Web Marketing Strategy Update

Came across this on Kalena Jordan’s [Ask Kalena SEO blog->http://www.searchenginecollege.com/2005/09/fresh-look-at-googles-webmaster.html]. Kalena used the Internet Archive to reveal the unannounced changes Google’s made to its Webmaster Guidelines over the last year:

Don’t use “&id=” as a parameter in your URLs, as we don’t include these pages in our index.

This is a biggie. Explains why sites with URLs that include session id’s have such trouble getting listed in Google! A very convincing reason to integrate a parameter workaround if your site uses dynamically generated pages, whether they include session id’s or not.

[Whilst I agree webmasters need to check they are not using this parameter needlessly, I think it would be more accurate to say that Google doesn’t want to spider pages that use session ID’s because it leads to wasting resources on indexing (and then removing) thousands of pages that are identical but have different URL’s because of the session ID. Therefore, Google have decided that if the spider comes across “&id=” it will interpret that as meaning the URL includes a session ID, and so skip it. If that is so, mass re-labelling of actual session ID’s may simply lead Google to broaden the range of dynamic URL’s it ignores. The better solution would seem to be not to use session ID’s in URL’s at all].

Submit a sitemap as part of our Google Sitemaps (Beta) project. Google Sitemaps uses your sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.

This one was obviously added after the launch of Sitemaps and is good advice for any webmaster serious about getting all their pages indexed by Googlebot.

Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Note the words in bold have been added to this sentence sometime in the past year. Nothing to write home about here except perhaps an inkling that the ODP is not as important as it used to be.

Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”

Again, the words in bold have been added since last year. Looks like an attempt by Google to reinforce their firm stance against cloaking. Also provides their personal definition of what cloaking is, a topic that has seen great debate in the search engine industry over the past 12 months.