We've heard feedback from members of this Help Group that some of you
want to hear more about what goes on at the conferences we attend.
Well, I was at an AMA Search Marketing conference in Chicago last
week, and thought I'd share some of the questions that were asked at
the conference (as well as some answers!):

Q: How many keywords should I put in the meta keywords tag? I heard
the limit was 25, but then my web guy told me you should only put 3 -
5.

A: Not all search engines take the meta keywords tag seriously these
days, since its potential for abuse is so great. If you're using it
because you think it's a great way to send Google a signal about your
site's topic, your time would probably be better-spent creating great
content rather than carefully tailoring your meta keywords (since site
content is one of the signals we use to determine what a site is
about).

Filling the meta keywords tag with hundreds of keywords tends to look
like spam, so I'd keep the numbers reasonable; but if you want to use
keywords, there's no exact limit on how many you're "allowed". I've
heard several people say they use the meta keywords tag as a reference
for themselves, so that when they come back to a page they can
remember which keywords they were targeting or what the main focus of
the page was (this is particularly helpful if you're managing a large
site with many pages). Using the number and type of keywords that
would be useful for *you* is a pretty good rule of thumb for the meta
keywords tag.

~ ~ ~

Q: My site's robots.txt file includes the following:

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /subfolder/

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Is Googlebot going to be able to crawl the site, or will it be blocked
by the second rule (disallow all)?

A: We used the robots.txt analysis tool in webmaster tools to test
this scenario. (Yes, Googlebot will be able to crawl all of the site
except the /subfolder/ folder.)

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35248

~ ~ ~

Q: If your site only has a few sitelinks and you use the new feature
in webmaster tools to block one of those sitelinks, your site will
show one less sitelink in search results. But if you have the maximum
possible number of sitelinks and you block one of them, will you get a
new one to fill its place, or do you just go down to [max-1]
sitelinks?

A: Every time you block a sitelink, you'll have one less sitelink
displayed in search results, regardless of whether you were at the
"max" number of sitelinks or not.

~ ~ ~

Q: If you've submitted your content to Google and then you create some
new content or redo your site, should you submit the new content? Do
you need to "remove" the submission of the old content?

A: The purpose of submitting your content to Google (via
http://www.google.com/addurl/ ) is to make sure we know about the
existence of your site. It can be useful, for example, if no other
sites link to you (in which case we wouldn't be able to discover your
site during our normal crawl). Once we know about your site, however,
we'll come back and crawl it periodically, and when we do we'll see
that you have new content; so there's no need to resubmit your URL.

If you're interested in giving us more data about your site's URLs,
such as when they were last updated or how often your content changes,
you can submit an XML Sitemap which includes this type of information:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34654
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/protocol.html
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34609

~ ~ ~

Q: Is there a backlog for submission of new sites? I heard there was a
6 month backlog.

A: Nope, not true. I've seen sites get crawled within days of our
first hearing about them. How frequently we crawl your site, however,
can vary a lot depending on factors like how popular/important it is,
and how often your content changes. But you don't have to worry about
any "backlog", and certainly not a 6 month backlog. Go ahead and let
us know about as much content as you want!

~ ~ ~

Q: Would you recommend using cookies, or would you consider that
"forcing" something on the user?
(This question was asked in the context of a discussion about giving
users choices about how they can use your site.)

A (from Mike Moran): Cookies are fine, because
a) it's opt-in, so you're giving people a choice; and
b) the cookie rejection rate is going down every year, so whatever
you're trying to accomplish with those cookies is more likely to be
successful.

(Note that you should also make sure your site still functions if the
cookies get rejected, since some visitors--including search engine
crawlers--don't accept cookies.)

~ ~ ~

Q: Would you recommend a deep or shallow navigation structure?

A (from Mike Moran): Studies show that narrow-and-deep hierarchies
tend to be less successful because you're asking people to make too
many choices (and they may not know what a particular category means,
so if they make the wrong decision they've just clicked themselves
farther away from what they really want).

~ ~ ~

Q: There's so much information going around in the SEO/SEM industry,
and often a lot of it conflicts; what's your response (as a Googler)
when you attend these conferences and hear all this conflicting
information?

A: If I hear a speaker say something in their presentation that I know
is flat-out wrong, I'll mention it to them after the session (and tell
them where they can find the correct information). But a lot of this
industry deals with questions that don't have a simple black-or-white
answer; there are shades of gray, hundreds of influencing factors, and
what worked great for one person or one website may not be effective
for someone else. Or there may be multiple ways to achieve the same
result.

In general I like to listen to the evidence that people present for or
against particular theories or techniques, because *how* they arrived
at their conclusions is often more useful (did they run tests? What
factors did they control for? Is this just anecdotal evidence?) than
the actual conclusion itself.