"It boils down to a question of intent. Did you undertake to earn a profit or did you intend to play and have fun? If the former, you are entitled to the deductions; if the latter, you may not be." · Be consistent: Try to keep your internal linking consistent. For example, don't link to example.com/page/ and example.com/page and example.com/page/index.htm.


			
				
				
				 
				
				

				
				
				Health and Legal Queries Show Importance of Authority 

				

				There are a lot of elements of Google's Panda update to discuss, 
				and we've certainly
				
				discussed many of them over the last few months, but let's 
				not lose sight of the reason the update was launched to begin 
				with - to improve search quality. 

				

				
				Do 
				you think Google's search results are better now?
				
				Tell us what you think. 

				

				While quality is often in the eye of the beholder, there are 
				certain kinds of queries where the information being retrieved 
				is simply more important than others. We've talked about this 
				before, as it's been a problem in some Google results. 

				

				One example we've
				
				looked at a few times is where an eHow article written by a 
				freelance writer with no clear authority on cancer (and whose 
				body of work includes a lot of plumbing-related articles) was 
				ranking at the top of Googe's results for the query "level 4 
				brain cancer" above numerous other sources that would seem to be 
				of greater authority on such a subject. 

				

 

				Google Not Following Their Own Advice re: Duplicate Content
				
				By:
				
				bhartzer 

				

				I was looking around on Google.com and noticed over 26,000 
				(twenty six THOUSAND) pages of duplicate content on the 
				Google.com domain. Here we are trying to get rid of low-quality 
				content on our own sites and remove the duplicate content 
				because of updates like the Google Panda update...and Google 
				can't even follow their own advice. 

				

				Recently, while reading Google's own Webmaster Guidelines (http://www.google.com/support/), 
				I read the Duplicate Content section. What caught my eye 
				specifically was the 2nd bullet point on that page: 

				

				Be consistent: Try to keep your internal linking consistent. 
				For example, don't link to example.com/page/ and example.com/page 
				and example.com/page/index.htm. 

				

				It appears to me that Google is not following their own 
				guidelines when it comes to duplicate content. In fact, Google 
				has an extra 26,000 pages on their web site that should NOT be 
				there: they're duplicates of other pages on the site. 

				

				Not only is Google linking internally to their directory pages, 
				they're also linking to their /index.html pages, as well. Which 
				are all duplicates. 

				

				I have screen shots and more specific examples of this on my 
				recent blog post:
				
				http://www.billhartzer.com/ 

				

				Maybe it's just me, but shouldn't Google themselves be expected 
				to set an example here? Follow their own advice?