Your Most Common SEO Questions Answered
Today I browsed through the 3,500 or so SEO questions people asked at Google and chose the most common ones to answer. I figured that, if so many people were seeking out answers for these SEO questions at Google, many of you may also be wondering the same things.
Unsurprisingly, many questions were along the line of “How do I get my site found in Google?” (Answer: Read everything the High Rankings website!) And sadly, there were tons of questions about Meta keywords, as if they had anything to do with SEO. But there were lots of specific questions that you may also have wondered about recently, from very basic things that we in the biz assume everybody already knows to what’s happening right now with Google’s latest algorithm changes. (I’m starting out with the more tricky technical ones. If those go over your head, please scroll down to the “On-page SEO Question” section.)
Let’s dig right in…
Technical Google Questions
Q. Can I recover from Google’s “Penguin Update”?
A. For those who don’t know, Penguin is the name of Google’s latest algorithm change that came out toward the end of April 2012. At this point, it’s too early to have had any Penguin recoveries. However, as with any Google update, of course you can recover from it as soon as you understand what it was that your site had (or didn’t have) that caused it to be nuked from the search results. From what I’ve seen so far, Penguin is simply an extension of Panda. Reading what I wrote in “Why SEO in All the Right Places No Longer Works” is a good place to start your recovery.
Q. How do we know about unnatural links to our website?
A. You can use backlink checker tools to find some of them. Or ask the jerk spammer company who purchased them for you. 
Q. How do I find the number of pages of my site that Google has indexed?
A. The quickest and easiest way is via a “site:command” at Google. Go to the Google search box and type: site:example.com and hit the search button. You’ll then see at the top of the page: “About xx,xxx results.” That’s the approximate number of URLs from your site that they have indexed. You’ll be able to scroll through the first 1,000 results, but that’s about it. Please note that site:command isn’t 100% accurate and you may find vastly different results from one day to the next.
If you want to see how many pages Google has indexed that actually bring traffic to your website, SEOmoz had a post from 2010 that shows how to find that number in your Google Analytics. I’ve taken that a step further and created a custom report that does something similar.
Q. How often does Google update its search results? (Or another variation: How long does Google take to index pages?)
A. In the early days of Google, it could take up to a month for pages to get indexed. And the search results would shift once a month or so during what was called the “Google Dance.” Today, due to much more processing power and many different data centers, most existing sites see new pages getting indexed almost immediately. This in turn causes the search results to also change constantly. Even brand-new sites will often be indexed within a few days if they ping Google and/or have a few tweets that announce it.
Q. Can you have two domains for the same site?
A. You can have as many domains for the same site as you’d like. However, you typically want only one of those domains to be indexed by the search engines. Use 301-redirects to point to your main domain from your extra domains for best results.
Q. Can a web crawler find unlinked pages?
A. They do seem to manage to find them these days, so be sure to exclude them via your robots.txt page and/or through a robots=noindex tag.
Q. Does the canonical link need to go on every page of the website?
A. The canonical link element aka rel=canonical doesn’t necessarily need to be on any page of your site. But if there is a chance of pages having URLs that get appended one way or another with stuff that doesn’t change the content, it’s not a bad idea to use rel=canonical to ensure that Google indexes only the correct (main) URL. It will also pass all the link popularity to the main URL as well. All pages where the URLs may get appended should use rel=canonical.
Q. Will deleting duplicate content from my website get me ranked again?
A. If the duplicate content on your site was what caused you to somehow lose rankings, then yes. Just remember that it’s doubtful that your site was penalized for having duplicate content. What may have happened, however, is that you split the link popularity of your content between multiple URLs, which can definitely affect rankings. In which case, using rel=canonical as mentioned previously can help.
Q. How are search rankings affected by a domain name change?
A. If you 301-redirect the old domain to the new, tell Google about the new website address within your Google Webmaster Tools (GWMT) account, set up a new GWMT account for the new domain, and change as many of the old links to point to the new domain, your rankings and traffic shouldn’t be affected.
Q. If forum signature links can be seen only by members, does Google count them?
A. If the forum has set the Google spider to be a “guest” and not a “member” (which is the norm), then no, they can’t see the signatures and therefore can’t/won’t count them. That’s how we purposely have it set at the High Rankings Forum, but every forum has its own unique settings.
Q. What is the best for SEO: PHP or HTML?
A. By the time it gets to the browser, PHP is in HTML form, therefore they’re both the same as far as search engines and SEO are concerned.
The rules of SEO seem to change on a continual basis, and techniques that work one month don’t seem to work the next month. Strangely some website owners refuse to cotton onto this fact and so they continue to use the tools they’ve always relied on and that used to assure a good search engine ranking – even though a lot of these so called ‘tools’ have now fallen into the SEO myth category.