How to structure a site? - Mattcutts Video Transcript

Ok As you can this is the closest I can get to a World Map, Did you know there are 5000 languages spoken across the globe, how many does Google support? Only about a 100 still a long way to go.

Barry writes in "What's the right way to theme a site using directories you put the main keyword in the directory or on the index page? If you are using a directory do you use a directory for each set of keywords?

This is a good question, I think you are thinking too much about your keywords and not about your site , this is just for me I prefer a tree like architecture, so everything branches out even, nice like a branch sort of thing and also it will be good if you are breaking down by topics so if you are selling clothes and you have sweaters as one directory and shoes as an other directory and something like that, if you do something like that what you will end up with is your keywords do end up in directories, So as far the directories vs the actual Html file it doesn't matter with Google screwing up with it, So actually I think if you break it down by topic and make sure that your topic is broken down by keywords. Then I think if your user type of keywords and find your page then you are in pretty Good shape.

Aright Joe writes in, If a Ecommerce site has too many parameters say it has punctuation marks, dots etc and its un index able is it ok to be within Google's guidelines and serve static html pages to Googlebot to index instead. This is something that I will be very careful of because if you end messing this up you will be doing something called cloaking which showing different content to users and different content to Googlebot and you need to show the exact same content to both users and Googlebot. So my advice is to go back to the question I asked about whether or not the parameters in URLs are indexable and unified so that both users and Googlebot see the same user directory. And if you are going to do something like that, definitely that's going to be much better saying that what ever html paying you are going to show to the Googlebot , if users go to that page and if they stay on the same page and not redirected or sent to an other page then you are fine. They need to see the exact same page that Googlebot saw that's the main criteria you got to be careful about that.

John writes in he says "I would like to use AB split testing on the static html pages, will google understand my PHP redirect for what it is or will Google penalize my site for assumption of Cloaking, If there is a problem is there a better way to split test?. That's a Good question if you can I would recommend split test in a area where search engines aren't going to index it. Because when we go to a page and you reload and show different content then it does look a bit strange so if you can please use robots.txt or .htaccess file or something that Googlebot doesn't index it. Saying that I wouldn't do a PHP redirect , I will configure in a server to serve 2 different pages parallel. One thing to be careful about and I touched on this a while ago in a previous session that you should not do anything special for Googlebot just treat it like regular user that's going to be the safest thing in terms of not being treated as cloaking.

And lets wrap up, Todd asks an other question he says hi Matt here is the real question, Ginger or Marian? I am going to go with Marian.

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