Probably a stupid question...

[BishopWeber]

I used sitemaps in a site and it was not indexed for about 6 or 7 month, not a single page. Then someone told me that becouse of the spam, google deindexed sites using sitemaps, so I take off the sitemap and in a few weeks my site was indexed. May be a coincidence, who knows, google acts in strange ways.

[virgohippy]

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

In other words, a page with too many links may not be all that user-friendly (e.g. huge LL category page forcing a surfer to scroll down to find free site listings). Googlebot may also prefer to crawl pages with moderate number of links or limit the number of links it crawls depending on site trust (speculation)

...if Google assumed that any page over 100 links is more likely to be spam, that would result in many high-profile false positives, including cnn.com (~142 links), amazon.com (~203), and ebay.com (~143).

Fresh content in the middle of a large page does seem a bit non-userfriendly.

Google seems to favor more of my pages with a smaller number of links, a higher non-linked text to linked text ratio, and a smaller file size.

I imagine with design elements a balance of all things is more important than the (non)presence of certain other tactics?

Originally Posted by BishopWeber

I used sitemaps in a site and it was not indexed for about 6 or 7 month, not a single page. Then someone told me that becouse of the spam, google deindexed sites using sitemaps, so I take off the sitemap and in a few weeks my site was indexed. May be a coincidence, who knows, google acts in strange ways.

I've not had a problem with using sitemaps. But I've only used them on sites that already had more than a few valuable back links, so they weren't entirely necessary.

[Halfdeck]

Google seems to favor more of my pages with a smaller number of links, a higher non-linked text to linked text ratio, and a smaller file size.

Though there are a few technical guidelines I go by to avoid indexing problems (e.g. meta description no less than ~55 chars, TABLE-less page structure with content above nav links, word count 200+ per page not including anchor text, etc.) , I think when you're talking about on-page "optimization", there's only one question worth asking: Is this the best page EVER on the web for keyword X?

[virgohippy]

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

...there's only one question worth asking: Is this the best page EVER on the web for keyword X?

Now just add 300 more pages of mildly entertaining technical mumbo jumbo and you've written the most enlightened SEO book ever!