Gabriel Harper’s Blog

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines no longer suggests having relevant sites link to yours. They also removed their suggestion of submitting your site to relevant directories. This was brought up in Google Groups recently, and subsequently on the big Webmaster forums Digital-Point and Sitepoint. However based on the logic of these threads, which get pretty heated over Google vs. directories, Google is also suggesting that we don’t have relevant sites link to us!

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Google is against paid links.  They have made this clear by asking Webmasters to report sites that sell links, repeateadly blogging about how paid links are bad, and by evidently selecting sites to torture in their search algorithm for participating in link sales. Obviously a lot of people are upset about this - publishers want to sell advertising on their site as they see fit, and not hire programmers to understand things like “nofollow”. Search engine marketers don’t want to be subjected to Google’s guessing games. Who will be next for Google to torture?

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Many years ago I didn’t know what a search engine friendly URL was. Now I practice human readable “search engine friendly URLs” whenever possible. When I stumbled upon the concept and started moving away from dynamic URLs to friendly, keyword rich URLs I noticed a direct and immediate positive impact on how much I was crawled and how well I was ranked in Google. Is that still the case? I still use friendly URLs whenever I can, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of agreement on the subject.

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The recent launch of Cuil and the widespread press has caused more than an uproar this week. Bloggers around the Web are “calling out” Cuil on dubious press claiming to be a Google killer and show-stopper in search, when after 50 million searches on day one led many users to say… WTF? That’s not what I wanted! Many popular news channels and Internet professionals are talking about how Cuil screwed up, botches results and even has a stupid name. I have to ask - did this new search startup drop the ball or is this honestly just part of their PR campaign?

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