I knew there was a reason I subscribe to email from Rambling About SEO. In an interview posted today, the blog managed to get some straight talk from Google's Adam Lasnik.
The Google search strategist puts out some choice information on topics often discussed by SEO bloggers. Here's a sample:
- Anchor text from inbound links: "Useful descriptive Anchor text can be great, not only for the user ... but helpful for Google to better understand what that page is likely about. On the flip side of things, (there's the) smell test, and that if something doesn't smell right, smells fishy; doesn't look or seem natural, that's going to certainly raise a red flag for us."
- Domain name wording: "I think people overemphasize the value of good domain names. ... I would say that while a domain name can be a factor in some ways how we view sites, how we view links; I would really say that it is relatively a minimal factor."
- Internal links: "What we found is that sites that have a lot of links, 200, 300, or 500, tend to have links that have not been strongly editorially vetted. We would rather see fewer links that the webmaster has actually looked over, and that they are maintaining to make sure they are still fresh."
- Dueling home-page file names: "If (the Googlebot) sees a page that is pretty much identical to something it has already seen, it will automatically make a determination regarding which page makes more sense, and it will run with this URL. ... In the vast majority of cases, it really has no negative affect at all."
Eric Enge asked the questions. Great job.
This is the kind of communication bloggers, webmasters and SEO providers need from Google, although I don't know why it usually gets done via random interviews like this and hints from Matt Cutts. The tea-leaf reading gets old.
Update: Here's an experienced SEO blogging about the same complaint.
