Ryan in Dearborn, MI asks: "Many SEO's are obsessing about your speed comments, but I get the feeling speed will be a very minor component in ranking. Am I right, or should I be obsessing about load times as well?" … [Read more...]
Do I need to set state-level geographic targeting in Webmaster Tools?
Gus in MA asks: "Should an Hawaii tourist business (that wants to attract visitors from all over the world), specify Hawaii as a geographic target in Webmaster Tools?" … [Read more...]
Is a sale page duplicate content?
Linda in Lakewood, NJ asks: "Should a 'Sale Page' be in a robots.txt file, to avoid duplicate content? (these products are also on the site separately)" … [Read more...]
How does Google rank sites which run on non-standard ports?
Greiner Thomas from Austria asks: "How does Google rank sites which run on a different port than the standard port 80? (eg www.example.com:90/myplace) And would 'www.myplace.com' rank higher than 'www.example.com:90/myplace'?" … [Read more...]
Can I exclude certain words from Googlebot?
Youser in Siegen, NRW asks: "Is there a way to tell Google bots to exclude recurring words on a website such as 'leave comment' or 'print page' when indexing in order to improve the keyword density?" … [Read more...]
Should I spend time on meta keywords tags?
Ryan in Dearborn, MI asks: "Can you think of any reason, whatsoever, to validate spending more than 5 minutes creating meta keywords?" … [Read more...]
Can I use rel=canonical when publishing articles on different sites?
bflicker from Los Angeles, CA asks: "If we were to syndicate my written content (entire articles) to multiple domains then would we be able to use the imminent cross-domain link rel="canonical" tag to confirm which site we would like to index for a … [Read more...]
Is there a way to mark a section of a page as being less important for snippets?
Dan W. from San Francisco, CA asks: "Can Google provide a way to mark a section of our pages as being less important for being indexed/snippeted by Google? Sort of like the AdSense section targeting comments. The snippet that Google SERPs often shows … [Read more...]
How does URL structure affect PageRank?
Chris. F. Masse from the World-Wide World asks: "On your WordPress.org blog (mattcutts.com), why did you switch from domainname.com/year/month/day/sample-post/ to domainname.com/postname/ ? Has this to do with how PageRank flows within a site?" … [Read more...]
Do pop-unders affect ranking?
Biz, from the USA asks: "We got rid of a profitable pop-under ad (since we thought it the concept was user unfriendly), but then pages-per-visit and time-on-page dropped - along with our rankings. Does Google reward or penalize for a pop-under, … [Read more...]