John Mueller is well known in the SEO space, he is responsible for helping webmasters learn best practices when it comes to building out web sites that work well with Google. So he answers a lot of questions in the help forums, as well as does many videos and conferences.
Today is April 1st, April Fools Day, so he decided to spice up his answers in the forums a bit by using images and animated GIFs to respond to webmaster questions.
(1) A response about content mattering, he wrote the following content with this image after:
One thing you really, really also need to take into account is that our algorithms focus on unique, compelling, and high-quality content. If a site is just aggregating links to other sites, then there's not really much value in showing that in search -- users would be better served to just go to the destination directly. So instead of just focusing on technical issues like crawling and indexing, I'd strongly recommend taking a step back and rethinking your site's model first.
(2) A topic of duplicate URLs, John wrote and used this image:
One thing I'm seeing there is that you have a lot of search pages with a ton of different parameters / facets in them. Reducing the duplication through minimizing URL parameter usage can help make it easier to crawl your content faster, so that we don't keep obsolete content (with links to obsolete pages) in our index. That said, this is mostly a matter of us being able to crawl efficiently, so we'd see these changes a bit faster. You would still continue to see pages that return 404, and that's absolutely not a problem (unless you wanted those pages to be found in search). Having 404s on your site will not cause the rest of your site to be seen in a bad light -- it's a completely normal thing for a site to have.
(3) Why does it take Webmaster Tools to update the data, John said be patient and used this image:
It looks like you just added the site recently to Webmaster Tools. The data there can take a bit of time to populate, so
(4) Finally, John spotted someone cloaking GoogleBot and used an animated GIF of Matt Cutts I created a while back.
Your site is cloaking to Googlebot.
Be careful what you read today, it is April Fools. But real answers like this backed with some fun imagery is classy on April Fools in my opinion.
Happy April Fools!
