An interview with a member of the Search Quality Team
- 5th September 2008
- SEO
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Yesterday one of my favourite blogs published an interview with a Polish member of the Search Quality Team. His name’s Kaspar Szymański but he’s mostly known as Guglarz on Google Groups. The interview was conducted by Cezary Lech.
Who is Guglarz?
Guglarz (Kaspar Szymański) has been a member of the Search Quality Team for two and a half year now. He works in Dublin and his main goal is to fight with spam techniques, as well as keeping contact with webmasters.
What is Guglarz mainly known for?
- fighting against all types of copies (such as Wiki copies) and automatically generated website directories - you can read more about it in the article about site content and use of web catalogues;
- fighting against unnatural linking which main aim is to flow the Google PageRank and influence the SERPs. This includes link exchange systems and linking to websites that has no topic connection to ours;
- he’s the guy who tries to help webmasters on Google Groups
The use of “nofollow” attribute in internal linking
Some webmasters pay much attention to controlling the flow of Google PageRank between the pages in their website. It seems to make sense only if we use “nofollow” attribute in case of links which go to, for example, the admin panel.
In other cases (for example if we think about adding “nofollow” to the page of little importance), Guglarz suggests webmasters should focus on more important things rather than on such details, as Google algorithm changes regularly and what is recommended today must not be up-to-date tomorrow.
However, there’s also another situation. Suppose we have 2 or 3 links that go to the same page, for example link to the home page that is placed in the logo, menu and footer. There are different opinions about whether we should use “nofollow” attribute in some of them, and for example leave only one of them with dofollow. Unfortunately, even this time Guglarz leaves us with no specific response but recommending us testing different options
Is SEO SPAM?
This question meets with a short answer: “No, white hat SEO isn’t spam.”
What happens with the flow of Google PageRank in case of a few links with different anchor texts?
Anchor texts should have nothing to do with the flow of Google PageRank.
Do using reciprocal links such as A< ->B, B< ->A validates the Webmaster Guidelines?
Reciprocal links are OK on condition that they are topically related. If a website for vets links to the website that offers food for animals and it links back, it’s not a problem since users of one website might be interested in the other.
Unfortunately we couldn’t find out about SEO what we would like to. But we can’t expect the Google worker to reveal us all the secrets of such a mysterious Google algorithm, can we? However, it’s better than nothing, so I appreciate it.
