Two SEO questions I get asked a lot:

• How important is the URL to ranking and
• Which is better, sub-domains or directories

In general, both have only minor impact on ranking (I think they are important to click-through) but I just saw an example of the latter that is worth some thought.

In searching for "swing treeview" (a Java thing) at Google, the top two results are treeview-java-swing.qarchive.org and java-treeview.qarchive.org and Google did NOT do the second as an indented listing which they would do if these were treated as being from the same domain.

If the same content were served via pages or directories at the root domain, the best this site would get is an indented listing, and even that is open to question.

This is likely a generally applicable result. Look at the results for searching for "blogspot" for example. Predictably, there are pages and pages of blogspot sub-domains. The previous example is no different.

The lesson here is that sub-domains really are different domains (which we knew).

The action item is to find out which is easier to get:

• Multiple listings from sub-domains or
• An indented listing from a single domain

I’ll let you know what I find.

The terms ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ do not correctly represent any real technological differences in how pages are delivered. The real issue is ‘clean URL’ or ‘messy URL’ — query strings is a common example. The engines are far better today at dealing with these URLs, so the historical advantage of clean URLs has dissipated considerably, but messy URLs still remain a problem and their use should be minimized.

Recently I was told that "there are no SEO Secrets" and to claim such a thing was deceitful. Hmmm, maybe. So I looked up the word "secret" — I already know what SEO means :-).

Secret:

1. done, made, or conducted without the knowledge of others;
2. kept from the knowledge of any but the initiated or privileged;
3. …

Now go look at some random search results. What percentage of these web masters have any clue at all about SEO? Maybe 5%. So if 5% of people know something, is it still a secret? If not, then when does something go from "secret" to "not widely known" and from there to "common knowledge"?

I’m not even going to propose a number. Insread, I’ll rely on the second definition: SEO secrets are known to the "initiated or privileged". And it’s easy to find out who they are: they are at the top of the search results!

If you are not subscribed to SE News, then you should be. I read every issue in the first few days of the month. This month’s articles on Supplemental Results and Google Sitelinks are top notch. Mostly I agree with their articles and that’s more-or-less true this month as well, with a couple of exceptions.

In the list of "Top 10 Quality Indicators" there are a number of items presented as fact that I can not back up with actual measurements. Conversely, I don’t yet have the data to disprove them either, so I’ll let all that slide for now.

But there is a non-technical issue that keeps coming up that I will take issue with today. The referenced article [subscribe to read the whole thing as it does provide some good information and food for thought] claims:

"Now that Google has a spider to determine page quality for sites in their ad program, it won’t be long before that data is folded into Google’s organic search results."

In my opinion, this is just plain incorrect. Here’s why.

As one of several forms of actionable "anittrust" or "unfair trade practices" the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has identified the "tying arrangement" whereby use of one product or service is predicated on use of another. This is a very complex area of law loaded with judicial discretion and balancing corporate rights and "public policy" so all bets pre-trial are pretty much off, but I’ll give you mine anyway.

The FTC case against Microsoft vis-a-vis Windows and IE was precisely a "tying arrangement" case where the FTC claimed that Microsoft improperly used its market influence in the PC operating system market to create an (unfair) advantage in the browser market. While this is a classic example of unfair practice, it is not the only one.

With respect to Google, if the paid advertising programs — either Adwords or Adsense — impacted organic ranking in a positive way, this would create a tying arrangement between their "free" search and their paid programs seeking to coerce webmasters to buy advertising in exchange for better ranking.

Conversely, if participation in paid advertising programs created a negative organic ranking influence compared to non-participants, this would constitute contract fraud in as much as a material aspect of the advertising contract was non-disclosed. The FTC might or might not act on this as an unfair trade practice, but you can bet some large firm of attorneys will be happy to take it as a class action lawsuit.

This also came up in my recent review of VEO for OptiSmarts subscribers where the author of VEO claims various similar effects with Adsense. Again, same problem, undisclosed contract terms and tying arrangements.

In all cases, when it comes to tying organic and paid programs together, "there be dragons."

Like most of what is written about SEO, when you don’t know how computers work, everything is a mystery and (worse) impossible garbage sounds totally reasonable. This is not the first time in four and half years that we’ve gone ’round about Google tracking page visit times and it’s no more true this time than it was the last half dozen. Give it another six months and we’ll hear it again.