More Bad News for Blog commenting. Say Goodbye II

Hi Mike,

I agree there is a widespread perception that Google's own actions aren't consistent with their policies for webmaster. I personally do not see it that way.

I recall listening to a Google engineer, speaking at a developers conference a few years ago, describe how they formulate and publish their policies. What struck me as interesting is that he said they have a team of linguist that analyze every word and confirm the words accurately convey their policies as practiced. While they do not disclose all of their policies and procedures they are careful to only say what is accurate and in a very concise fashion. I took that to mean that you do not need to read into their words anything that isn't actually said.

For example, many people erroneously believe that Google has said that you cannot or should not buy or sell links to or from your website. That is pure hogwash, they have never said that. What they actually said is that you shouldn' buy or sell links for the purpose of pagerank manipulation. They also say that you should make your paid for links labeled as such and that you shouldn't allow them to pass PageRank. Google's own practice is absolutely consistent with this policy.

I read your earlier thread about Google ignoring your content without backlinks. What Matt Cutts actually said is that if you have a very large website that you may need to do some deep linking or they may not index all of your content. They have a practical and technical reason that this is true. The Googlebot is programed to only crawl a few levels deep in your hierarchy of links. If you have a tremendous amount of content your hierarchy will exceed the programming limitations placed on the bot. To ensure that all of your content is crawled you should place some deep links when you have a large amount of content or pages that are buried many levels deep within your link structure.

Early in Google's development they encountered a serious problem. You see some clever programmers figured out how to dynamically create unique content on the fly from a large database that effective became an infinite loop that trapped the bots within their websites. To counter this all bots had to be programmed to limit the depth of a crawl. Since it's virtually impossible for the bots to distinguish a very large website from an infinite loop website you must build deep links to ensure that all of your content will eventually get indexed. A website with a few hundred pages of content and good link structure generally does not need to be concerned about this.