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Why need an About or Privacy page?

by livemusic
7 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Magicman2003 put this in a post about helping a site get page rank.

add a privacy control page, about us page, proper titles for each and every post. put all titles in H1 tag, ping your website after each and every update.

I assume that means a privacy statement? How does that help? How does having an About page help? How or why does it help?

How do you ping your website?
#page #privacy
  • Profile picture of the author HunterSnake
    PageRank matters but it's not the only thing that matters.

    You're also designing a web site for your visitors, not just for search engines.

    Having an about page, contact page, privacy policy, disclaimer, terms of service, etc. is all stuff that your users care about. Also, Google TrustRank apparently weighs on these things a bit, which I've noticed through personal experience and can verify.

    Google's trying to bridge the gap between designing for people and designing for search engines. Ideally, the website designed best for a human will rank best in Google. This approach is leading Google to give bumps for a site that has qualities that are beneficial to humans.
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  • Profile picture of the author paulgl
    You don't need an about page. You don't need a privacy page
    unless you have adsense, amazon, or other affiliate stuff that requires
    one. HunterSnake went through a laundry list of things can lead
    to visitors trusting the site, leading to more exposure, leading to better
    life on google.

    If your website gets crawled a lot, and most decent sites do, you
    don't need to ping. In fact, you can ping too much. Use something
    like pingomatic.com if it makes you feel better.

    People need to realize that if google needs help in finding your page
    and updates, then you've got some problems elsewhere. But pinging
    does have a use and I do use it.

    Page rank is a generic term that can be meaningless. Pagerank, the
    google thing, is based on backlinks, not site structure.

    Paul
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    If you were disappointed in your results today, lower your standards tomorrow.

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    • Profile picture of the author HunterSnake
      Originally Posted by paulgl View Post

      You don't need an about page. You don't need a privacy page
      unless you have adsense, amazon, or other affiliate stuff that requires
      one. HunterSnake went through a laundry list of things can lead
      to visitors trusting the site, leading to more exposure, leading to better
      life on google.
      Correct. These things aren't "needed" by any means. They do help, however, as you stated, because if visitors don't trust a person's site, they likely won't come back and they almost certainly won't link to it and spread it around. =) Thinking about "SEO" too much I think is detrimental. One must always remember "PO" - people optimization.
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  • Profile picture of the author rahulr
    If you are selling then there are some FTC guidelines to follow.Privacy policy is a must if you are using adsense.
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    • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
      Going one step further, if you are collecting ANY information which is or could be personally identifiable (like, first name and email ), you should have a privacy statement to cover your own behind.

      The rest are trust factors for most people. If you have a forum or blog which encourages participation, i.e. discussion or comments, you should have a terms of use statement that spells out what users can and cannot do. Again, it's more of a CYA thing than a SEO thing.
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  • Profile picture of the author woweb
    Using an about page and a privacy policy builds Google trust.
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    • Profile picture of the author bigleaf
      Originally Posted by woweb View Post

      Using an about page and a privacy policy builds Google trust.
      ... and human trust, and it is the right thing to do.

      You asked how to ping - some people use pinging to get their sites indexed. A simpler way is to just submit your site to Google using their webmaster tools and to Bing using Webmaster Central.
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