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!

Ok, so I’m sitting in my local Starbucks, sipping a delicious Venti Verona, on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Austin, Texas. It being too hot here to do anything outside, I thought I’d catch up on email, and then just surf around a little while, enjoying my lazy day.

Was I surprised when I tried to login to my Digg account and got the message: Sorry – bad IP address. What?! Bad IP address?! WTF, I wondered. So, off to Google I go (did I mention I love Google?) to find out.

It turns out that a few other folks have experienced the bad IP address problem before . . . whew, at least it isn’t just me. Apparently, to prevent undesirables from posting in Digg, they have chosen blocking IP addresses as their method of choice. That’s all well and good, and it’s certainly their prerogative to block whomever they wish, but is it an effective method of spam prevention?

While I’m sure this confounds many of the people using T-mobile’s Starbucks hotspots, I imagine blocking the Starbucks IP confounds spammers for all of about 15 seconds. Indeed, even I was savvy enough to Google proxy sites and login to Digg in less than a minute.

So, I ask, why bother with blocking IP addresses? To me, this is sort of like passing laws making it illegal to have guns. If you’re going to use a gun to break the law, why do you care that it’s illegal to have it? The only people this will effect is the law, or in this case, the Digg TOS abiding citizens. The spammers will continue on unabated while good, money generating, adwords clicking traffic is driven away in droves.

IMHO, blocking the Starbucks IP from Digg is not just an ineffective policy, it’s a bad idea.

“Oh, great”, you might think, “another catchphrase created by internet marketers”. “Social Networking Optimization”, what the heck is that?

Well, the good thing is that Social Networking Optimization, or SNO, is really not just some made up markerter lingo. It is real, it’s relatively easy to implement an SNO program, and most importantly, SNO WORKS!

What is Social Networking Optimization?

Social Networking Optimization is simply the process of utilizing the various social networks spawned by the Web 2.0 Generation to generate direct traffic to your website while simultaneously using them to bolster your search engine page rank. Social Networks range from huge online communities like MySpace, to photo and video sharing websites Flikr and YouTube, to simple web based applications such as the “social bookmarking” websites Digg, Furl and del.icio.us.

How Does Social Networking Optimization Work?

Social Networking Optimization, or SNO, works in two ways. First, huge online communities have sprung up all over the web. These communities are often based on creating a more effective way to share information. By joining these communities and becoming an active member, you promote your site to thousands of people who would have never heard about it otherwise. Secondly, these communities allow you to link directly to search engine optimized content on your website, and since the online communities carry very high page rank, quite often some of that rank carries over to your site. Because of this, traffic increases to your site, some coming directly from the social networks, others finding you from your increased search engine results pages (SERPs) exposure due to your increased page rank. Simple, huh?

Social Networking Optimization Strategy

The most important things to consider when planning a Social Networking Optimization Strategy are the rules and accepted practices of the various online communities. These social networks have become popular because they provide people with valuable information. If they were suddenly filled with spam, no one would go there any more. Therefore, as you could imagine, the communities react pretty harshly to people, even well intentioned ones, who come across as spammers. Join a social network, lurk for awhile, learn the ropes then dive in and become an active part of the community. The more active you become, the more effective your Social Networking Optimization Strategy will ultimately be.

Social Networking Optimization Through Social Bookmarking

Another piece of your Social Networking Optimization puzzle is implementing a “social bookmarking” policy in your workplace. This would be implementing a plan so that each of your employees adds any new important link from your website to their bookmarks hosted on social networking sites. I promise, it’s not as hard as it sounds, but you will have to overcome some reluctance on the part of your employees. Maybe you could explain it will help keep them employeed if they take, literally, 10 seconds to bookmark any new pages on your site. Also, you can make it easy for them by sending out a company-wide email with instructions when you would like them to add a bookmark.

What is Social Bookmarking?

Stepping back real quickly, social bookmarking is the practice of using a small web application such as digg.com, furl.net and del.icio.us to save your bookmarks, and tag them with topical keywords so you can find them easily, instead of using the bookmark feature of your browser. Ostensibly, these services serve two purposes. First, they consolidate your bookmarks to one easy to use location, so if you find yourself at, say, a computer at the gym, you can still get to your bookmarks. Secondly, and this is the part we care about, these bookmark services allow users to share their bookmarks. This will generate some traffic, but what is really important here is that your keyphrase tagged bookmarks are also being shared with search engines.

Why is Social Bookmarking Important?

Think of each bookmark, or link, from a social networking site as a vote towards your importance for a certain topic. The more users who bookmark, the more votes you get and the more “important” the search engines think you are.

Implementing a Social Networking Optimization Strategy

The first, most important thing to do is for you, and your employees, to spend some time getting familiar with the various social networking websites. Start small, go to MySpace, Flikr, YouTube, Digg, Furl and del.icio.us and figure out what’s going on at each. Subscribe to each, and slowly become an active member of the community. From there, the opportunities are almost limitless because there’s a never-ending supply of Web 2.0 companies, and social networking is the hot topic of today.

Outsource Your Social Networking Optimization

Possibly the best solution would be to hire an experienced Internet Marketing Company such as Get Page One, LLC. We have been doing Search Engine Optimization since there were search engines, and we’ve been doing Social Networking Optimization since it was way too big a secret to discuss on our blog. So, if you’d rather spend your time building and running your company than hanging out on MySpace or Digg, we’d love to help you out. Our SNO specialists would probably just be hanging out there anyway, so together at least we could give them a purpose.

Contact us at our Austin, TX offices, or simply give us a call at 512-535-6633. We’d love to hear from you.

If you were sent here from Digg, I apologize for the confusion. Apparrently someone liked our article on social networking optimization and Dugg it, however that post is located at http://getpageone.com/blog/2006/10/31/social-networking-optimization. Sorry. Actually, I have often heard it referenced as social media optimization lately, and while I personally think that conjours up a slightly different meaning, I’m leaning towards using it because, well, it just sounds better. Any thoughts?