Q&A Session for Google Webmaster Help Group Chat
Session number: 573630075
Date: March 28, 2008
Starting time: 08:46 am
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Rahul Doshi - 9:07 am
Q: what is the process?
MattD - 9:08 am
A: Rahul, You will want to log out completely and back in. If you end up not getting onto the call, you should still be able to follow along in the chat windows.
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Gabe - 9:08 am
Q: What is the criteria for getting the 'more results' for the 1st search result? It's not just appearing first and having a sitemap recognized by Google because I've seen both for a given site with no 'more results', so what is it?
MattD - 9:13 am
A: Gabe, are you saking about Sitelinks?
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Laurent - 9:19 am
Q: About SiteLinks, what would be your advice to get results appear. I see them in the GWC, but not in SERPS
Susan Moskwa - 9:20 am
A: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=47334
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Gabe - 9:14 am
Q: The first result returning specific sitelinks below just after 'more results'.
MattD - 9:20 am
A: Gabe, Sitelinks are purely algorithmic, you can find some more information here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47334
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Linda Farm - 9:13 am
Q: Is Website Tools verifying site not working? i've tried verifying my site and it just doesn't work
John Mueller - 9:21 am
A: Linda, the team is working on something with verification, it seems to be affecting some sites.
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Cassiano Travareli - 9:16 am
Q: I wanna know about social media optimization! what is the Google opinion about that?
John Mueller - 9:21 am
A: Social media is a great way of attracting relevant visitors!
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Mark Kaufman - 9:21 am
Q: Would you recommend nofollowing the sorting links?
John Mueller - 9:22 am
A: Mark, if those links lead to duplicate content, you can either add a nofollow to the links or block indexing through meta tags or a robots.txt entry.
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erik - 9:16 am
Q: One of my clients has a thumbnail next to their serp result instead of the sitelinks that were there before....what gives?
MattD - 9:22 am
A: erik, Sitelinks and Universal Search results are query-specific.
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Terence - 9:20 am
Q: If RSS feeds have near identical content as HTML pages, might that cause duplicate content penalties?
John Mueller - 9:23 am
A: RSS feeds do not need to be indexed, you can block indexing through your robots.txt
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ali merchant - 9:22 am
Q: how does the search engine treat an https (secure) page versus an http
John Mueller - 9:24 am
A: Ali, we treat https the same as http -- however, https puts a bigger load on your server, so you might want to check that it can handle it on your side.
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Mark Kaufman - 9:23 am
Q: Kind of depends on what duplicate content means -- if the sort is different on a results screen, different products/items will appear on a given page...but overall it's the same set of products as the default sort.
John Mueller - 9:25 am
A: Mark, if the content is generally the same but just in a different order, I don't think it would provide much original value in the search results for the user.
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Carlos - 9:22 am
Q: We are a comparison shopping website, healthpricer.com, and we power the ecommerce section of 4 different sites, i.e. marketplace.healthcentral.com those sites have identical content to our main site, can this get me penalized?
Susan Moskwa - 9:26 am
A: Unfortunately we can't do individual reviews for every site, but you could start here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66359
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Terence - 9:24 am
Q: Confusion about robots.txt vs rel=nofollow. I don't want to pass PageRank to my Privacy Policy. Suppose I already blocked /privacy/ in my robots.txt. Do I also have to use rel=nofollow when linking internally to /privacy/ to prevent the pass of PageRank?
Susan Moskwa - 9:27 am
A: Pages that are blocked by robots.txt can still have and pass PageRank, so if you don't want that page to get PageRank from your Privacy Policy page, you should nofollow that link.
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dockarl - 9:27 am
Q: Why's he using ALT TEXT on text at the bottom of his site - is that wrong? LearningGuitars.com
Evan - 9:30 am
A: Hi Dockarl, the site Wysz was talking about was learningguitarnow.com
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erik - 9:24 am
Q: my client has the same issue as this: search for buzznet.com in google and you'll see the same thing
MattD - 9:31 am
A: Thanks for the example erik. This site is triggering an image as a Universal result. Both Universal and Sitelinks are determined algorithmically, so you can't opt-in to either. You can opt out of Sitelinks in Webmaster Tools if that helps the situation.
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Andrew - 9:26 am
Q: What are your views on image replacement versus using alt= on an image. Is it a bad thing if used legitimately?
Susan Moskwa - 9:31 am
A: There are many high-quality sites that use image replacement techniques (such as Fahrner image replacement) to provide a better user experience. If you're using this technique in a legitimate way to benefit your users, you shouldn't have problems.
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Nancy - 9:31 am
Q: Any chance that Google will develop its own directory that folks can directly submit their website to?
Evan - 9:31 am
A: Hi Nancy, we use the ODP (open directory project), to learn more go to dmoz.org
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Mark Kaufman - 9:26 am
Q: Can I ask a video sitemap question? We sumbitted a video sitemap back on Feb 19th. In Webmaster Tools, total URL is 11k, but Indexed URLs are 0. Of the 115 sitemaps off the index, 2 have warnings. Do video sitemaps just take a long time to get indexed?
John Mueller - 9:32 am
A: Video sitemaps take some time to get approved -- it can take up to 2-3 months.
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Jaan Kanellis - 9:28 am
Q: So duplicate content can cause page rank issues? I thought you were able to filter duplicate content?
JonathanSimon - 9:33 am
A: If you have mutiple URLs for the same content within your site, each URL could be attracting it's own links. It would be better to instead have one page for everyone to link to thus consolidating the value of all the external links.
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Gary Carpenter - 9:27 am
Q: I setup a webmaster account an submitted my url. I also setup a Sitemap.xml file. Google reports that the url is indexed and the Sitemap file is OK yet when I google search my url the result is "No Documents Found". What have I done wrong???
John Mueller - 9:33 am
A: It can take a bit for sites to get indexed, you might want to post in the webmaster help groups for detailed suggestions.
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Korpis, LLC - 10:26 am
Q: Would there be a problem with doing a large number of 301 redirects at once?
Susan Moskwa - 9:34 am
A: I would recommend against doing "chained" redirects (a page redirects multiple times).
Susan Moskwa - 9:34 am
A: If you're talking about moving an entire site, or a large amount of content on your site, you might want to start by redirecting a small amount of content and see how to move goes before redirecting a large potion of your site
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Kevin Rogers - 9:28 am
Q: For the Guitar lesson site, shoule they 301 the learnguitarnow.com/index.shtml page to learnguitarnow.com?
John Mueller - 9:34 am
A: If that URL is not linked, it should not need to be redirected. If it's linked, it would be best to remove the links, a 301 could help to speed up the removal.
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Laurent - 9:28 am
Q: I see nofollow links in my GWC. Why is that ?
John Mueller - 9:34 am
A: That's by design.
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Hasit Ruparel - 9:28 am
Q: I have alread reviewed that, however I have problems in which my websites are not considered for higher ranking, ever after following all the steps on http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
John Mueller - 9:35 am
A: You might want to post about it in detail in the help groups.
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Terence - 9:29 am
Q: Thanks Susan, but I'm actually asking about internal links pointing *to* /privacy/, not links from /privacy/. Will internal links pass PR to /privacy/ even if /privacy/ is blocked by robots.txt?
Susan Moskwa - 9:35 am
A: Yes.
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Scott - 9:23 am
Q: what site is he talking about now?
Jessica - 9:36 am
A: Hi, Thanks for your question. We're now discussing images in Google Search results
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Jaan Kanellis - 9:30 am
Q: Also can we get any comments on paid link re-inclusion process? Once the paid links are removed is the next step Google re-inclusion through Google Webmaster Tools?
John Mueller - 9:36 am
A: Yes, a reconsiderationrequest is the next logical step once everything is cleaned up. Please include all details in your request so that we can handle it appropriately.
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Allison Kulage - 9:26 am
Q: Related to the robots.txt issue - if you've placed a no robots tag on every page of a site and a disallow for all in the robots.txt file, but the home page still shows up in the top 10 for a competitive keyword, how else can you get the site removed?
John Mueller - 9:37 am
A: If you are blocking crawling with robots.txt, we won't be albe to see the robots meta tag. If you want the URL removed, it would be better to allow crawling (not block it in a robots.txt) so that the meta tag can be read.
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Raffi - 9:30 am
Q: would you suggest subdomains or folders for state specific content for a US site? i.e. az.domain.com or www.domain.com/az ?
John Mueller - 9:38 am
A: Both work.
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Cassiano Travareli - 9:25 am
Q: i wanna know about duplicate content inside blogs. about categories, archives, authors, have the same content of the article. in my webpages im blocking using robots txt, i blocked categories and archives. is it good?
MattD - 9:38 am
A: Cassiano, If your content is the original, I wouldn't recommend blocking it. If you have content fed in from another site, it might be smart to use robots.txt as you've said. I'd recommend taking your site to the Webmaster Help Group as well.
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Terence - 9:30 am
Q: What are the benefits of submitting a sitemap if our site is already crawled well by Google? In other words, what are we missing out if we don't submit a sitemap?
John Mueller - 9:38 am
A: By submitting a Sitemap we see which URLs have been added and changed. We can crawl those earlier than if we had to accidentally "stumble" upon them.
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Jaan Kanellis - 9:30 am
Q: Lastly can we download this cat log?
John Mueller - 9:39 am
A: You should be able to use File - Save to save this log.
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Rob - 9:32 am
Q: Is there any major issue with using CMS, e.g. Joomla?
John Mueller - 9:39 am
A: If the CMS is compliant with the normal web standard it should be no problem. However, each tool is only as strong as the person using it -- all CMS can create great sites and they can create bad sites.
MattD - 9:41 am
A: Rob, from personal experience, CMS packages are great, though you will want to make sure you customize the templates and page titles so your snippets are unique.
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Phil Peterman - 9:28 am
Q: I was hoping y'all would address the use of display:none and some basic guidelines for it's use
JonathanSimon - 9:40 am
A: As long as the use of display:none is not abused to selectively hide content from site visitors while at the same time showing it to search engine crawlers, it should fine to use this.
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Gijs Nelissen - 9:38 am
Q: are you recording this conference for later reference ? i missed some of the advice on my website (www.digitalbase.eu).
Adam Lasnik - 9:40 am
A: Hi Gijs, we weren't able to record the audio, unfortunately, but I believe at least one blogger was doing a transcript :)
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Jonatas Leonel - 9:29 am
Q: So, how google see websites what receive a lot of good links, by natural way but use rel="nofollow" in all of its external links?
Evan - 9:40 am
A: Hi Jonatas, could you clarify? Good Site A links to Good Site B, and Good Site B has rel="nofollow" links?
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Ian M - 9:35 am
Q: Will Google provide audio and text of this chat after?
Susan Moskwa - 9:40 am
A: We'll do our best to put this content online, though I'm not yet sure in what format.
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Leslie Ding - 9:39 am
Q: Regarding subdomains, I understand google can determine country codes from the URL, e.g. jp.mysite.com. What about japan.mysite.com?
John Mueller - 9:40 am
A: No those are not recognized automatically. You can however use Webmaster Tools to set geotargeting for it.
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Hasit Ruparel - 9:39 am
Q: Thanks for the reply John, do you know which is the BEST place to post any problem?
John Mueller - 9:40 am
A: http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help/topics?start= is where the official Webmaster Help group is located.
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Raffi - 9:39 am
Q: John, I work for a site where I think a competitor is trying to buy links "for us" to try and get your google bomb algo to kick in...what can I do about this?
John Mueller - 9:41 am
A: That's generally no problem as we always look at the bigger picture and try to assess the intent.
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John - 9:14 am
Q: One or two panelist mentioned they were part of the google health team, but I did not catch their names?
Adam Lasnik - 9:41 am
A: Hi John, nope, sorry, we must not have spoken clearly... -- we're all in Search Quality, not Health
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ParksC - 9:40 am
Q: With regards to the paid links question above about asking for inclusion, would it be the same to nofollow the paid links instead of just having them removed?
John Mueller - 9:42 am
A: Yes, if you had paid links and added rel=nofollow to them, you can explain that in your reconsideration request.
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Nancy - 9:35 am
Q: Yes, I've been trying for 2 years to get a listing, but there is no editor for my category... so things have been slow. I guess I thought that Google might be a bit quicker in adding entries. That said, I've had good luck in getting my site listed.
Susan Moskwa - 9:42 am
A: It sounds like you're talking about Google Directory, which our team doesn't really work with. If you're referring to Google search results, there isn't an "editor" process to get in. Check out our Webmaster Guidelines for help getting into search results.
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Terence - 9:40 am
Q: We have a regional sudomain, canada.domain.com (we don't have domain.ca). We set the geo location to Canada in Google Webmaster Tools a few weeks ago, but site is still not indexed as a Canadian site. How long does it take? Any other steps we should take?
John Mueller - 9:42 am
A: This can take some time to take affect. If the setting is set, you should be fine in the long run.
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Terence - 9:42 am
Q: Does Google rank "static" URLs better than dynamic URLs? Ex. /q-digital-camera.html vs /search?q=digital+camera
John Mueller - 9:43 am
A: There's no preference.
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paavan - 9:39 am
Q: When can available option pay per call in India
ramya - 9:43 am
A: You can post your question with respect to Pay per call on http://groups.google.com/group/adwords-help,they should be able to help you better
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Jeremy Rivera - 9:37 am
Q: Will Universal Image search results REPLACE links to sites? I.e. Instead of 10 sites plus images, will we see 1 image, 1 video and 8 sites?
Susan Moskwa - 9:43 am
A: We're constantly testing what works well in our search results, including whether differenty types of universal results are "additive" or will replace one of the 10 web results. For now I'd say, stay tuned. :)
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Richard Hearne - 9:42 am
Q: Is there any process for confirming a TBPR penalty? Working with authority site which recently went PR7 -> PR3
John Mueller - 9:44 am
A: If you know that the site did not comply with the webmaster guidelines, you can clean that up and file a reconsideration request.
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webado - Christina - 9:38 am
Q: I don't know where I can ask my question if I may even - down hre or up there or nowhere ?
Susan Moskwa - 9:44 am
A: Down here!
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paavan - 9:43 am
Q: thanks
ramya - 9:44 am
A: Thanks for the question Paavan :)
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jtbandes - 9:41 am
Q: How about ? Worth it? Or just let the search engines get it from the content?
John Mueller - 9:44 am
A: We do not read the keywords meta tag -- but if you want to use it for yourself, feel free to keep them.
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Amit Agarwal - 9:40 am
Q: One of my sites was severly penalized in Google though it respects all the guidelines. I filed a reconsideration request and it was quicklrestored though I didn't change anything at my end. The problem has happened thrice in 3 months.. Can I prevent this ?
MattD - 9:44 am
A: Amit, reconsideration requests are the right path. You may want to set up a Webmaster Tools account to check the message center if you haven't already.
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Tom Smith - 9:46 am
Q: Our site is CSS based, content pages are heirarchy based, using 2 tags, 2 tags and then tags for additional content sections to organize content sections. Will we be penalized using this approach?
John Mueller - 9:45 am
A: That's a great way to provide context to your content. Keep it up!
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Andrew Delamarter - 9:41 am
Q: Is it possible sap.com is being penalized on Google.com by the geo-relevancy component due to the site being hosted on servers in germany, japan, and the US? Load balancing determines which data center handles the session.
John Mueller - 9:46 am
A: By setting the geotargeting in webmaster tools the server location will be less of an impact. We understand the need for load sharing across locations.
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ali merchant - 9:40 am
Q: Concerned about div tags. Any harm if they are used as a space saving technique and used completely legitmately
MattD - 9:47 am
A: ali, There should be no harm in extra div tags if they are being used legitimately. Let me know if this doesn't answer the question.
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webado - Christina - 9:43 am
Q: OK here goes. This site www.melinas-music.com - starts out with an optional flash splash page which redirects (in flash) to the proper homepage whihc with js on is a /home/. With js off you dont' get the splash flash and the page displayed at the root url
John Mueller - 9:47 am
A: That should not be a problem :-).
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webado - Christina - 9:43 am
Q: is the same as would be at /hom/ which is not accessible except though js.
John Mueller - 9:48 am
A: If users can link to it, they probably will sooner or later. In general it's no problem if it's just a duplicate.
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Christi - 9:45 am
Q: Should we use alt and title tags, or just alt tags, on images?
John Mueller - 9:49 am
A: You can use both, since the title tag is shown as a tool tip in Firefox, but the alt text is more of a replacement for the image -- they're two different things, which can be used at the same time.
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Jaan Kanellis - 9:48 am
Q: John can you confirm that www.websitehostdirectory.com has been hit with a paid link penalty? So I can remove them and do a re-inclusion?
John Mueller - 9:50 am
A: Hi Jaan, we can't discuss individual sites here, but you may try the experts inthe Google Webmaster Help groups.
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Alan Rothstein - 9:48 am
Q: What about the image enhancement function in Google Webmaster Tools, how does this help?
MattD - 9:50 am
A: Maile is answering you right now. No automatic boost, but a program to help us understand images better. :)
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Gary Campbell - 9:47 am
Q: For top menus displayed on all pages, we load the CSS menu at the end of the page in a hidden div and set to the proper div after loading for help search engines not see the common content first. Is this OK ?
John Mueller - 9:50 am
A: That's fine, if it works for the users and if the content shown / hidden is not misleading to search engines.
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Gary Carpenter - 9:38 am
Q: where do I access webmaster help groups
Adam Lasnik - 9:51 am
A: These are linked from www.google.com/webmasters
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Allison Kulage - 9:44 am
Q: Should you only submit for re-inclusion if your site has been completely banned from the index? or can you submit if you've seen a huge drop in rankings but you're still in the index? What if only a few pages got dropped?
Susan Moskwa - 9:51 am
A: You can request reconsideration at any time, if you've seen a sudden and significant change in your site's performance.
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Mark Kaufman - 9:48 am
Q: Does using an image caching/delivery network, like Akamaii, where the host doman of the image is different than the web page, a problem for Google image search?
John Mueller - 9:51 am
A: The host domain does not have to be the same as the web page - it'll still be indexed in the context of the web page.
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Korpis, LLC - 10:42 am
Q: Does google better understand a page if the url contains the major keywords the page is about?
Evan - 9:52 am
A: If the subject of the page is already adequately covered, then search engines will understand. Having the keywords in the URL will help your users understand what to expect on the page.
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Leslie Ding - 9:49 am
Q: I noticed that in Google News, the thumbnail is from a different site to the news content. How does Google determine what image thumbnail is paired with a google news entry?
John Mueller - 9:52 am
A: Google News has a completely different setup than normal web search. The help center has more information on Google news and News Sitemap files.
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Mark - 9:49 am
Q: Our site has a number of categories and within each category products are shown 9 thumbnails at a time. It seems that our category names come up great in the search results, but products below the first nine in a category do not appear well.
JonathanSimon - 9:52 am
A: I've seen similar situations as this where the problem turned out to be how the product pages were linked using a Javascript method instead of a standard HREF link. Another thing to consider is if the product pages have unique content..check web for dups
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Gary Campbell - 9:48 am
Q: I mean, we load menus at end of page, move to top of page via script. Is this OK ?
John Mueller - 9:52 am
A: Should be ok, if it's not misleading.
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Charlie - 9:49 am
Q: Should I rather have HTML drop downs to all the 50 categories on my website, or should i rather have the top 5 category links on my front page
Susan Moskwa - 9:53 am
A: I'd recommend thinking about it from a user perspective. If you were a new visitor to your site, which method of organization would be easier for you to use?
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webado - Christina - 9:49 am
Q: the page at /home/ is kept out of the index
John Mueller - 9:53 am
A: that should be ok.
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Brian Harnish - 9:50 am
Q: Does Google have plans to include programming algorithms that provide higher results for W3C standards-compliant sites as well as great content?
John Mueller - 9:54 am
A: If your site has compliant code then that could increase your number of happy visitors -- which could in turn help your site across the board.
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Gijs Nelissen - 9:32 am
Q: are we able to listen to a recording of this conference ?
Evan - 9:54 am
A: Unfortunately we do not have an audio recording of this chat. There should be some people blogging about it ;).
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ali merchant - 9:49 am
Q: can subdomains increase my visibility
MattD - 9:54 am
A: ali, pages on subdomains should not increase visibility any more than pages on subdirectories. It's more of an organization (and sometimes navigation) preference.
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Felipe Miyata - 9:26 am
Q: does a noindex, follow page pass pagerank?
Evan - 9:55 am
A: Noindex pages accrue Google PR, and can pass Google PR - even though as a page in its own right, it does not exist in the SERP's
- a good use for this would be pages such as sitemaps that you don't want to appear in the SERP's, but that you want to accrue
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Allison Kulage - 9:47 am
Q: If there's a paid links penalty, what's to stop my competition from buying paid links to get my site penalized? And, many of the top rankings sites for a client of mine are breaking all the paid link rules. How are they ranking and my site isn't?
John Mueller - 9:55 am
A: If you feel that a different site is buying / selling links, you can report that in WEbmaster Tools. This helps us fine-tune our algorithms. In the end, we will take a look at the broader picture.
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Terence - 9:50 am
Q: We have a very large site with tons of dynamically created pages (like user generated content). We notice that Googlebot's crawl rate fluctuates a lot. Any tips on increasing Googlebot's crawl rate? Crawl rate is already set to Fast in Webmaster Tools
Susan Moskwa - 9:56 am
A: One thing I'd recommend is to try to limit any duplicate URLs on your site. E.g. if we're crawling the same content under more than one URL, we're "wasting" some of our bandwidth on that when we could instead be crawling new and unique content on your site
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Andrew Shell - 9:51 am
Q: Is there an difference in indexation for http vs https pages?
John Mueller - 9:56 am
A: No - both are fine.
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webado - Christina - 9:49 am
Q: i have been scrambling my brains to find a better way to transition without visible query string parameters
JonathanSimon - 9:56 am
A: You might want to consider using hidden HTML input fields
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Richard Hearne - 9:50 am
Q: Foolow-up. We haven't made a full analysis, but we want to confirm the penalty first. No lnown contravention od TOS, but initial thoughts are that some external linking may have been viewed as paid while they are not.
MattD - 9:57 am
A: Richard, doesn't look like we have time to do any more individual site analyses, but if you suspect a penalty, I'd recommend submitting a reconsideratoin request or visiting our Webmsater Help Group.
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Charlie - 9:51 am
Q: Should I rather have HTML drop downs to all the 50 categories on my website, or should i rather have the top 5 category links on my front page
John Mueller - 9:57 am
A: I would try to limit the number of links to less than 100 per page -- if you can make 50 links more usable to your user than 5, it can be good for your site in general.
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Alan Rothstein - 9:52 am
Q: Do domains (with a 7 year history but has been redirected for 2 years) keep bad neighborhood links and ip penaltiies when they swtich owners?
John Mueller - 9:58 am
A: If you buy a domain which you suspect has a bad history, you can file a reconsideration request detailing the new ownership.
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Aaron Chronister - 9:56 am
Q: Site penalized, not ranking for company name. Buying links I was the only thing I did b/c everyone else was. Not anymore. How do I fix??
John Mueller - 9:59 am
A: If you can get those links removed or if you can add a rel=nofollow to them that would be a good idea. Once you have cleaned up as much as possible, filing a reconsideration request would be a good next step.
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Anderson - 9:57 am
Q: Site A has a link with nofollow to site B, will google visit site B by this link?
JonathanSimon - 9:59 am
A: No, but keep in mind there may be other links out there pointing to site B
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Mark - 9:55 am
Q: If multiple keywords are used in a url is it better to separate with an underscore, dash or does it matter?
John Mueller - 9:59 am
A: It doesn't really matter.
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Amit Agarwal - 9:48 am
Q: Thanks MattD - I have a Webmaster account and I use that for sending reconsideration request. I am worried because the site gets penalized too frequently (once per month) - There are no warnings or messages in the Webmaster Message center.
MattD - 10:00 am
A: Amit, since we're getting toward the end, I'd recommend taking your site to the Webmaster Help Group. The community there is awesome. It seems like this may just be normal algorithmic fluctuations as opposed to penalties.
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Swaroop - 9:55 am
Q: Can you tell us about the pro's & con's if we use the shortened URL's using TinyUrl or some other similar service.?
John Mueller - 10:00 am
A: Shortened URLs are often not as descriptive, which might make it harder for users to recognize the content that is behind them. For us it's generally not a problem, as long as the content is available normally.
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Jacob Weiss - 9:57 am
Q: I wouldn't feel comfortable posting my url in a public chatroom so all my competitors can see the issues we have, is there a way to disguise the url so only Gogglers can see it?
JonathanSimon - 10:00 am
A: You can send me the question directly...:)
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Nagaraju - 9:58 am
Q: what is the typical google index rate for urls in sitemap. If I introduce about 30000 new urls today, when can I reasonably expect those to be indexed ( assuming I'm at medium crawl rate and the site performance is good)
John Mueller - 10:01 am
A: There's no guarantee for crawling and indexing of Sitemap URLs. There are many factors that play a role in that.
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erik - 9:57 am
Q: when is google going to get better at finding good videos that are not in youtube
Evan - 10:01 am
A: Google is constantly working on improving search.
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Gary Campbell - 9:55 am
Q: http://www.webtrain.com/solutions-business-meetings.asp - it uses the move approachto help SEO focus on the unique content.
John Mueller - 10:01 am
A: Hi Gary, we can't comment on individual sites here, but you can post about it in the groups.
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Gary Campbell - 9:55 am
Q: also, we compete against webex - wish you could use us
Susan Moskwa - 10:02 am
A: Send us your info! We're open to looking into WebEx alternatives.
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John Jones - 9:56 am
Q: Question on links: Many competitors in the real estate industry by far out rank some of my clients because they've been around for years and have hundreds or thousands of agent to agent links. Any chance of flushing Google's aged in bound links?
John Mueller - 10:02 am
A: Even giant sites can be suppassed by creative webmasters!
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jordans - 9:58 am
Q: Are there any detriments to 'hot-linking' videos on youtube?
John Mueller - 10:02 am
A: No, that's fine.
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Nelu Lazar - 9:57 am
Q: If I provide good keyworkds within Title and Description tags, will I need additional Keywords tag in meta information?
Susan Moskwa - 10:03 am
A: First and foremost you should make sure that the relevant words are included in your site's content. Title and meta tags can supplement that, but they're not a replacement for highly relevant content.
Susan Moskwa - 10:03 am
A: Google doesn't use the meta keywords tag very much, but some other search engines may. so it's up to you whether you want to spend your time on that tag, or on adding and improving your content.
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webado - Christina - 9:58 am
Q: The page uses at /hopme/ "noindex,follow" whereas the regular homepage has no block
John Mueller - 10:03 am
A: That's a great way to control the indexing of it.
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Gary Campbell - 9:58 am
Q: My suggestion to Google is to detail issues in webmaster tools, especially if there's a site problem, or penalty. we have to guess. You could save millions of hours of effort.
John Mueller - 10:03 am
A: We are considering & working on that, thanks!
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Richard Hearne - 9:57 am
Q: @Susan - I cant see you in the participamts list?
Susan Moskwa - 10:04 am
A: I'm in the
Susan Moskwa - 10:04 am
A: 'Panelists' section
Susan Moskwa - 10:04 am
A: Ha, I can't type :)
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Ian M - 9:59 am
Q: What meta data so we use for geolocation, and what tags do you not use?
John Mueller - 10:04 am
A: We don't use meta tags for geolocation -- you can use the Webmaster Tools settings though.
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Mark - 10:01 am
Q: Our products can be accessed by different url's (e.g. ex.com/catalog.asp?P=1234 or ex.com/catalog/keyword.asp). Is that considered duplicate content?
Evan - 10:04 am
A: Hi Mark, as far as SERPs go, Google will show the most appropriate URL of the two to the user if they're they same.
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Alan Rothstein - 10:01 am
Q: If we have two websites one .ca and one .com, how would Google.com or Google.ca handle these?
John Mueller - 10:04 am
A: Google can use that information to determine which one would be most relevant to the users (especially those in Canada who use "sites in this country" as a search setting).
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gaurav doshi - 10:03 am
Q: now u can see the vide?
Evan - 10:05 am
A: We have turned off the cam chat. The audio is still on though.
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Amy Balliett - 10:02 am
Q: What is your take on image replacement?
John Mueller - 10:05 am
A: It's great! But you need to make sure that it's a correct replacement (do not replace lots of keywords with a simple image). Also, those images are usually not indexed with image search.
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Alan Rothstein - 10:03 am
Q: how does Google deal with syndicated articles or duplicated content. How do the original content providers get the orginial value?
John Mueller - 10:06 am
A: If content is syndicated, you might want to make sure that you have a link back to your site (if your site is the original).
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Swaroop - 10:04 am
Q: How about getting us first into the next round of really secret beta invites list ?
JonathanSimon - 10:06 am
A: How did you find out about the "really secret beta invites list? [:)
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Mark - 10:08 am
Q: Thanks Evan. So it's ok to have two url's to the same page?
Evan - 10:06 am
A: As long as they follow Google Webmaster Guidelines, everything is up to you :)
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Charlie - 9:50 am
Q: There are many high-quality sites that use image replacement techniques (such as Fahrner image replacement) to provide a better user experience. If you're using this technique in a legitimate way to benefit your users, you shouldn't have problems.
John Mueller - 10:07 am
A: That
John Mueller - 10:07 am
A: That's correct.
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Doug - 10:04 am
Q: Susan how long does it usually take to get a post to show in the webmaster google group
Susan Moskwa - 10:07 am
A: It should show up almost immediately, but sometimes Google Groups has problems that delay posts. Check their "alerts and updates" section here to see if they're having problems: http://www.google.com/support/groups/
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David Gomel - 10:07 am
Q: Are we safe with 302ing paid links?
John Mueller - 10:07 am
A: if you have paid links, you need to make sure that they do not pass pagerank. If you can redirect them, make sure that the redirecting URL cannot be indexd (blocked with a robots.txt).
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ParksC - 10:08 am
Q: Just wanted to point out while I laugh that I am a HE and not a she, ha ha.
John Mueller - 10:08 am
A: Hi!
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ali merchant - 9:58 am
Q: Matt, if a site is hosted internationally, its preferred to use a top level domain extension such as .co.uk, however wont that affect traffic within the US though.
MattD - 10:08 am
A: ali, Ah, I see. If you have a country-specific TLD, you are inherently already targeting a region. If you have a generic TLD, you can use the geolocation feature in Webmaster Tools to specify either a subdomain or subdirectory as targeted to a country.
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Amit Agarwal - 9:59 am
Q: I have seen aggregators like megite.com, social sites like Digg and even splogs rank above in Google than the actual webpage. Can we prevent this ?
Reid - 10:08 am
A: Hi Amit - if you see a splog rank above the actual webpage that owns the original content, feel free to file a spam report to let Google know: http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
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Alan Rothstein - 10:07 am
Q: how often do take action on paid text link (or spam reports) reports in google webmaster tools
Mariya - 10:08 am
A: Alan, be assured that all spam reports which are submitted are reviewed.
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Bob Shirilla - 9:29 am
Q: Please provide opinion on Hackersafe and Authorize.net.
Should a retail store use these services?
John Mueller - 10:09 am
A: if those services provide value to your visitors without breaking any of our webmaster guidelines, then that can be a good thing for your site.
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ali merchant - 9:31 am
Q: any pros cons around using h1 tags. I like to add them from a usability perspective (for instance on a product detail page)
John Mueller - 10:10 am
A: If you can provide context to your content by using headers, by all means use them.
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Gary Carpenter - 9:34 am
Q: where do I access webmaster help groups
John Mueller - 10:10 am
A: http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help/topics?start=
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ParksC - 9:36 am
Q: My site dropped out of the rankings for any term with a date in it (2009 widgets) but didn't lose any ground for main non-dated keywords. A lot of our title tags have dates in them, could this be an over-optimization penalty?
John Mueller - 10:11 am
A: There are many factors involved in ranking -- for details, you may want to ask the experts in the Webmaster Help groups.
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Dictina - 9:37 am
Q: I want to make some case conversion of my URLs in order to have all them in minor case and avoid duplicates, , but I am afraid of overloading the server with 301 redirection. Any idea to make efficient redirects?
John Mueller - 10:11 am
A: In general even a large number of 301 redirects will not be a problem in the long run. One way you can help that is by using a Sitemap file.
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webado - Christina - 9:48 am
Q: I think it does. All it is js on, you get splash and redirect to /hom/; js off you stay on root but see what woudl have been at /home/
John Mueller - 10:12 am
A: If you have cleaned up the links to your site as much as possible, make sure that you detail what you did and file a reconsideration request. However, make sure that all of your site complies with all of the guidelines beforehand.
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Doug - 10:09 am
Q: What would be the process if you feel google thinks you have paid links but you do not
Wysz - 10:12 am
A: If you feel that your site may have been detected as being in violation of the Webmaster Guidelines and it is not (or is no longer), then submitting a reconsideration request in Webmaster Tools is the way to go.
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ParksC - 9:47 am
Q: again with asking for inclusion, would you need to wait until Google has recrawled any/all sites you have had paid links changed on before asking? And how long would you expect to wait to see results from asking for inclusion?
John Mueller - 10:13 am
A: If you have cleaned up the links to your site as much as possible, make sure that you detail what you did and file a reconsideration request. However, make sure that all of your site complies with all of the guidelines beforehand.
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Amy Balliett - 10:08 am
Q: I have reported a competitor for spam multiple times (they use CSS to push about 50 repeated keywords off the screen on load). I've seen nothing happen as a result of my spam report, is there a better way to report this?
Susan Moskwa - 10:13 am
A: The spam report is the best way to do this. FYI we do take all spam reports into account, but we don't take immediate manual action on all of them (we use many of them to improve our algorithms in the long term), so you may not see immediate changes.
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Gabe - 10:10 am
Q: It sounds like you are big on blogs. How would you rank the blog software out there (wordpress, blogge, etc.) in terms of which has the most SEO friendly coding so that we can best succeed in search results?
MattD - 10:14 am
A: Hey Gabe, covering this over voice right now.
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Jacque - 10:06 am
Q: Could you go into more detailed of the links? what does "float" PR mean?
John Mueller - 10:14 am
A: I'm not aware of "float" PR.
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webado - Christina - 10:06 am
Q: I guess the usual "an image is wirth 1000 words" doesn't quite apply ;)
John Mueller - 10:15 am
A: Only if you do not use keyword stuffing in your alt tags.
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Eric - 10:05 am
Q: can you explain rel=nofollow tags on links? When and where should we use these tags?
JonathanSimon - 10:15 am
A: If you want to link to a site that you either don't trust or can't vouch for use rel nofollow. For user generated content like the comments section of a blog, user added URLs can be auto nofollowed if you don't have time to monitor these Links
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David Gomel - 10:08 am
Q: So in certain cases, 302s could be passing PR?
John Mueller - 10:15 am
A: You should make sure that the redirecting URLs cannot be crawled, then you should be ok.
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Phil Peterman - 9:41 am
Q: Thank you Jonathan, I ask because we are doing a redseign now and are using it in our navs rather heavily
JonathanSimon - 10:16 am
A: sure np
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Manish - 10:11 am
Q: Are .com domains better placed in SERPs than say .in domains ?
Mariya - 10:16 am
A: Manish, the .com domain is a generic top-level domaina, while .in is a country-specific domain. While they could appear mixed in the serps, the .in domains would be naturally better targeted for India-specific local queries
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Manish - 10:14 am
Q: Does the country where your .in domain is hosted makes any difference in SERPs
Evan - 10:16 am
A: Hi Manish, this may affect different geographical google domains, such as google.co.uk or google.com. I would suggest using WM Tools to set geolocation preferences.
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Doug - 10:14 am
Q: Spam reports are good but i think that some type of reputation should be given to them based on how man someone does maybe
John Mueller - 10:17 am
A: If you file spam reports, make sure that you do that from within your webmaster Tools account. Those reports are treated with higher priority.
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Jaan Kanellis - 10:17 am
Q: Can you say that PR Sculpting is important for most all websites to use?
Susan Moskwa - 10:18 am
A: Personally I think that the majority of sites would benefit more from spending their time and energy on other things (making sure the site's content is accessible, unique and compelling, promoting their site, building community, etc.).
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webado - Christina - 10:18 am
Q: Evan, the geolocation preference only works for generic tld's, isn't that true? If your tld is already a country tld then that's the geolocaiton already
Susan Moskwa - 10:18 am
A: True.
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Doug - 10:18 am
Q: What if a link is not paid but google thinks its paid and treats it like one.
John Mueller - 10:19 am
A: We take a look at the bigger picture.
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Mark - 10:20 am
Q: We recently added a favicon to our site. When I view source it appears above the tag. Will that affect our rankings since the title and meta description are further from the <head> tag?
John Mueller - 10:19 am
A: No, that does not matter.
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Mark Kaufman - 10:15 am
Q: Thanks. It was strange that after years of pagerank of 7 or so, to have it drop off to 0, but since traffic was unaffected we didn't completely freak out. ;)
Evan - 10:19 am
A: Awesome, its always best not to freak out. We have a great blog post about housekeeping items at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/03/good-housekeeping.html
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John Jones - 10:19 am
Q: Is it better to clean up / remove / update in bound links even if those links probably don't pass ANY value?
John Mueller - 10:20 am
A: If those links cannot pass any value then you should be fine. However,you should also make sure that there are not other items which are problematic with your linking.
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Manish - 10:20 am
Q: How can I know which page on my site is leaking PR. Some of my blogs are penalized for paid links. I have nofollowed or roboted out whatever I cud find. I hv requested reconsideration requests too. but still no PR.
John Mueller - 10:20 am
A: There's gnerally no need to worry about "leaking PR".
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Ian M - 10:21 am
Q: Seeing as you're going to look through this Q&A - can you please go over (ina post) about which meta language data you will look at, specifically which out of these: html lang=, meta name=language, meta http-equiv=content-language
John Mueller - 10:21 am
A: We do not look at the language meta tags -- we've discovered that they are often incorrect and that it is better to recognize the language through the content.
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Rob - 9:54 am
Q: Is subdomain considered a "separate" domain that will come up in search results as "competing" with the main domain?
Evan - 10:22 am
A: Hi Rob, there is usually some level of connection among subdomains and root domains.
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John Jones - 10:21 am
Q: @ John Mueller: biggest indicator that a link isn't passing value would be what in your opinion? If Webmaster Tools knows of the link wouldn't that go to say that it is passing something?
John Mueller - 10:22 am
A: To prevent passing of pagerank from a link you can apply a rel=nofollow or make sure that they redirect through URLs which cannot be crawled.
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webado - Christina - 10:22 am
Q: so ya mean I've been wasting my time setting the language properly? lol
John Mueller - 10:23 am
A: No, it shows that you take your content seriously, which is probably reflected in the rest of your content!
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Doug - 10:23 am
Q: Is it better to have a site with a different tld for different languages or to point someone to a language based on their IP
John Mueller - 10:24 am
A: both can work, or you can use a geeric tld and use webmaster tools to assign geotargeting.
Susan Moskwa - 10:24 am
A: I'd recommend always allowing the user to make a choice about what language to see; some people may prefer a different language than you would automatically assign to them based on their IP.
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dockarl - 10:14 am
Q: You said that words in the url are good for users Adam, but what about for search engines?
MattD - 10:24 am
A: dockarl, I'll try to cover this while Adam talks. :) If you think about this in the same way as images, a descriptive file name can be more helpful than a non-descriptive filename for users and search engines.
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John Jones - 9:46 am
Q: would including the img url in the site map help?
John Mueller - 10:26 am
A: Yes, but it will not pass as much context for image search as an image that is embedded in a HTML page.
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Dictina - 10:25 am
Q: Tags vs categories navigation or pagination: which is best? which shoul <I nofollow?
Evan - 10:26 am
A: It is up to you how you want to have users navigate your pages, both can work well. I would suggest using nofollow on links that you do not want to pass PageRank (links that are unrelated to your website, etc)