Marketing and Technicalities Go Hand in Hand

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

If you are making website changes or launching a new website you want to make sure the technical redirects and webmaster related pages are being used correctly, things like when to use a 301 redirect or when to use a 302 redirect. It might sound like not a big deal but the reality is if you get it wrong and the search engines assume you are trying to do something different than what you really are you might find yourself getting slapped on the wrist by Google.

If you own and operate your own website and you rely on its performance for your livelihood than you will have to play the role of your webmaster on more than one occasion. Google recently had a webmaster quiz and it was pretty interesting to see some of the results. Read more the quiz on the official Google webmaster blog.

Here are a couple of questions and answers that appeared on the quiz that might be very helpful to some of you:

Q: You bought multiple domain names and want them to all show the same website. What should you do with them?
A: Use a 301 redirect.

Q: Your website is not in the index 5 days after you’ve put it online; what should you do?
A: Continue working on the site.

Q: You have a country-coded domain name called example.es. To associate your site with Spain, you need to:
A: Google should already associate a domain ending in .es with Spain.

Q: Which of the following is NOT against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines?
A: Running tests on a site that result in some users seeing one version of a page and other users are seeing another version.

Q: Link schemes that can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results EXCEPT:
A: Links to other sites that you think your users will find interesting or useful.

These are just a sample of some of the most important Google questions and answers from a recent quiz. It would be in everyone’s best interest to not fight these and abide by what Google deems appropriate otherwise you could find yourself trying to dig your way out of a search engine penalty.