Wednesday, January 26, 2011

SEO Tips: Matt Cutts on Redirects, Trailing Slash plus more

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...Image via CrunchBase
  •  Should Webmasters Use the 'If Modified Since' Header? - a good standard practice, but Matt notes that it won't necessarily help you get crawled faster.
  • Should Webmasters Use 503 Status Codes for Downtime? - 03s can help avoid getting a page that's under construction or experiencing problems crawled and indexed
  • Does the Number of Outbound Links from a Page Affect PageRank? - There's no need to hoarde all of your link juice on your page and, in fact, there may be benefit to generously linking out...
  • Is a Trailing / Important in URL Structure? - Matt says he would slightly advocate for using a trailing slash simply because it clearly indicates that a URL is a folder and not a document.
  • Does Google Crawl from Multiple Geopgraphic Locations? - Google basically crawls from one IP address range worldwide because (they) have one index worldwide. (They) don't build different indices, one for each country.
  • Is It a Bad Idea to use Chain Redirects (e.g. 301-->301-->301)? - yes ideally no more than 2.