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HighRankings Forum moderator Randy made a comment recently that bothered me a little. In a discussion about whether you should use the Hx headers for SEO value (bottom line: do what makes sense for your visitors), Randy wrote “…I can clearly see why the engines would want to reserve the right to see [both CSS and Javascript files]“.

Randy was speaking figuratively (I think) but whenever someone says that a search engine has a right, I stop the horses and get off the wagon.

Here’s the thing: if you extend rights to search engines within the scope of your Web site’s resources, you become obligated to respect those rights (or they can sue you or take other actions against you).

Search engines and Web sites do not have rights with respect to each other. They extend privileges to each other. It is a revocable privilege for any search engine to be able to crawl and index your site. In practice, I revoke that privilege every day for all search engines on some content and for some search engines on all content. That is my right and no search engine has the right to circumvent the blocks I put in place.

On the other hand, there is no law stating that search engines have to observe any particular guidelines on crawling and indexing. That is, we distinguish good search engines from bad search engines on the basis of which ones honor the robots exclusion standard, but no search engine is legally or ethically bound to honor that standard.

Even under common law we do not operate in a contractually defined environment with search engines. They can include whatever content they wish and we exclude whatever search engines we wish, but beyond those inherent rights neither party has any actual defenses that assure them of damages.

If you create a spammy site, Google won’t win any lawsuits against you if your site manages to get past their filters. You just created content and left it for them to find. They took the revocable step of indexing your spam.

And if someone creates a rogue search engine, you won’t win any lawsuits against them if they merely crawl your site. After all, you created a Web site for the purpose of publishing information on the Internet. Everyone is allowed to access that information.

There is a boundary that is seldom crossed. If either party’s behavior becomes abusive to the extent that it interferes with the normal operation of the other party’s services, that might constitute criminal activity. Simply creating Web spam that gets indexed, however, does not interfere with the normal operation of a search engine’s services — it only affects the results of those services.

We cannot inject spam into a search engine. Hence, we cannot be held responsible for what a search engine indexes.

On the other hand, we cannot reasonably argue that a technology which is designed to make information openly available should be considered breached if someone we don’t like merely stops by and grabs a file. If you have secured the data through password protection and someone still grabs it and indexes it, you might have a case. A few courts have issued specific restraining orders in such instances.

John Andrews brought up the issue of “SEO liability” (note: Barry Schwartz followed up on SE Roundtable) on Sphinn. Are we liable for what we do? At some level there are certain obligations you enter into when you take on an SEO contract.

At the heart of the matter is whether you include a clause to ensure that both parties agree to indemnify and hold harmless each other in the event that something doesn’t work right. Without that clause, can your clients sue you?

These two discussions led me to wonder how we might engage in a contractual relationship with search engines. I’m not sure it would be feasible (in fact, there would have to be a three-way contract). Unless a search engine sells you a listing (as some directories do), neither your nor the search engine are offering value or consideration to the other — and as I understand it without exchanging either value or consideration two parties cannot enter into a contractual relationship.

We do see value in being listed in search engines and search engines do see value in indexing content from Web sites, but we are not explicitly exchanging value with the search engines. Our robots.txt files don’t lay down the law, as it were, for either party. After all, no search engine is required by law to either fetch or honor the specifications provided in a robots.txt file.

Which leads me to conclude that if you’re trying to manage your SEO as if you are engaged in a contract with the search engines — that is, if you’re assuming or acting as if the search engines have any rights (or as if you have any rights) — you’re doing it wrong.

Without coercion, without exchange of value or consideration, there is no real legal relationship between search engines and Web sites. We have to operate under the rules of that situation — whatever those rules may be.

Keep in mind that if you’re performing SEO on someone else’s behalf you have to observe the rules of that relationship — which may very well be defined by a contract or statement of work.

I think there is an entire body of search law waiting to be invented.

Matt Cutts decided to get experimental on us this weekend and he moved his blog from MattCutts.com to Dullest.com. To keep visitors going where they should be, Matt utilized 302-redirects in an .htaccess file on MattCutts.com.

In the comments on his “Switching Things Around” post Matt mentioned that Google had already indexed “double digits’” worth of pages from Dullest.com.

I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what Google had found (and where it found and placed stuff) the next day (today).

So I just made five screen captures and find I cannot upload them. I’ll have to come back and load them later in an update to this post.

I found around 40-50 pages from Dullest.com in Google’s Main Web search.

I found absolutely no pages from Dullest.com in Google’s Blogsearch.

I found that Matt’s “Switching Things Around” post appeared on page 3 of a site search for Dullest.com.

I found that Matt’s Disclaimer ranked second in the site search for Dullest.com.

I found that Matt’s own post does not appear in Google’s Main Web Search results’ first page for the query “‘matt cutts’ ’switching things around’”.

We can ask a number of questions:

1. Does Google Blogsearch follow 302-redirects?
2. Does Google Main Web Search assign any sort of PageRank for 302-redirects?
3. If people are linking to the new post on Dullest.com, what will that do for Matt’s rankings in Google?

I could probably ask other questions but these are good enough. There is only one definitive answer, I think, that we can point to right now. In the past Matt has said that Google won’t transfer PageRank through 302-redirects. Although this is a pretty short timeframe, I’d say his test indicates that Dullest.com has no PageRank despite the fact that his post attracted a lot of attention (perhaps only from automated sites — maybe this was a test to see how many SEO spammers would fall into a simple trap). So Matt has demonstrated that, in the short-term at least, a high PR site won’t transfer its PageRank (immediately) through 302-redirects.

Blogsearch, of course, seems to take its sweet time about indexing content these days but maybe they filter out all the scraper sites and therefore haven’t found any links to Dullest.com yet. Or did someone go in and tweak the Blogsearch index (with or without Matt’s knowledge)?

If Matt leaves Dullest.com live for a few weeks it will be interesting to see what happens to his search rankings. After all, people will link to his blog posts and the site will accrue PageRank on its own, thus giving it some juice to get into Google’s Main Web Search results. Will it compete with MattCutts.com for queries like “matt cutts blog”?

BTW — if any Googlers working on Chrome are reading this post, I have two issues to point out (sorry — I’m too busy to look up where to send feedback today).

• Chrome was unable to use the image upload form in this version of Wordpress. I had to switch to Internet Explorer to attempt the upload (only to learn that my account doesn’t have permission or something to upload images).
• I bought a new home computer a few weeks ago and installed Chrome on it. Now when I load Chrome it shows me my popular site icons on the first tab. However, on this computer here at work, I still have to open second tab to see those icons.

Both computers use Windows Vista (Professional at work, Home at home). I don’t know if that matters. I tried to trigger a Chrome update on the work computer but it said it was up-to-date.

Anyway, I LIKE seeing those icons on the first tab. Don’t show me an empty screen when I load Chrome — show me my favorite sites!

ON EDIT: You can control this in Google Chrome by setting the option “Use New Tab Page” for opening the browser. Duh!

If you haven’t read Carlos Del Rio’s blog, 100 Dollar SEO, you’ve been missing some good articles on search engine optimization and related topics. Carlos is a former VT employee so I’m very familiar with his knowledge and experience. He’s knowledgeable and tenacious and seeks to provide his clients with the best service possible.

He has recently posted three articles that I feel are worthy of mention. Here they are and here is why:
List of all white hat techniques for SEO – Now, several of the points Carlos makes deserve some elaboration, so I certainly hope he follows up in the future. In looking over the list I can think of only one omission: I would include “add content frequently”.

There are some old-school techniques in Carlos’ list that many people in the SEO industry now speak out against. For example, “Use forums”. Carlos suggests you participate in forums, adding there may be a signature link privilege in many forums. But the important point is that he’s talking about participating in forums, not just doing drive-by link drops (way too many still do that).

Participating in a forum helps you build visibility to potential new partners, influencers, and customers — but you don’t want to be self-promotional about the process. Just letting people find out on their own that you sell custom made watches for a living is much, much preferable to being a self-promotional shmuck. On the other hand, if you offer a premium service with brand value but you want to reach out to people on the Internet, favoring a few forums with your presence can be a good marketing tactic. Give people a chance to see that you’re a real person with your own passions and that you place value in what others have to do and say.

Just find people whose opinions you value (even if you don’t always agree with them).

Redesigning your contact forms – Man, I’ve redesigned my contact form more times than I can recall. Contact forms are where we’re allowed to be control freaks. We can guide people gently or firmly through the processes they need to reach us. You can use contact forms to filter out a lot of the nonsense messages people want to send you (although some will still get through).

Thanks to the email spam industry it’s no longer a good idea to embed a mailto link on your Web pages. Contact forms protect your email address, although popular contact form scripts can be (and have been) compromised by email spammers and hackers. Even a custom contact form script can be compromised if it’s modeled on the common scripts. You should definitely make it challenging for hackers to inject data into your scripts (especially by restricting their execution to your own domain).

How much times does SEO take? – That’s the Hundred Dollar Question now, isn’t it? Carlos provides time estimates for how long many specific tasks should take an experienced person to execute them.

I would only add one item: Time it takes to find those links you know are out there but forgot to bookmark — 2-5 hours per link.

Hey, no system is perfect.