Googleguy Says:

For those that are nay-sayers that Googleguy is a Google employee - don't read this, don't give it any thought, and don't use/change anything on your site.

For the rest:

1. Google does not penalize web sites that use pop-up ads.

2. Participation in Google's AdSense will not get your web site indexed more quickly.

3. New web sites take time to rank well in Google.

4. New sites take time to build up PageRank - even if you have tons of links pointing to it "immediately".

5. If you have your domain hosted on a shared server that also provides other domains... Google is smart enough to recognize virtual hosting.

6. Google doesn't start indexing web sites in alphabetical order.

7. Google is not limited to 32 bit indexing (4.3 billion pages) - Google will continue to grow.

8. Avoiding URLs with "id" parameter because "id=" usually marks a session. Rename domain.com/index.asp?id=something to some other param.

9. words separated by underscores ("_") or hyphens ("-") in URLs. Google will treat "keyword-phrase" as "keyword phrase" and "keyword_phrase" as "keywordphrase.

10. TLDs (Top level domains) .com, .net, .org, etc., will not rank better than any other regional domain.

11. Google can detect hidden text/link and even innovative use of hidden text/link e.g. - blue text link in a blue table but page white background is still detected.

12. Your site description is missing in index tends to indicate... site was down when Googlebot crawled.

Just some recent comments.

Many thanks for this post, fathom. Good infomation for both practical matters and curiosity.





Many of us use virtual hosting to conserve on costs. What are the downfalls of doing this? I also notice that some virtual hosts offer additional IPs to their virtual hosting clients - how can they be beneficial?

Downfalls - None - as long as you stay away from duplcated content.

Benefits - many - particularly when diversifying your markets.

1. pop-up ads. It's obvious. Every main portal in the web with PR8 or 9 have one or more popups.

2. AdSense. I've read too the Adsense rules/TOS and I saw about the mediapartners bot.

3. New web sites take time to rank well in Google. Has really Googleguy told this? The Google results are full of new pages collected by the freshbot (or the new fres-deepbot)

4. New sites take time to build up PageRank - even if you have tons of links pointing to it "immediately". False. I make a domain on PR4 in one dance. I've done some times. You only needs ten or more PR5 domains with a link into the index page.

5. If you have your domain hosted on a shared server that also provides other domains... Google is smart enough to recognize virtual hosting. Maybe... but nobody knows if this is for good or bad pourposes and even nobody knows if really Google uses these info for anything. By the way, I'm too smart to do it.

6. Google doesn't start indexing web sites in alphabetical order. Oh God! I forgot select my domains starting "aries-***.com"

7. Google is not limited to 32 bit indexing (4.3 billion pages) - Google will continue to grow. Who told that a 32 bit programming languaje have only 4.3 billion elements? You only need to use two chains of 32 bits to have some zillions.

8. Avoiding URLs with "id" parameter because "id=" usually marks a session. Rename domain.com/index.asp?id=something to some other param. uh?

10. TLDs (Top level domains) .com, .net, .org, etc., will not rank better than any other regional domain. Have a proof? The domain name have a limited weight in the SERPs and is even impossible have two sites with identical content and links to demonstrate nothing.

11. Google can detect hidden text/link and even innovative use of hidden text/link e.g. - blue text link in a blue table but page white background is still detected. Only if background is HTML-defined, there are many ways to do it and... does Google something on te pages with hidden text? NO.

12. Your site description is missing in index tends to indicate... site was down when Googlebot crawled. What site description? The page content? bah... there are so much more reasons (but nobody really knows).

thanks fathom, as always I appreciate your reply.

Mauricio you're so funny! :-)

Must be the new Googleguy! ;)

Call me Googlicio.

Sorry just to clarify on one of the points if you have an address which lists all the news articles

www.domainname.com/news/headlines.asp

and then each article is listed on it's own url like below. Is there a problem with google picking this up

http://www.domianname.com/news/deta...?id=78&pageno=1

I have contacted google news and they said Thank you for your suggestion. We have reviewed
domainname.com/news/headlines.asp and will be including it in Google News
in the near future.

4. New sites take time to build up PageRank - even if you have tons of links pointing to it "immediately".

I can tell you from past experience that if Google sees a site get "too many" links pointing to it in a certain period of time (for me it was 1 month with well over 1000 new links pointing to a site) it will pr0 the site.

I've also known of folks having their adwords sales rep from Google have the clients' sites unpenalized by talking with the techs that look at that type of thing.

Rogue, I am curious to find out how many internal pages did you have at the time you were penalized?

sjbc...I had 161 internal pages. Why do you ask?

Just the 1,000 links didn't get anything penalized!

Nothing inbound can harm you... or competitors would just send you a 1000 links and poof -- penalty! ;)

Whose links were they, yours? Or what else was the problem?

When I have a large project on the go that takes a couple of months to complete - I preempt the ranking ability by develop links over the period.

When the site goes live the links go live -- thus Google would see these the same way as yours.

But they are not just "crosslinks". ;)

I asked because it seemed unreasonable for Google to penalize for a 1000 outbound links and you have 161 internal pages.

The links were incoming to the site that got penalized. Yes, the links were from other sites that I own. That site is still pr0'd with google, but most of the 1000 sites were not. The only variable that I can find for that site is that it got too many incoming links in too short a period of time.