What was discussed in Google Webmaster ‘Tricks and Treats’ Webinar? – Part 2
In my previous post of Google Webmaster ‘Tricks and Treats’ Webinar, I had given some notes of the presentations given by the Googlers. Here, in this post, I am posting the questions asked by the webmasters and the answers as given by the Google Team itself.
Q: You say links don’t count, but why is there such an emphasis on them and why does it seem that they DO make a difference?
A: Jonathan Simon; Links are one of the ways users and search engines find your site. So if visitors are important to you then links should also be important to you.
Q: About IP addresses, you always used to hear that you don’t want to share because you could get punished if you share with a bad site. I’m guessing that’s not a concern anymore — true or false?
A: JohnMu; I wouldn’t worry about that anymore. The situations where it would matter are when the server is overloaded (can’t respond to your visitors) and when it’s incorrectly configured (not returning your site to your visitors).
Q: When checking out your links to not found pages, what would you do about links from spammy sites? In fact, what to do about links from spammy sites in general?
A: Wysz; In general, it’s not something that you should worry about. We understand that you can’t control all links to your site, and work hard to make our algorithms robust enough to prevent this type of activity from harming your site’s ranking.
If you do notice any spam sites that are affecting Google’s search results, please let us know by submitting a spam report:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35265
Q: Until recently (the last six months or so) a high ranking was achievable by submitting articles to article directories (providing they were 40%-60% unique), it no longer seems to be the case. Have links from article sites been de-valued at all?
A: Matt Cutts; In my experience, not every article directory site is high-quality. Sometimes you see a ton of articles copied all over the place, and it’s hard to even find original content on the site. The user experience for a lot of those article directory sites can be pretty bad too. So you’d see users landing on those sorts of pages have a bad experience.
If you’re thinking of boosting your reputation and getting to be well-known, I might not start as the very first thing with an article directory. Sometimes it’s nice to get to be known a little better before jumping in and submitting a ton of articles as the first thing.
Q: Does using W3C standards make a difference in ranking on Google? If yes, when will HTML5 be supported?
A: JohnMu; Indirectly adhering to standards always makes sense — it helps to make sure that your site is accessible to a larger group of users, which could in turn result in more recommendations for your site, leading us to want to send more users there as well. I’m not sure how HTML5 fits into the whole thing though — we’ll have to wait and see what they come up with.
Q: Thoughts on SE Rank Checking software? Are you against them? Would you purposely disable them?
A: JohnMu; I generally believe that rank checking software doesn’t make much sense anymore (not to mention that they’re against our Terms of Service and could result in us blocking your IP address). We use a lot of personalization and geotargeting in our search results – so what ranks high for one user might not rank high for others. It doesn’t really help you much to know a “ranking number” if you can’t tell how far this ranking is actually something that the majority of your users are likely to see.
Q: Are you going to focus more on personalised search? If so, these results we currently look at won’t really matter, as different sites will be at #1 for different people, right?
A: JohnMu; That’s right — with personalized search it’s possible that each user sees slightly different search results. We try to make those search results unique and compelling enough to make the user go visit and stay on the sites listed — so if your site is really awesome, chances are high that we’d be recommending it to users as well :-).
Q: What weight does the age of a site and the amount of time a domain is registered for have on it’s search placement?
A: Matt Cutts; In the majority of cases, it actually doesn’t matter–we want to return the best information, not just the oldest information. Especially if you’re a mom/pop site, we try to find ways to rank your site even if your site is newer or doesn’t have many links. I think it is fair for Google to use that as a signal in some circumstances, and I try never to rule a signal out completely, but I wouldn’t obsess about it.
Q: Recently, you removed this suggestion: “Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!” from your guidelines. Is there any chance that you will be discounting these kinds of links for ranking value in future?
A: Matt Cutts; There’s always the chance that we’ll discount directory links in the future. What we were seeing was quite a few novice people would see the “directory” recommendation and go out and just try to submit to a ton of directories, even if some of the directories were lower-quality or even fly-by-night directories that weren’t great for users. Right now we haven’t changed how we’re weighting directory links–we’ve only removed the directory suggestion from the webmaster guidelines.
Q: Since Google is against using ranking software (ie:WebCeO) to monitor SERP rankings, is there any plans on Google creating an approved, in-house rank check application that webmasters can use?
A: Matt Cutts; It’s something that we’ve talked about. My concern is that sometimes people get too worried with paying attention to their “trophy phrase” and want to rank for that even if that’s not the best phrase for them, or concentrating on one phrase to the exclusion of all the other stuff they rank for isn’t the best idea. I think paying attention to server logs or analytics data gets you a really nice array of keywords that are practical to work on. But this is feedback that we’ve heard, and personally I think it would be nice if we offered this for some reasonable size of keywords.
Q: Do inbound links from other sites owned by the same company help or hurt rank?
A: Matt Cutts; I find that inbound links from the same company tend to break down into two camps. You’ll find mom/pops that have a very few sites in one camp, and that can make sense if those sites are linked; in the other camp, I’ve seen SEOs have 1000 or 2000 different domains and cross-link them. I definitely would not recommend that.
I think a lot of the litmus test in my mind is whether it makes sense to a regular person for those domains to be interlinked. If you look at a product like Coke, people aren’t surprised to see that they have coca-cola.co.nz and several other domains. If you go to coke.com, it’s perfectly reasonable to ask users which country they’re coming from, and then send them to one of a bunch of domains. But if a regular user lands on example.com and finds 20 or 30 cross-links at the bottom of the page and they look like off-topic or cookie-cutter or spammy domains, that’s going to look bad to almost anyone.
Maile Ohye; I’m not trying to give you the run around, but this is a bit situation specific… overall, though, I wouldn’t look at these links as helping or hurting your rank when written in a helpful manner to the user.
So, 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.
Put yourself in the user’s seat, and do what makes sense for these links. Good luck!
Q: In addition to a XML sitemap, does it make any sense to have also an HTML sitemap on the same website? Does HTML sitemap helps improve the rating?
A: JohnMu; A HTML sitemap file can help search engines, especially those that don’t use XML Sitemap files. Also, the 404 widget in Webmaster Tools (which you can place on your 404 pages) will use “/sitemap.htm” and similar files to help users to find the content they’re looking for. So yes, I would recommend making HTML sitemap files, however I’d focus on the user and not the search engines.
Q: Is the bounce rate and speed taken into account when ranking a page? i.e. if you see a searcher click on a result then return very quickly and choose another result, is the first page ranked lower?
A: JohnMu; Assuming that users will be jumping out of a site like that, there’s a high probability that they won’t be willing to recommend it to others (or come back themselves). So yes, indirectly at least, if a site is made in a way that users run away right away, then chances are that we might not be recommending it as much as other sites that users like (and recommend to others).
Q: Many believe that to rank well, you simply need “quality” backlinks. But how important is having your keywords in the links, and throughout your site? Is keyword density of any importance to show what the page is about? What % is suggested?
A: Wysz; Links are just one factor involved in Google’s ranking of pages. We look at both on-page and off-page content, so what you have on your page can be an essential part of ranking. However, there is no recommended “keyword density.” Your content should be high quality and written for users. If you try writing for search engines, the language can become very unnatural, which may end up hurting you more than it helps.
So, this was all about Google Webmaster ‘Tricks and Treats’ Webinar/event. These are only few of the questions discussed there. I will keep posting more SEO tips in my further posts. If you want to ask anything specific, do post a comment or send me an e-mail.
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