SEO Facts and Myths – W3C Validation, Dynamic Pages, Duplicate Content

Some interesting facts about SEO taken from Matt Cutt’s latest video sessions:

• When you launch a new website, rather launch it with a few thousands pages instead of millions. After that, add pages in a healthy period of time.
• Be sure to have unique pages!
• Don’t worry about W3C validation too much. It’s good to validate but it’s not necessary. Usability and how the pag looks should be your first thing to worry about. Personally I never really cared about W3C validation because in my opinion they’re living in the past.
• Dynamic pages with query strings are crawled by most searchengines just one link deeper. If you have to use dynamic query string pages be sure to keep your parameters short and avoid long numbers as they might be treated as session ids.
• Try to use mod_rewrite or simliar techniques to make your urls more friendly and readable
• GEOIP targeting is not treated as cloaking, however, you should never treat the googlebot or any other searchengine bot in a special way. Cloaking means to show different content to searchengine bots than to users.
• Google does a lot of duplicate content detections. There are several forms of duplicate content, like full duplicates or just near duplicates. Be sure to write as unique pages as possible and you won’t get into trouble.

That’s a short summary of what I written down while listening to the videos.