Guest: Maile Ohye from Google
Vanessa and Maile answer some questions prompted by Maile’s talk on February 11th, 2009 at Developer Day.

Which URL structure best for Google rank?
Dynamic URLs: some people Maverick practices, use alternative encoding (W0 for ? and QQ for =) like eBay. When you use these, Google’s crawler can’t prioritize because it doesn’t see it as valuable- can’t tell a parameter from a name, so really, you’re making it worse.
Google finds patterns in URL to find uniqueness, so the more standard you can make URLs the better.

If I can rewrite URLs to make them static for the ease of the user, will it hurt me?
Not if you’re good at it. Also, if you use a session ID as directory path makes it hard for Google to tell that it is a session ID.

How does my site architecture affect sight link extraction?
make sure Google has access to content, algorithmically calculated- what users are searching for and if your site is relevant. If Google can’t reach your content, it won’t rank you because it can’t crawl you. Site architecture is most important part in SEO efforts.

Is it better to end URL with extension or folder with slash?
in terms of ranking a file extension won’t matter. just keep it accurate (pdf or doc or html)
if you hide extension it can help you if you want to change it in the future.

Absolute vs relative links: which is better?
From a ranking perspective, they are equal relative links have more problems… unless you do it right.
If many people are working on the site or you are undergoing many changes, stay away from relative links. scraping content: absolute helps for original source and link back to your site!!

How much top navigation links is too much do navigation links mean too much for internal linking?
Do whats best for your users! you can have too much- it can look like its for search reasons only. You get to too much when you aren’t doing it for your users anymore. Whats the right amount? Well, what is ideal for your users? If your site isn’t built for the user the users will abandon it anyway!

Is there a scenario where it’s better  to reduce the non-essential pages priority in site map.xml vs excluding it in a robots file?
If you have a low-priority page, ask if it’s necessary. If it is, then just leave it as is.
Robots are extreme… over optimizing. few instances when you would disallow with robots: shopping carts, log-in pages, creates new URL strings…. reduce that! Disallow contact us page too. No good reason for Google to crawl that.

The podcast ends with Maile talking about how she wants to improve the entire web by cleaning it up with this editable wiki: code.google.com.doctype . If anyone wants to spearhead this task, you are invited to do so!

Listen to the entire episode.