Hi everyone,
Wow, that was a great event!
I have slightly cleaned up the transcript of our big question and
answer session. In an attempt to keep it as authentic as possible, I
only removed the site and user names. Keep in mind that things were
going very quickly, so if there are any questions that you would like
more information on, feel free to start a thread here. I'll be posting
a transcript of the chat in a little bit.
I hope you enjoyed the event as much as we did!
John
----
Q: What is the criteria for getting the 'more results' for the 1st
search result? It's not just appearing first and having a sitemap
recognized by Google because I've seen both for a given site with no
'more results', so what is it?
A (MattD): Gabe, are you saking about Sitelinks?
Q: One of my clients has a thumbnail next to their serp result instead
of the sitelinks that were there before....what gives?
A (MattD): Sitelinks and Universal Search results are query-specific.
Q: Is Website Tools verifying site not working? i've tried verifying
my site and it just doesn't work
A (John Mueller): The team is working on something with verification,
it seems to be affecting some sites.
Q: The first result returning specific sitelinks below just after
'more results'.
A (MattD): Sitelinks are purely algorithmic, you can find some more
information here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=4...
Q: How is it that Search results get indexed
A (Susan Moskwa): Any URL that is reachable by our crawler has the
potential to get crawled and/or indexed, including the URL of a search
results page.
Q: Google recently added support for video sitemaps. When will Google
offer support for audio sitemaps, so hardworking podcasters everywhere
can have their files indexed? ;)
A (Reid): I don't know myself about Google support for audio sitemaps.
Feel free to post this feature request in our help group:
http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Requests/topics
Q: I wanna know about social media optimization! what is the Google
opinion about that?
A (John Mueller): Social media is a great way of attracting relevant
visitors!
Q: About SiteLinks, what would be your advice to get results appear. I
see them in the GWC, but not in SERPS
A (Susan Moskwa): http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=47334
Q: In the webmaster tools, it shows the Top Search queries. However,
over the past 3 months, these have changed when I looked back at the
results. Ie. It showed results in week 1 that then didn't show when
they went to week 2. Is that intentionally done?
A (Reid): Hey - thanks for the question. This data changes on a week-
by-week basis, since users are finding your website using different
searches each week. Does that make sense?
Q: If RSS feeds have near identical content as HTML pages, might that
cause duplicate content penalties?
A (John Mueller): RSS feeds do not need to be indexed, you can block
indexing through your robots.txt
Q: Would you recommend nofollowing the sorting links?
A (John Mueller): If those links lead to duplicate content, you can
either add a nofollow to the links or block indexing through meta tags
or a robots.txt entry.
Q: how does the search engine treat an https (secure) page versus an
http
A (John Mueller): We treat https the same as http -- however, https
puts a bigger load on your server, so you might want to check that it
can handle it on your side.
Q: Let me ask other question. If the website has no ERRORS and is 100%
Search engines friendly, what do you think is the next step. Just
submit the website general business directories?
A (Susan Moskwa): Google's webmaster guidelines are a good place to
start; they have recommendations for content and getting the word out
about your site: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
Q: my client has the same issue as this: search for (sitename).com in
google and you'll see the same thing
A (MattD): Thanks for the example. This site is triggering an image as
a Universal result. Both Universal and Sitelinks are determined
algorithmically, so you can't opt-in to either. You can opt out of
Sitelinks in Webmaster Tools if that helps the situation.
Q: We are a comparison shopping website, (sitename).com, and we power
the ecommerce section of 4 different sites, i.e.
marketplace.healthcentral.com those sites have identical content to
our main site, can this get me penalized?
A (Susan Moskwa): Unfortunately we can't do individual reviews for
every site, but you could start here:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66359
Q: Confusion about robots.txt vs rel=nofollow. I don't want to pass
PageRank to my Privacy Policy. Suppose I already blocked /privacy/ in
my robots.txt. Do I also have to use rel=nofollow when linking
internally to /privacy/ to prevent the pass of PageRank?
A (Susan Moskwa): Pages that are blocked by robots.txt can still have
and pass PageRank, so if you don't want that page to get PageRank from
your Privacy Policy page, you should nofollow that link.
Q: How can I get better results in the image search?
A (Reid): Hi - that's a pretty broad question. Maile will be talking
about image search in a few minutes, so I hope that will be helpfull.
Q: Kind of depends on what duplicate content means -- if the sort is
different on a results screen, different products/items will appear on
a given page...but overall it's the same set of products as the
default sort.
A (John Mueller): If the content is generally the same but just in a
different order, I don't think it would provide much original value in
the search results for the user.
Q: I wanna know about duplicate content inside blogs. about
categories, archives, authors, have the same content of the article.
in my webpages im blocking using robots txt, i blocked categories and
archives. is it good?
A (MattD): If your content is the original, I wouldn't recommend
blocking it. If you have content fed in from another site, it might be
smart to use robots.txt as you've said. I'd recommend taking your site
to the Webmaster Help Group as well.
Q: Can I ask a video sitemap question? We sumbitted a video sitemap
back on Feb 19th. In Webmaster Tools, total URL is 11k, but Indexed
URLs are 0. Of the 115 sitemaps off the index, 2 have warnings. Do
video sitemaps just take a long time to get indexed?
A (John Mueller): Video sitemaps take some time to get approved -- it
can take up to 2-3 months.
Q: does a noindex, follow page pass pagerank?
A (Evan): Noindex pages accrue Google PR, and can pass Google PR -
even though as a page in its own right, it does not exist in the
SERP's
Q: What are your views on image replacement versus using alt= on an
image. Is it a bad thing if used legitimately?
A (Susan Moskwa): There are many high-quality sites that use image
replacement techniques (such as Fahrner image replacement) to provide
a better user experience. If you're using this technique in a
legitimate way to benefit your users, you shouldn't have problems.
Q: Would there be a problem with doing a large number of 301 redirects
at once?
A (Susan Moskwa): I would recommend against doing "chained" redirects
(a page redirects multiple times).
A (Susan Moskwa): If you're talking about moving an entire site, or a
large amount of content on your site, you might want to start by
redirecting a small amount of content and see how to move goes before
redirecting a large potion of your site
Q: Why's he using ALT TEXT on text at the bottom of his site - is that
wrong? (sitename).com
A (Evan): Hi, the site Wysz was talking about was
learningguitarnow.com
Q: I setup a webmaster account an submitted my url. I also setup a
Sitemap.xml file. Google reports that the url is indexed and the
Sitemap file is OK yet when I google search my url the result is "No
Documents Found". What have I done wrong???
A (John Mueller): It can take a bit for sites to get indexed, you
might want to post in the webmaster help groups for detailed
suggestions.
Q: So duplicate content can cause page rank issues? I thought you were
able to filter duplicate content?
A (JonathanSimon): If you have mutiple URLs for the same content
within your site, each URL could be attracting it's own links. It
would be better to instead have one page for everyone to link to thus
consolidating the value of all the external links.
Q: For the Guitar lesson site, shoule they 301 the learnguitarnow.com/
index.shtml page to learnguitarnow.com?
A (John Mueller): If that URL is not linked, it should not need to be
redirected. If it's linked, it would be best to remove the links, a
301 could help to speed up the removal.
Q: I was hoping y'all would address the use of display:none and some
basic guidelines for it's use
A (JonathanSimon): As long as the use of display:none is not abused to
selectively hide content from site visitors while at the same time
showing it to search engine crawlers, it should fine to use this.
Q: I see nofollow links in my GWC. Why is that ?
A (John Mueller): That's by design.
Q: I have alread reviewed that, however I have problems in which my
websites are not considered for higher ranking, ever after following
all the steps on http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
A (John Mueller): You might want to post about it in detail in the
help groups.
Q: So, how google see websites what receive a lot of good links, by
natural way but use rel="nofollow" in all of its external links?
A (Evan): Hi, could you clarify? Good Site A links to Good Site B, and
Good Site B has rel="nofollow" links?
Q: Please provide opinion on Hackersafe and Authorize.net. Should a
retail store use these services?
A (Susan Moskwa): I would recommend testing whether
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