Matt Cutts of Google Discussing SEO: Session 4

Contributed by MickeyMouse August 1, 2006  
Tagged: Google

Matt explores google’s treatment of static versus dynamic pages, if google will ever notify users when a site gets hacked, and the difference between cloaking and geotargeting.

Session four continues with excellent questions and answers.

Does google treat dynamic pages different than static pages?

Both types of pages are treated in similar ways as regard to ranking. Pagerank flows to dynamic urls just as it flows to static urls.

However, Matt warns that multiple parameters in the URL can be bad. He suggests limiting it to 2 to 3 at most. He recommends limiting long numbers because the engine may feel that those are session ids. Using mod_rewrite to make the urls appear to be static is frequently worthwhile.

Looking at other dynamic sites and seeing how they are indexed in google is also useful.

Can google notify a webmaster when a site gets hacked?

This proposed warning would likely be done through sitemaps and would warn that inappropriate pages were crawled. However, Matt states that google does not have the resources to do this at this time.

Can a webmaster use geotargeting software to send different ads to users in different parts of the world? Would this be cloaking?

Matt states that google defines cloaking as showing different content to users than you show to the search engine. Therefore, in itself using geotargeting software is not cloaking.

What gets webmasters in trouble is treating googlebot differently. For example, sending users to different content based on their country is okay, but do not “create a special country” just for googlebot.

Googlebot coming from an US IP address should see US content, for example.