Canonical tags
Do they really consolidate inbound links? How can this be measured?
Link anchor text
Do links pass relevance from the second occurrence of a link to the same target URL?
n.b. My first test results on this are almost ready to publish!
Page title
Despite the aesthetic value of limiting a page title to 70-75 characters for the SERPs or browser, at how many characters past this point will a keyword still pass relevance? 76? 150?
Meta description
Will keywords in the meta description have absolutely any affect on how relevant Google considers a page to be?
PageRank
Can you sculpt it? If so, how can you measure changes?
Bad Neighbourhoods
Can I really burn a website by getting links from bad website neighbourhoods?
Semantics
Can I get a web page to rank for a keyword just by using synonyms onpage and offpage?
URL
Can I get a website to rank purely on the virtue of having the keyword in the URL?
Subdomains
Does Google regard them as distinctly separate websites? Will links to a subdomain benefit the parent domain?
Indexation
Can I get a web page indexed by publishing the URL in plain text, with no direct link?
August 6th, 2009 at 3:49 am
This looks good David, looking forward to seeing your posts… A couple of points:
Bad Neighbourhoods – Are you going to try and burn down a site by giving it a bad link neighbourhood!?
URL – Have you seen been keeping an eye on recent test done for SEO Manchester by http://www.seomanchester.org.uk ?
August 6th, 2009 at 5:02 am
I’m more inclined to believe links will just be devalued, rather than any chance of a full site/page ban. Otherwise it would be open to competitor abuse. Besides, the difficulty would be defining what is a bad neighbourhood… it’s such an wide term.
Yeah, I’ve been watching that website closely creep up the SERPs ;) I like it.
August 12th, 2009 at 5:33 am
if you’ve got a couple of spare hours check out this thread at WPW: http://www.webproworld.com/google-discussion-forum/68650-can-inbound-links-really-hurt-you.html
My conclusion was:
“It IS possible but damned hard! And IF you are penalised because of your own or a competitors link building spamming actions then it is possible to reverse the effect with some work and dialogue with Google. But in the grand scheme of things it’s not something we should worry about.”
April 11th, 2010 at 5:07 pm
I think the bad neighbourhood thing is definitely over-rated. I also think that it has to rely on outbound links from your site rather than inbound ones because, as said, it would be open to competitor abuse if not. You would have to be linking out to some pretty spammy link farms or something to actually be penalised by the big G imo.