SmallBusinessNewz

There has been quite a bit of useful information coming out of Google lately. Not all of it is news, but it is all stuff that webmasters should know about if they are concerned about their rankings in the search engine.

1. The "Keywords" meta tag

Savvy SEOs know that the "keywords" meta tag is not something that Google looks at when it comes to ranking websites. However, there are still many people concerned about this, and the tag is recognized by some search engines. Google's Matt Cutts set the record straight on Google's stance though.

2. Content Scrapers

Cutts also set the record straight about how content scrapers can affect your ranking. Luckily, they shouldn't affect you at all in a negative way, according to Cutts. He even says they can possibly help your rankings a little if you include links to yourself in your content. That way when your content gets scraped, it still points links back to you.

3. Paid Links in Javascript

Cutts also talked about paid links and javascript. A while back Google announced that it is able to read javascript, but this was previously a method Google used to suggest to keep Googlebot from reading paid links. If you have paid links in javascript, you don't have to worry about being penalized by Google right now, but he says they may start looking at it in the future.

4. The Duplicate Content Myth

Greg Grothaus of Google's Search Quality Team recently talked about the "duplicate content penalty" myth. He says that people often think Google penalizes them for having duplicate content when this is not exactly the case. He says that duplicate content is often found by Google by using a different query to get there.

5. Another Duplicate Content Eliminator

Finally, Google also released a new feature in Google Webmaster Tools, which provides an option for webmasters to let Google know which parameters in URLs they wish to be ignored. The feature is called parameter handling.