Google follows profile links from its own domain.

Having a dig around on Google’s robots.txt today, I discovered a few interesting bits and bobs. Firstly, they have a dedicated server setup (gstatic.com) for serving up their own sitemaps. These sitemaps seem to contain quite a few good old fashioned static links to text files. These text files contain thousands of links to static profiles on Google’s domain.

For example:

http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/sitemap-000.txt

Each one of those represents a personal profile. Now the interesting thing appears to be that both Google’s notebook sites (see here – http://tinyurl.com/aztuef)  are being indexed along with your personal profile.(http://www.google.co.uk/s2/profiles/me) .

All of these sites allow you to place a FOLLOWED LINK, on the google domain. I haven’t noticed whether this is resulting in actual link juice or not, but only time will tell if it makes an impact in the SERPS. Numerous spammers seem to be already exploiting Google’s Notebook features for seo purposes, so there probably is some mileage, and benefit in it.

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Filed in: Google • SEO
Tagged with: Google • SEO