Ask Googleguy About Update Bourbon

Webmasterworld is currently hosting a Questions for Googleguy thread, as well as a Googleguy only thread where he answers select questions that were brought up in the lengthy Google Bourbon update threads at WW.

Highlights so far include:

• Googleguy reminds people again that Bourbon is only "halfway through".



• He suggests that Googlebot pretty much ignores any page with "&id=" in its URL - this is done to avoid indexing duplicates of pages with different session ID strings.



• Google's PageRank ™ is continuously updated by dedicated machines, the toolbar PR is only a "snapshot in time" (didn't we all know that already?).



• That webmasters should use absolute links instead of relative links on their pages, and that it is highly recommended that sites use a 301 redirect to send non-WWW requests to the WWW (or vice versa - pick one and stick with it). Furthermore he recommends that webmasters chose a single home page convention and use it consistently through the site (all links to the home page should be www.dotcomicide.com, not www.dotcomicide.com/index.html, and other variations.



• He stresses the importance of natural, organic growth of a site's links, and suggests that a site that has a "viral" growth spurt won't be harmed by a sudden influx of links (but won't be helped either) - citing as an example, a "friendster" type site that has surged in popularity, gaining massive links in recent months.



• Googleguy suggests that webmasters submitting a "reinclusion request" for a site send in detail a complete description of what the site was doing wrong, and expect at least 4-6 weeks for the request to be processed.

All in all, some great answers from Googleguy - with more to come.

Related posts:
Google Bourbon III
Google Bourbon II
Google Bourbon I
Google's Bourbon Hangover