It’s a first, the Google Webmaster Help Group Chat. Big G is actually going to talk to webmasters about how to improve their website’s position in the search results! Why is this such a big deal? Well, Google can be the typical evasive, faceless, “please refer to the help pages” monster corporation. This is a huge shift in how they deal with webmasters. Hopefully, it will last.

(edit, if you didn’t copy the webex Q&A chat window before it closed, you can borrow my copy of the Google Webmaster Help Group Chat Q&A Transcript)

What’s going on at the Google Webmaster Help Group Chat

8:45 Doors open
This is a great time to get logged in to the chat!
9:05 Welcome!
Introductions, and how to get the most out of the event.
9:15 Site Clinic: Emphasis on good fundamentals
We’ll examine and give feedback on one of your sites.
9:40 Advanced topic: Images in search results
Presented by our own Maile Ohye.
9:50 Additional Q&A time
We guides will tackle your questions about images and other webmaster issues
10:00 End
Time to say goodbye.

The official information page about how to attend the Google webmaster help group chat live page is here.

How Open is this New “Open Attitude?”

Just how open is this new “open” attitude Google seems to be taking with webmasters? Well, I’m as curious as you are. Are they going to give out any “SEO secrets”? Any Search Marketing tips, tricks and techniques? Maybe they are just going to go with their old fallback of “create good content blah, blah” I guess we’ll know soon enough. And if you aren’t going to be able to make it, you can read about it here. I’m going to be “blogging” the Google Webmaster Help Group Chat live as it unfolds. Stay tuned to hear more…

Google Webmaster Help Group Chat Starting in 5 Minutes

Hopefully, they will be starting in 5 minutes. Still can’t log in. Wondering if they will be having problems, as they themselves say, “There will be bumps. We’ve planned and practiced, but inevitably a (technological, meteorological, philosophical or other) snafu will pop up… especially in v1. We’ll do our best to keep things running smoothly, and we thank you in advance for your understanding .” As just about everything else is at Google, the event is labeled “beta”. Gotta’ love the Google attitude!

Google Webmaster Help Group Chat Begins

One of the first ones in, one minute early, Matt Cutts beat me though! The list of people is really adding up. This might just be a popular event Quite a few peeps from Google are logged in as well. They brought the troops. Right now it’s Adam Lasnik, John Meuller, Maile Ohye, Matt Cutts, Susan Maskwa and several one namers. I can hear lots of typing…

Adam is announcing that people can’t chat with each other…the first “snafu”. Beginning in 7 minutes.

Now They’re Talkin

Starting to chat away. One of the very first messages, “What’s up, all my SEO people”. Well, they’re definitely acknowledging us. They’ve fixed the chat room, everyone can chat with everyone. Not sure that’s such a great idea.

The Phone call begins

Guidelines:

no specific sites
info about presenter
general issues

Presenters:

Adam Lasnik is the “Search Evangelist”.
Jessica, search quality
Myli, search engineer
Reed, search quality
Evan, search quality
MattD, search quality team
Matt Cutts, Web spam, search quality
Susan, webmaster trends analyst
John Muir, webmaster trends analyst
Maria, who can’t talk…in Ireland
Johnathan Simon, webmaster trends analyst

Sorry didn’t get full names and titles, they were going fast. If anyone has them, send them in and I’ll add them.

Google Webmaster Help Group Chat Site Clinic

Starting to review Pictureline.com

Now they popped open a window with the web-browser…it took over the computer for a second, thankfully they’re nuking that idea. They say they planned this…hmm.

Now with the tips:

Not sure I agree with some of it. One of the guys/gals said the site name is not in the title, so people might not be able to find that site. I disagree somewhat. Google knows who PictureLine is, so it’s not necessary for ranking. Maybe he was saying people can’t find the specific company in the SERPs b/c of that?

Lots of “look and feel” stuff. Width of site, UI type things…Why are search engine engineers doing a UI review?? We want juicy SEO info!

Now with accessibility tips…oh, hey…there you go, a good tip. One of the guys/gals mentioned to not have javascript in the main navigation. Great point, but nothing new. Says to have text links, not graphical, and to have alt tags. All good points.

Johnathan:

choose www or non-www, points out you can do that in webmaster tools
fix duplicate url’s
make sure sitemap has no broken links
make sure sitemap is in robots.txt
mentions load times…this is a new one and important

Reed:

Found duplicate content, apparently they moved the site from somewhere else…oops!

Next site: learningguitarnow.com

Hints:

True 404′s in headers
301 redirects to WWW domains are good
fix alt attributes in blog
upgrade to newest version of wordpress
embedded youtube video, have an html link directly to the video

Next site:

digitalbase.eu
alt tags, blah, blah
versions of the site: he has multiple versions of the site, use 301 redirects to get rid of that.
titles, make more compelling…not really search engine optimization info, but a good point
windows IIS server, url’s can be upper and lower case, this is not good

Interesting side note…there is a Q&A chat that seems to be a completely different meeting. It’s been commandeered by someone with question after question to Matt Cutts about her site. I understand why she would take the opportunity, I’d do just about anything if one of our sites had been dumped by Google, but I think in the future they need to be more strict about “no personal site questions” or it’s going to get out of hand.

More technical problems…phone out…now they’re back.

Now we’re on to the Image search portion of the meeting.

Discussing how to optimize for Google image search results.

Starting with discussion of how image works, how to use the tools, filtering, etc. Nothing about how to rank better (grammer is losing out to speed here, sorry).

Tips:

How Google Ranks Images

Quality of the site
Img attributes, alt text
Image filename
Domain referrer and the image’s host site…hotlinking…don’t do it!
Make images accessible. NO FLASH! No Flash slideshow
Don’t duplicate the image by having Flash and the same image, dilute’s page rank
Image size is important, large images rank higher
Write relevant text around your image, very important
Alt and title tags both? Yes
Use descriptive file names
Not important to have in sitemap.xml

Now the Juicy SEO Tips

Sitelinks:
Triggered algorithmically
You can remove individual site links
Create more original and compelling content (I called that one)

Apparently, that was pretty much it…

Now they’re discussing how to get more information, go to Google Webmaster Tools, of course!

Oh, hey, they are going to stick around and help us more…Google Rocks!

Universal search and video:

They only show sites with really high bandwidth in the serps, that’s why Google shows Youtube in the serps
Create video sitemap

Bought links:

If you BUY or SELL links, and they pass page rank, they are emphasizing that they will either “lose trust in your site” or remove you altogether.

Look at your backlinks from webmaster tools to make sure there aren’t any bought links.

Subdomains:

When should I use subdomains? When it makes sense for your users. Basically, if you have a large sections, not single pages, use subdomains. They say single pages don’t work.

Personally, I think there are a lot of examples showing that is NOT CORRECT.

rant
Subdomain landing or doorway pages work, which is unfortunate, because they’re spammy and lessen the quality of the SERPs. It’s also unfortunate because we ceased using sub-domains for SEO when Matt Cutts said to, and apparently we should have “kept on keepin’ on”. I wish Google would put the same smack-down on these guys they are hitting the paid link people with!
/rant

Duplicate content?
no answer, common sense test

How many links on a page?
no more than 100

How long should pages be?
no answer, common sense test

Blogging:

Discussing spam prevention, etc. nofollows, etc. Take care of your blog and maintain a good neighborhood.

What if you bought links and can’t get them removed?
Submit reconsideration request with as much detail as you can

Page Rank Sculpting, good or bad?
Don’t bother, site architecture is the most important thing.
Again, SITE ARCHITECTURE is really important.

Splogs:

De-prioritize in favor of other concentrating on main site.

Aggregators like Digg:

rank high, but as they fall off home page they lessen in importance.

However, note that the Digg to this blog post was ranking in the top 10 for google webmaster help group chat before the event was even over. If you’re in a hurry, Digg is the way to go.

Submitting Spam Reports:

Spam reports from webmaster tools are prioritized. Cool.

When will Webmaster tools telling us if we are penalized?

They want to be careful to not aid spammers, so probably not going to warn about much, but they do show some things, and sound like they’re going to show others.

Ok, well, that’s it. A user going by the name of SchoolsGalore said he was recording the event in it’s entirety. I’ll try to find a link to that.

Thanks, Google, for a great session. It ended up being very helpful, and I’m sure the 250+ attendees appreciated it tremendously. I’m just amazed there weren’t more.

Any questions, comments? Contact us!

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This entry was posted on March 28th, 2008 by Brian and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.