Google Algorithm Developments

Many of you in the SEO world will know the name Matt Cutts. He is head of Google’s webspam team and is often a helpful link between webmasters and Google. Recently he spoke at WordCamp 2007, a 2-day conference for Wordpress bloggers and fans. In this talk Matt shared some key developments in Google’s ranking algorithms, virtual gold dust in the SEO world!

One key development was the announcement that underscores in URLs are soon to be indexed by Google as word separators, a significant step in understanding how URLs are read by search engines. This means that a page with a name like search_engine_optimisation.html will now be found to be that little bit more relevant for the term “search engine optimisation“. So those with keyword-rich URLs such as this may soon start to see increases in their rankings.

Other interesting points that Matt answered:

• Google treats dynamic URLs no differently to static ones. What this basically means is that you won’t be penalised for having a question mark in your URL, something a few people have been concerned about. There is one condition however: the dynamic URL can only contain up to 2-3 parameters before the Googlebot begins to struggle to follow the structure.
• The number of slashes in your URL (i.e. how deep the page is in the folder structure of your site) is not a factor in Google’s rankings. This is something I suspected anyway, as the likes of wordpress blogs with a URL structure of /year/month/day/postname don’t appear to be hampered in rankings. However, it is still rumoured that Yahoo and MSN still have an issue with deep structures like this, struggling to spider all the way down them.
• The file extension you use doesn’t affect your rankings. According to Matt, .html .php .asp .jsp and pretty much any other extension is treated the same. The one file extension you should avoid? .exe

So, some much-debated subjects all put to rest.

Rik
SEO Programmer