Google Webmaster Help Chat – Highlights
For those who have missed the Google Webmaster Help Group Chat that took place on 19th of June, you can refer to the complete transcript posted at SearchEngineRoundTable.com. Also, the downloadable audio transcript is available.
This post provides a summarised of the entire session. For ease of readers, I have clubbed the questions under various categories. In most cases the answers are quoted for ease of understanding and whereever, possible I have added a summary statement.
- Flash Websites
- Google – Yahoo Partnership
- Links
- Multinational Websites & Geo Targeting
- Robots.txt
- Google PR
- 301 & Redirects
- XSS Exploits
- Google Webmaster Tools
- Keyword Density
- Is Google Case Sensitive
- Sitelinks
- Sitemap
- Page Load Time
- Privacy
- Duplicate Content
Google can extract some information from Flash information but not complete information like it does for HTML ( by John Mueller)
Q: Can Google read words in images and swf files?
A: Hi Alan, I took this one on audio, but the basic answer is that for better accessibility, it’s always a great idea to provide alternate content as text. For images in particular, use the alt attribute in your img tag.
Q: In regards to the Flash files, I believe it is possible to create Flash movies with extra accessible content, correct?
A: We encourage building flash sites with html accessibility for googlebot to crawl. For more information check out our blog post on flash: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/07/best-uses-of-flash.html
Suggested this link http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/our-agreement-to-provide-ad-technology.html ( by Susan Moskwa)
Google doesn’t consider links found in publications in Google Scholar as a backlink unless the document is found on the web as a regular web page.
Q: Does google take anything from links taged nofollow, for example does it read the anchor text and credit that to the destination?
A: No, it basically drops that link from our link graph (it ignores it).
Q: I’ve seen external links shown in Webmaster Tools that have clearly been nofollowed – how is that?
A: We list them as well.
My Comments : Seems a bit surprising and contradictory to me. If Google isn’t taking anything at all from the “no-follow”ed links why would they care to list them in the Webmaster Tools ?
Q: is directory submission still a good way to build links? or its not recommended?
A: Hi Ernest, I’d be very selective choosing directories. I’d rather recommend building links naturally and by merit.
Multinational Websites & Geo Targeting
Q: I’ve got a question about internationalization: I have a multinational site with country-coded subdirectories and I’ve registered these as such in Webmasters’ tools, will this be exempt from duplicate content rules for a site spanning uk/us/aus ?
The same questions is answered twice in two different ways by two Googlers. I will quote them here.
John Mueller – 5:07 pm
A: That’s generally ok. I would still make sure that the pages are obviously well-targeted for those audiences. It wouldn’t make sense to send users from specific areas to one general page. In that case, I would use a single page without geotargeting.
Susan Moskwa – 5:16 pm
A: Geographic targeting doesn’t affect the fact that we only want to show one version of a piece of content in search results; we will still try to filter out duplicates when we serve search results.
Q: can you use geotargeting to target a region or a # of countries?
A: Hi Seth, geotargeting at the moment is only possible to target single countries, no regions are supported at the moment.
Q: Any comments on the seomoz article “why apple isn’t UK enough for google?” Any other tips/tricks about UK sites which are physically hosted in the USA and not on a .co.uk?
A: Great question. In Webmaster Tools you can set geotargeting. For more information please see: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/where-in-world-is-your-site.html
Q: Further on Geotargetting. I run a multinational site with about 12 different languages being supported. We are implimenting geotrageting so users are directed to the appropriate language page for their country. The concern of some is that Google may penal
A: I would recommend not redirecting users based on their location. This can be a bad user experience. It’s better to allow a user to choose his version based on his searches
Q: Are google going to give any weight to geo location meta tags – if so is there an ‘accepted’ standard
A: No, we don’t use them.
Q: Does the location of your site hosting affect the local results your site shows up for?
A: Yes, it may. We look at server location and ccTLD among other factors
Q: is google using ip to trigger localized search results
A: Yes.
If there is no robots.txt file Google will assume that there are not any crawling restrictions, as long as there are no other robots directives via meta tags or the x-robots HTTP header directive. ( by Michael Wyszomierski )
Howevere, remember to read this post on Google’s stand on Robots.txt – in case there is no server response.
Q: When you use the robots.txt tool in Webmaster Tools does it abide by this case sensitive rule?
A: Hi Alan, yes. The robots.txt analysis tool is case sensitive in the correct areas. Directives like “disallow” can be lower or uppercase. Path and directories are correctly case sensitve.
Q: Is there any chance, that problems in receiving robots.txt can completely prevent site from indexing?
A: Hi Serge, if you suspect that there are issues with the robots.txt file for your site, a good place to check for more information is your Webmaster Tools account — on the Overview page you will be able to see if there are any robots.txt -related errors.
Q: About the robots.txt: I read today a deep post in the net where is specified that whenever gbot is unable to get back result for an existent robots.txt file in a shorten time, google crawler start to ignore web site page indexing. This sound a bit strange.
A: If we are not sure whether or not we are allowed to crawl a site, we might play it safe and not crawl the site. Of course if the robots.txt is unreachable, chances are the rest of
your site might be too (which is bad).
Q: Whats the average time after which the PR of a site gets updated?
A: We typically do pushes to the toolbar every 3-4 months, so it can take that long between toolbar data pushes.
The same question was again answered by Reid..
Hi Abhijeet – Google’s index is continuously updating itself so there are no defined timeframes when a site’s ranking will change
Q: Abhijeet: Is that update period just for the toolbar, or for search results as well? What’s the time it takes for page rank changes to affect search results?
A: Our search results are updated all the time! The pagerank in the toolbar however is only updated a few times a year.
Q: Do 301 redirects send PR to its destination? I have several domains that 301 to 1 domain, and a couple have PR. Will it now send that PR to the 1 domain now that it is 301 redirected? Thank you.
A: 301 redirects are the best way to let us know that you’d like a particular URL to get “credit” for factors from another URL; we’ll pass those signals across a 301 redirect as appropriate.
Q: If you have a domain that has a PR of 4 and I 301’d it to my new site, why hasn’t any of the “link juice” passed off or the PR? It’s been a few months now.
A: This can take more than a few months.
Q: If a site had a noindex meta tag and was removed from the index, how long before it could come back into the index? Would that removal carry over to another domain if that site was 301’d to a new site?
A: Hi Brian, the site (or just one URL) can return to the index once it’s recrawled with the noindex tag removed. Also, you can’t really noindex a separate domain, even if you 301 (so no mean webmasters can easily exclude your domain from being indexed).
Q: How long does it take for 301s and 410s to take effect?
A: 301s and 410s can’t “take effect” until after we’ve had a chance to crawl them–that’s the real variable. After we crawl the URL and get the status code, your removal / move should happen within a short period of time, most typically within a few days.
Q: What about a zero second 302 redirect. Is this a 301 redirect?
A: No, they are not the same; the HTTP code that is returned is what’s important.
Site Hacking Through XSS Exploit
Matt discussed and pointed to http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/check-your-search-box-for-xss-exploits/
Q: Hi John, I wanted to know more about Google webmaster tools stats.. How can we automate it? Why are there special characters like “[” when we download excel file
A: Hi Ankit, I have a python script on my site at http://johnmu.com/ that will convert those files into more readable ones.
Q: Is there any way to speed up the time between selecting a country for targeting and it actually beign updated in the system?
A: We’re working on improving the webmaster experience with Webmaster Tools, including speeding up the reaction time for specific features.
Q: Is the incoming links list in Google Webmaster Tools an accurate estimator of all the incoming links that google thinks as a backlink?
A: It’s a sampling of your incoming links that we know about, not always 100%.
Q: Hi Matt, Are there any guidelines available on keyword density we have pages that are about 1 single subject and the keyword density is quite high
A: Antony, you may not believe this, but we tend not to think much about KW density here at Google, b/c our algorithms handle it pretty well. My advice is to pull in an innocent/non-search friend and have them read the text. If they raise their eyebrow, …
Q: Does google differentiate between searches in lower case and searches with proper capitalization?
A: We may take this into account if we can recognize that it is relevant to the query. ( by John Mueller)
Another similar answer
Q: What if you use a wild card, still case sensitive?
A: the wildcards aren’t case-sensitive (since the’re wildcards), but the other characters are still case-sensitive. ( by Bergy Berghausen)
John Mueller later stated that this answer is not correct and Google is not differentiating results based on case sensitiveness as of now. However, this might be a future option. Read the PostScript at : http://searchengineland.com/080620-081736.php
Q: Will we ever have control over sitelinks to bring searchers to the better pages on our site, vs the ones google thinks are the best pages?
A: Sitelinks are automatically generated by our algorithm and are meant to help users navigate your site. While you cannot opt into having sitelinks, you are able to block Sitelinks using Google Webmaster Tools.
Q: Does Google crawl all the links in a submitted sitemap? If a sitemap, with no errors, is only partially indexed, what could be the meaning behind this?
A: A Sitemap isn’t a guarantee of either crawling or indexing; it’s just an additional way of making sure Google knows about the URLs you’d like crawled. I’d start here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34444&topic=8524
Q: Does page load time have any effect in organic rankings?
A: Hi Michael, page load time is important for user satisfaction (they may leave the site if it’s too slow). For Google at this time, it’s not considered a signal for ranking. We’re always looking to improve the user experience, however, so if you keep your page load time down, users and search engines will continuously be happy!
Q: does google track what i’m searching for on other sites if i’m logged in with my gmail account? if not, how come i see Google serch results that seem to be related my previous search elsewhere
A: In general, your Google account is probably what you’re using for gmail. If you’re logged in, those searches may be tracked if you have search history turned on.
Q: If I click a PPC listing, will that visit influence organic, personalized search results?
A: I believe this is tracked only if you have the Toolbar, are logged in and have web history enabled.
Q: guys, when you have a company site, say in travel and or vacation rentals – many affiliates use your content/pics/pricing etc.. does this apply to the Google Duplicate content rule? If so, suggestions on best handling it?
A: Hi Rob, as long as your site has original content and images, you have no reason to be worried
Hi Rob, did you see our recent post on dupe content? We also have a few words on syndicated content: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/duplicate-content-due-to-scrapers.html
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