This morning I was fortunate to be able to participate in the ‘First-ever Google Webmaster Help Group Chat’. Though it was labeled as beta, it turned out to be a great session.
The group chat, hosted by Webex, consisted of a panel of 13 Googlers, namely our Google friends Matt Cutts and host Adam Lasnik.
After web-cam-assisted introductions, the Googlers reviewed a site which had been chosen from a small group of submissions to this thread. The very lucky site was pictureline and a comprehensive review covering design, usability and SEO was given. Pictureline was chosen since the site already implemented many SEO best practices, but still had room for review and improvement.
Also quite helpful was Maile Ohye’s presentation on images. She described how Google indexes images by analyzing alt tags, filenames, directory structures, headline and surrounding text and more. She also emphasized the value of having your images indexed by Google to increase the number of ways that users may find your site.
The Google Webmaster Help Group Chat is a totally new concept for Google, but they may continue to offer more free online panels like this in the future. Though it is only a fraction of the valuable content that was offered, those of you who missed the panel can get your copy of the Google Webmaster Help Group Chat Q&A Transcript here.
Please comment if you attended or if you have any questions or insights.
I attended and I was blown away at how much info was tossed around in that short amount of time. Have we gotten anybody who recorded the audio? I am about to post some of my summaries from the audio part, but really there was way to much going on for me to focus on just 1 thing!
I don’t have the audio, but please comment here with links to your summaries when they become available!
Here is my latest post, it mixes some of the Q & A from the Google Webmaster Help Chat and discussion of Universal Search from SES New York.
Get Attention to your Content by Optimizing your Images
Google Webmaster Chat Audio has surfaced on John Honeck’s blog.
I was told that if I had written any posts directly related to some of the material covered by the Q&A, general chat or the audio conversation of last weeks Google Chat that I could post a link here in comments.
So far I’ve written two with more to come:
Possible PageRank Leakage to be Aware of and Getting and Managing Google Sitelinks
John Jones
- 10 minutes of SEO, SEM & Internet Marketing
Have there been any more like this since? how would one know if or when future such events will be held.
So far there haven’t been any additional webmaster chat sessions, but you should sign up for the google webmaster groups, and the google blog, they would announce it again in both of those mediums. You should also have those in your RSS feeder ( I use bloglines) anyways to keep up on the trends