Web Marketing Strategy Update

A little-known fact about Google is that it shows different search results depending on which kind of device is used. While these differences are subtle, they are important. Mobile results are provided in the order of what will work the best on a small screen, pushing equally relevant but less compatible results further down the list. The advent of a dedicated Google smartphone crawler will make the gap between desktop and mobile search results even wider.

Impact

A study conducted by Mongoose Metrics revealed the methods used by top websites to direct incoming mobile traffic based on how the sites had presented mobile pages. The methods being used by sites were 52.52 percent server-side redirection, 2.15 percent JavaScript redirection, and 45.33 percent cloaking and dynamic serving, which involves only presenting certain assets to mobile browsers. The results obtained from each method are very different and this is important.
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For an ultimate crusader against sponsored links, Google neglected its own piece of gospel this time.

Having programmed its algorithm against paid links and “thin” content for years now, a simple search query of posts sponsored by Google unfolds a whole set of results that belie Google’s assertion that it has refined its search program to flag down paid links.

In a sponsored post campaign for Google Chrome, it has surfaced that the search engine giant roped in a third party marketer (Unruly) to get bloggers to write content about its browser and its benefit to small businesses, based on their own personal discretional views that is. Not that there was anything wrong in promoting the product, but what pickled the idea was that these posts seemed to carry links to the Google Chrome download page, including a promotional video that redirected to the download page. Also, the posts were visibly scripted and low on quality information. There was inclusion of straight links to the Google Chrome page which ideally should have been blocked as per Google’s Webmaster Tools mandate for speculative paid links.
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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].
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