Once again some common questions on SEO have been posed to Matt Cutts, the chief of web spam team at Google. Like always, we have the elaboration on whatever he said about SEO or Google. There were 3 main questions about which Cutts enlightened webmasters around the World. The first involved No-Follow Links and whether their inclusion can mar the position of the website. Cutts answered with a straight “no”, elaborating that such links typically cannot inflict any damage on any regular website. But, he warned about excessive blog comments that tend people to report spam to Google. In such cases, Google may take manual action against the website for spamming. However, the largest search engine on the Web is considerate about the scale of abuse and does not take harsh actions unless the magnitude of the offence is severe.
The second issue posed to him was regarding websites that have scripts that can automatically generate pages on the basis of search queries by users. The pages do not offer relevant content or any at all and often contain advertisements all around the message saying that the link on which the user clicked does not have any search result. The user asked about what actions does Google take against to such websites. Cutts explained that such websites do not add value to search results of Google and violate Google Webmaster Guidelines. Rather, they yield adverse SEO results. He asked users to report about such websites and alerted webmasters to block empty pages at their websites so that they do not get indexed.
Panda is the concern in the third SEO question that has been discussed this week. The user asked about its effect and sought a way to know whether his website has been under its impact. Panda was released a few years ago followed by periodic incremental updates from Google. However, Google realised that updates were too small and affected too small a number of websites to integrate Panda into regular indexing mechanism. Generally, Panda can be avoided with good content that does not depend on short term techniques such as keyword stuffing. In reality, SEO is more about structuring of the website and its content properly to let the latter have meaningful stand on the Web. Steady increase in visitors is possible only through consistency, which can be achieved only through right strategy.