Today at 9am Google had another one of their great Webmaster Chat Sessions. As usual, an impressive array of Googlers was on-hand to answer questions from webmasters.
The Googlers on-staff were Adam Lasnik (host), Adi Goradia, Evan T., John Mueller, Jonas Voss, Jonathan Simon, Maile Ohye, Matt Cutts, Matt Dougherty, Michael Wyszomierski, and Nathan Johns. Apologies if I left out anyone!
A lot of great questions were asked, which you can see here: http://tinyurl.com/5lqcmn There is a great wealth of knowledge there for webmasters and SEO’s, so I highly suggest sifting through it.
Here are some of the key take-away points I found:
(all quotes direct from Google)
One person asked about cross-linking between sites owned by the same party. Google said that this is generally not an issue but to be careful of extreme situations:
“…if you run a sporting goods site, and you link to your sister companies for camping and tailgating equipment, that’s good for the user. More happy users can lead to more buzz, leading to better rankings.
If your sister companies are just linked at the footer of the page, in hopes of cross-advertising or getting more links, it’s not likely to add value to ranking or the user. In extreme cases, if it’s a bad neighborhood, these links will certainly not help you.”
On Domain Age, this feature so highly vaunted by domain brokers was largely debunked:
“In the majority of cases, it [domain age] actually doesn’t matter–we want to return the best information, not just the oldest information.”
Recent Google removed the passage suggesting webmaster submit their site to the DMOZ and Yahoo! Directories.
One user asked whether this is because links from these sites are now worth less than they were before. Google explained that this section was removed because some webmasters were fixating on directory submission, which is not an optimal strategy. Links from the DMOZ and Yahoo! directory may change in the future but are currently worth as much as they ever were.
Google may be developing their own rank-checking tool!
When asked about Google’s dislike of rank-checking tools, the Googler’s on-staff mentioned that an in-house rank-checker may be in the works. Exciting!
Link #Fragments: How are they handled?
As some SEO’s have known for a while, Google confirmed today that link fragments such as the #location in www.domain.com/page.html#location are dropped from URL’s before processing. This is not a cause of duplicate content problems.
“Yes, we remove URL fragments since they are processed on the client side and not relevant when fetching URLs from your server.”
Is correct W3C markup rewarded by Google in any way?
No. Not in the SERP rankings, but adhering to these standards helps your site look right in all browsers.
Does Google tell webmasters when their site contains guideline violations and has been punished?
Googlers clearly explained today that these situations are reviewed on a case-by-case basis. Is your site generally good and your violation quite possibly an honest mistake? You are more likely to get a webmaster’s tools message explaining the issue.
Is your site a major spam hub and the focus of a massive linkfarm campaign? Don’t expect much assistance.
Is there such a thing as domain-level PageRank?
No. PageRank is accrued solely on a page-by-page basis.
“PageRank is purely at a page level, so if you forums.domain.com has a high PageRank and links to new urls such as download.domain.com, that PageRank will flow immediately.”
Previously it was mentioned that chaining 301 redirects may create issues with the Google crawlers, how many is too many?
“It’s ok to chain a few together; I would avoid doing a whole bunch, like 20 or 30. :)”
So there you have it! Another great chat session from the Googlers. Thanks to everyone who helps make these happen!
Again, if you’d like to review all of the questions asked, click here: http://tinyurl.com/5lqcmn and you’ll be taken directly to the written Q+A session.
October 22, 2008
