Lexy's SEO blog

Above, you can watch an interview with Vanessa Fox talking about factors which, to a lesser or greater degree, influence the position of your website in Google, as well as about matters that are not clear to all webmasters, such as the importance of valid code or PR. Here’s a summary of this interview.

DUPLICATE CONTENT

According to Vanessa, there’s no penalty for duplicate content; however, a website with the same or very similar content to another one, will be filtred. When people are looking for information, they should get unique websites that will not be copies of others. That’s the reason for not indexing duplicated websites.

WEBSITE’S CODE

Website’s code doesn’t seem to influence the website’s position in Google. The crawler will only focus on the text so there’s no need to care about a valid code.

SITEMAP’S FORMAT

What is important is not the format of the sitemap but choosing the easiest way of creating it. It’s your choice whether to make it in xml, txt or in yet another format. Besides, the sitemap won’t help your ranking; however, it’ll help crawlers index all your webpages.

PAGE RANK

Although Google Page Rank is one of the factors that matter in web positioning, its influence on your website’s position is too insignificant for us to pay a lot of attention to it. Instead of exaggerating its significance, just put links on webpages which will help you get more traffic as they will concern the same subject. It’s not only about Google, it’s about increasing the traffic on your website.

That was the summary of Vanessa’a interview and those were her opinions. Personally, I prefer to have valid code and to use DIV’s and CSS to create website even if it doesn’t influence my ranking. In this case there are more important things such as smaller usage of transfer and comfortable modifications in layout. Besides, do you think Vanessa would share her whole knowledge and secrets? I don’t think so