What was discussed in Google Webmaster ‘Tricks and Treats’ Webinar? – Part 1

Third Google Webmaster ‘Tricks and Treats’ Webinar/ Chat took place on 22^nd October, 2008. There were around 700 attendees and I was one of them. People from various countries participated in the event. There were around 10 people from India. It was proposed to be a session of 1 hour but it lasted for around 2 hours because of the interest people showed and the queries posed by them.

Adam Lasnik was its host. Other Googlers present there were Matt Cutts, Adi Goradia, Evan T., John Mueller, Jonas Voss, Jonathan Simon, Maile Ohye, Matt Dougherty, Michael Wyszomierski, and Nathan Johns.

It was a nice experience to talk to the top Googlers and other fellow webmasters. They used WebEx interface for all the interactions. A question-answer section was there where we all posted our questions and they were answered by the Google team. Although it was a very appreciable step from their side but there were some problems too which were faced by all of us.

Some of the problems as stated by many webmasters were:

• The audio was getting interrupted in between.
• We lost some parts of the presentation may be due to more number of people getting connected.
• Some people were not able to attend because of the mismatch of timings.
• The chat, at some places, was going off topic and it was difficult to participate in the chat going on at lightning speed and at the same time to concentrate on the presentations by the team.

I think the Google Team will look into these matters and will find out a good solution to these problems, so that next time more and more number of people can attend the event and get benefited.

Now, for those who were not able to make it to the event, I am posting the questions, answers and some parts of the presentations as given by the Google team (let’s check out how strong is my memory power 🙂 ).

John Muller gave a presentation on ‘Myths & Misconceptions of SEO’. I was really fascinated by that. It was a must attend thing but I got disconnected in between and missed lots of it. I am posting here what all I had attended and can recollect now.

Following are some of the myths and misconception while optimizing a site:

• Keyword stuffing – It never helps in getting ranked on search engines. Avoid it and write content for users not the search engines.
• Meta tags – Least important factor.
• Submit, submit and submit – Submitting your site to search engines again and again leads to no results.
• Duplicate content – Don’t worry about it, Google is ignoring it. Be reasonable when re-using content from other sites.
• Capitalization of tags – meta name and META NAME are treated as same.
• Getting listed in 1000s of search engines and directories is important.
• Participating in adwords, adsense or analytics help or harm site – These are only tools provided by Google to help track your sites’ data and increase your visibility.
• Keyword is important – There no thing such as optimal keyword density.
• XML sitemap drops your site from listings – It only helps to keep search engines updated with your site.
• PR is dead or everything – It is only a measure of quality and quantity of links of a page. There are 200 other factors which are considered. (When asked repeatedly about those other 200 factors, they never replied 😛 ).
• Resubmitting is vital.
• Once your site ranks high, don’t touch it.

After that I got disconnected and missed the whole part… Waiting for it to get uploaded on Google’s blog.
Then came Jonathan Simon, who is a Webmaster Trends Analyst, with his presentation on the new feature uploaded on Google Webmaster Tools – ‘Find New Links – Not found errors report’. He explained how to get full benefit of this feature:

• Download ‘not found errors report’.
• Fix ‘on site’ not found links (i.e., broken links)
• Group external not found links by domain and sort them.
• Evaluate to prioritize. If the link is from a good page, get it fixed.
• Set redirects for those which can’t be fixed.
• Implement 404 page. The 404 page widget is also available on google webmaster tools.
• Resolve these errors periodically.

Then came Maile and gave presentation on ‘how to contribute towards community’.

This post is getting very lengthy. I will post the questions-answers and other discussions in my next post.

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