Google Webmaster Central’s Live Chat Transcript Posted

26 June, 2008 (10:37) | Digital Marketing, Google, Online Marketing, SEO, Search, Search Engines, Tech Companies | By: Kieran Hawe

Google has posted the audio, decks and Q&A transcript for the Webmaster Live chat that took place last Thursday. For those that missed it, the live chat basically brought together all of the important people who work at Google to answer any and all search related questions. Even though a great deal of the information presented was very basic, it was still very informative. Below I have pulled out some of the highlights from the live Q&A session that I found to be the most interesting and useful.

Here is the full Google Q&A transcript and the complete Google Webmaster Central blog recap.

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 ?
A (John Mueller): 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.

Q: can Google crawl Flash sites/
A (John Mueller): Somewhat — we can extract some information from the Flash files, but it’s generally not the same as with HTML sites/pages.

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?
A (Susan Moskwa): 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: 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 (John Mueller): Hi Ankit, I have a python script on my site at http://johnmu.com/ that will convert those files into more readable ones.

Q: does Google ‘value’ a website incorporating a relevant blog and forum
A (Matt Dougherty): Hi Paul, I would say that an organic blog or forum definitely adds value to your website by creating a community effect.

Q: If a website’s Robots.txt file is goign to a 404 error will it be removed from the index? What if it is missing altogether?
A (Michael Wyszomierski): 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.

Q: In regards to the Flash files, I believe it is possible to create Flash movies with extra accessible content, correct?
A (evan t): 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

Q: Does Google differentiate between searches in lower case and searches with proper capitalization?
A (John Mueller): We may take this into account if we can recognize that it is relevant to the query.

Q: Our pages are using mod_rewrite to strip “.html”– Will Google think of “process” and “process.html” as separate pages?
A (Susan Moskwa): If both URLs serve content, we will interpret them as two separate URLs. If the one redirects to the other (e.g. with a 301 redirect), this will let us know that one is the preferred/permanent URL.

Q: is an empty robots.txt bad?
A (Reid Yokoyama): Hi ralf - an empty robots.txt by default will allow all Internet spiders to crawl through all the pages on your site. If that is not something you want, then consider modifying your robots.txt file to set permissions.

Q: Does Google take anything from links taged nofollow, for example does it read the anchor text and credit that to the destination?
A (Susan Moskwa): No, it basically drops that link from our link graph (it ignores it).

Q: Is there any limit on the number of redirections 301, a Web site?. In a large site, if you change the URL structure, is the optimum time to do it with 301? or is best done gradually
A (Matt Cutts): There’s no per-page limit on the number of 301s you can do, so you could move 100K pages to 100K new location. However, if we see a really long chain of redirects, eventually we will decide to stop following the chain.

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 (Susan Moskwa): 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 the site is designed with css, does the crawler throw out the .css and look only at the HTML?
A (Matt Cutts): Typically we wouldn’t crawl CSS, Kien, but in a few limited circumstances we can (e.g. if we’re checking for hidden text).

Q: Matt, can you comment on the number of links leading to interior content/category pages, that appear on the index of a site - and the impact of having many internal links on the index or not having that..
A (Maile Ohye): Hi Jeff, by index do you mean Sitemap or index.html type page. In general, if it’s index.html (not a Sitemap) then keep is user-friendly and navigatable. We usually say 100 links or fewer. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer

Q: I’m worried that we’ll miss new visitors because personalized search will drive them to their frequently visited sites instead of those based on organic search relevance. Should I be concerned about this?
A (John Mueller): No :) — we try to show variety in the search results and additionally smaller sites are generally quicker in adopting to new trends, allowing new sites to rank for new terms faster.

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 (Matt Cutts): 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: If I click a PPC listing, will that visit influence organic, personalized search results?
A (John Mueller): I believe this is tracked only if you have the Toolbar, are logged in and have web history enabled.

Q: there is a general view that having a lot of backlinks is a strong influence on PageRank. Does Google have a response to this theory?
A (Matt Cutts): It’s more about the quality of the links than just the raw number of links.

Q: WHAT ARE THE 3 MOST INPORTANT THINGS TO DO TO EARN A GOOD PAGERANK?
A (Mariya Moeva): Content, content and content (: