

Matt Cutts posted an interesting article on his blog yesterday titled Improved SEO documentation galore! where he list a great deal of documentation related to Google and search engine optimization strategies.

Highlights include reference to documentation on the use of robots.txt files with links to Google’s, Yahoo!’s and Microsoft’s posts on the topic. he also placed a link to a PDF booklet on robots.txt written specifically for those who don’t ‘live and breathe’ search engine optimization 24/7.

Other interesting topics include nofollow, cloaking and doorway pages, the later being search engine optimization no-no’s.

The most interesting part of the post was at the end where he covered the ‘primarily for users’ topic. What I found interesting, was the change from ‘make pages for users’ to ‘make pages primarily for users’. Obviously, the intent of any web page is to provide something for users. The addition of the primarily is a response to the acceptance of search engine optimization that can be done to a page. To quote from the post:

Some people have misinterpreted that guideline as “You can’t do a single thing for search engines that you wouldn’t do for your users,” and that was not my intent when I wrote that guideline. Instead, the spirit of that guideline is that users should be the primary consideration. But it is fine to do some things that don’t affect users but do help search engines.

Matt went on to quote some basic search engine optimization techniques that could be used on page that doesn’t affect the visitor to the website.

It seems the dome of silence that has surrounded Google for so long is now starting to lift. Next thing you now Google will be pounding the social networking sites looking for Stumbles or Diggs. I wonder who will be the first to bury! Search engine optimization, and for that matter, social marketing, will never be the same again. I wonder if they will release their algorithm sometime soon?

                      Category: SEO, Search Engines