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This transcript was prepared with a very bad audio quality since our recordings failed on the live chat day. We did our best to make it accurate but we want to be very clear that we dont guarantee that the transcript will be an exact copy of the audio. Google's answers were brilliant and we did our best to reproduce it. If you find any valid problems please feel free to contact us through our feedback form.

 

                                Earthlink Netscape Netvouz RawSugar Shadows Sphinn StumbleUpon Yahoo MyWeb

 

Adam Lasnik: In the Mean time looks like we aren’t able to have folks chatting with each other we’ll see if we can fix that few minutes before the conference, but if not we will open up Q and A in just a bit. So alright we will start in about 7 minutes or so

 

Hello and we have more than a dozen of Googlers here and they are ready to get this chat on the road. So we have this agenda for 55 minutes or so and also we have chatter where you can ask question with each other. Keep in mind we are going to open up a Q and A section just a second, In fact we will go ahead and do that.

 

Right now you should see on your screen a Q and A and that is the section where you can ask us question during the presentation before and after but I wanted you to offer a few just quick guidelines for that. So you are good follow us, you can’t ask question about your specific site in much as we love to answer but we cannot type and look at your site at the same time. So please keep your questions to start about structure of site mind about talking images. Will acknowledge all general issues. We will tackle as many questions as possible during the chat today as we will type back to you and some of them we will answer towards the end of chat and some we will some take turns to answering by voice to you. So probably start a section as you are talking to googlers by again all of you are welcome to send us questions. Couple of other things you should be able to see us through webcam. There we go Ha ha ha Matt there? . And I think we should set out introducing our selves. I am Adam Lasik Search Evangelist and I am based in Mountain View California. I am going to first ask the Google folks here in Mountain View to come introduce themselves in front of cameras. Then we are off to focus other offices.

 

Michael: Hi, Hi Everyone I am Michael. I place my self in Mountain View and I work in search quality and I like skiing

 

Hi everyone my name is Jessica, I work in search quality based in Mountain View. One thing I love is going to beach and pretty much anything ill do it.

 

Hi everyone my name is Mariya olye, I am support engineer here, and I feel better and I like life,

 

Rynz: My name is rynz, Along with web and code and webmaster help group. I am based in Mountain View and I am also part of search quality. Things I love cycling

 

Ramya: Hi Everyone I’m Ramya from the Hyderabad office, I love this great to be part of the chat.

 

MattD: Hi I am Matt, you will hear from me as MattD, Lets rock and role

 

Matt Cutts: Thanks everybody this is Matt Cutts, I work in Mountain View imm the head of Webspam and Search Quality and I hope the technology works which doesn’t always.

 

Alright:

 

Ok Actually we are running a little bit ahead of schedule what we are going to first start with is site click .

 

What a site click is that we need to a pick a site from a list of sites that were posted in webmaster google groups and we are going to give some feedback on issues like accessibility to navigation and we are all going to give some tips on that and the site for today is pictureline.com

 

And you know what I want to apologize I have with me folks from other offices and I want to go ahead and briefly introduce them as well, Hi Folks Susan can you say hi please.

 

Hi Folks I am Susan ___, I am part of the web developer, I work in Washington. I support webmaster central

 

OK John you go ahead. I work in New York Office,

 

Hi I am in webmaster Panelists as well.

 

Hi how about Maria, Ohhh Maria did you make it back?

 

Jonathan Simon, I am also part of webmaster central team. I love Live Music.

 

I don’t think we have anymore guest, Still early for me in the Morning, We are going to get back to our sitelink which is talking about pictureline.com and why don’t we talk about some things we like to, our first mail to the viewer to the site is this site looks cool and we noticed that it looks professional, that it does have some good contents as well as newsletters and a blog. These are community aspects which can really be useful for the users and also content is good for Google.

 

Request for URL:

 

Adam: Ohh URL great work guys, The URL is www.pictureline.com and if you any of you want to present that I can make her present that all of have your browser ready. I hope everyone have the browser ready. Let me know go ahead it’s a great point Let me go ahead and let liza present that and that we can actually present the site here so that you can look at it. Also we are going to make the web cam go away, ok if you want to go to share and you can share with sitelink folks.

 

I think we are going to go with you all just checking some challenges, Extra browser sharing there we go, Ok now we are back to the main presentation and checkout www.pictureline.com and before we focus on that there are few other notes that, we appreciate that there is good focus on local content and we noticed there are invitations present for the local events. It’s just that the main way to distinguish a site is frankly offer the type of commodity which is consumer electronics everyone selling this should have a focus on the local velocity which is pretty helpful. We also noticed the contact info is easy to get to, equally noticed the contact information is in text you can also we see other times the contact information is in graphic and the googlebot can’t see that now there are other things Susan got a couple of things to add as well,

 

Susan: hello, I just want to say that the look and feel is really nice and its pretty professional, pretty much I would share the information and feel comfortable that I see from this site. Yes it’s a pretty site its important to put up the site quality , also for the community you are representing and I feel everything was very good , well built , quality rich, colorful totally very professional,

 

Oh we are off to John,

 

John: Ok, What I noticed is that it has some really good titles on the pages but usually it doesn’t seem the suit the theme of the store, we have product name in there something about the page or something about the store right. When you put on the site you might not just focus typically on the searches I also noticed it has a place on site to share as well as a sitemap which is great. I noticed if we search for site name it has sitelinks which is pretty neat which many people want to know also it is on product search and also in local business search in Google Maps which is really fine and people will really find it.

 

Adam: Thanks, We also had a few suggestions that this site can be a little better and why don’t we go t Matt in ____ office,

 

MattD: Yeah, I can see you just mentioned some constructive points, but I think the resulting question is when the results are good and the sales are good the site should be doing better. Then talk about the community section, when looking around it really absolutely needs to have a community section. He can talk about how the product actually releases. Well he can go for personally for some products he took that and use them for something that is useful actually talking about how different product actually releases, how it helps photographers, photography industry in general. He can better add more contents. The rest of the community section you think a community is a way to get users connected to each other, where you can have a directory of photographers where people can reach on lively, they don’t have to actually collaborate and discuss things on your site itself as well and of course and if then we can actually type it and that will actually say that it will create a photographer.

 

Adam: Susan more thoughts:

 

Susan: Well going back to the look and feel I was touching about before. It is a great honor to review this site and couple of things that I want to describe is the not relevant change in the browser, the page looks pretty wide so many people will have trouble with it. One more thing the section where it says shop, share and learn you can add a photographer screen or graphics section where you can have people really see it, of some sort you might as well need to clean that section so I guess my explanation for the center area is that you make it more accessible and more stuff what people want to do,

 

Finally along with some people signing up for your site the other most important thing Is that you want to call for action the things at the bottom, you need to make links to RSS, xml, news feed more prominent since people are not going to notice it unless they are going to look for it.

 

Wynz: Yeah I just want to drop some thoughts that’s on my sensibility. Ah, I noticed that on your news letter page you would navigate to different archives through drop down menus and unfortunately if you stay on, and your browser on you are doing this professionally actually great and but be on for search engines and users you don’t have JavaScript to follow these links and I even had that, even though we may already know that these pages are being in the site map or you can make it name as links so have Google better understand the structure of your site. So I think you actually just replace these links with underneath main links how they collapse using our forum, some JavaScript that don’t gives these functionality. So that you can have it looks great and makes it look and work more gracefully.

 

Out on the newsletter page on the top the phone number and couple other things they were, they weren’t actually text but images whereas in other parts of the site that is text, I think text is always the good way to go there and speaking of images on the community section you are missing alt attributes for some of the images and its always good to have alt attributes where you can present something for users as well as people using text readers. Then also speaking about community section it’s a little bit confusing on the user perspective on actually getting on to the community, main entrance is a large image on the top there is some text below it you can add some navigation on that, the image actually to me it looks like a banner at first . MMM, yeah that’s all I have.

 

Thanks Wynz Jonathan your thoughts.

 

Jonathan Muller: Couple of things hey guys, First thing I see is the http response for 404 pages I get a 200. This could be a problem for crawlers like the googlebot. And I want to look at the, I like this yet and next one is the problem on www and non-www you should distinguish which domain you prefer and rewrite to that one, you can also set that up in webmaster tools. Basically it’s good for all search engines I like to see and have a look at it you have a ton of duplicate URLs. And we describe this because you store this on your first name, a name that is stored by its first name it will go on duplication there. So you have less than 3 or 4 pages with the same card but different URLs that is how the page is stored. You want to take a look at the different types if you care about your pagerank passing to the URLs. Next I want to talk about the sitemap looks like there are some broken URLs in the site map, I want to check all the URLs in your sitemap with a crawler you can find from it where the broken links are the other thing about your sitemap is the text links looks took long you need to see how much depth a search engine can do on crawling a page. I would recommend you check all your pages for errors and some of those problems other than that it’s a great site good job.

 

Ok thanks Jonathan Can we hear from Reed please.

 

Reid: Thanks Adam I just have 2 quick points that I want to point out, First is when I was looking at pictureline.com/community which is one of the community aspect of the website I noticed that when I click on the white link on the bottom it took me to a testimony page what the site is all about, unfortunately I found that all the links that goes to your site picture line community .com which were broken links looks like what you got on here seems like this content will go on over to the directory but the links were not updated. So other helpful tip when you login to webmaster tools you can find out which pages Googlebot has trouble crawling and of course find your pages and update your links. And also I found that there is an identical site which I found on the web its ultimatecamerastore.com, ultimatecamerastore.com is when we look at them is definitely the same website which could make problem with content issues. So those are the 2 things I have. Thanks

 

Adam: So you can see there are lot of things we like about this site as well as we have some constructive suggestions as well one last thing I want to emphasize was despite getting a chance to look at a lot of great sites posted in the groups thread it should be noted that we picked this site also because we thought it had a lot of potential to get a lot of things right, there are lot of things we noted including some constructive criticism I think lot of other sites have issues like this as well, so got to be a big thumbs up to, to the webmaster of this site and keep up the good work and I hope our feedback is helpful, hence we realize that there are whole bunch of things that I gave from many great URLs we found that doing one, we don’t have time to go on an in-depth review of more than one site so we decided to make a bit of a compromise and what we are going to do is do a couple of total random site reviews right now and the first one we are going to do is a really cute dog site, I am going to go and post the URL in the chat. I am going to instruct Evan start talk about that already.

 

Evan: Thanks Adams, I want to say that I am happy to be in chat here today. And I wanted to say that I really appreciate to have everything perfect. Everything looks great I like the content, I like the pictures not too much JavaScript. I would say that you need to do more to describe the images add more context to the images or actually have other text to describe the images because you want people to understand what these images are. My other suggestion would be for you to add more information to explore and also a description can be about the dog

 

Adam: Thanks Evan, One other site we want to talk is pretty cool as well is learningguitarnow.com and the person who is going to talk about that is Wynz.

 

Wynz: Hi talking about your site I think it’s an awesome service and you have great content there and I noticed a blog, e-book and the skype online lessons which is pretty cool. And I don’t think you need much may be ill try it on someday but having all that content is good I think this is the type of site people want to link to. Also you have descriptive things about your service which is pretty good few things your footers and your headers redirect mainly to your www domain. I don’t think its happening now probably you changed that before the chat I think I am just curious. Something I would recommend thought I would add a sitemap if you have it already satisfy conditions on your robots.txt and which when I go to your site can adjust. Search engines know more of your contents certainly good job of the blog you have that’s a lot of fresh content and so that I can top this, You can get more information about this and set in robots.txt file so that everyone know where to find your sitemap. Talking about your blog specifically I noticifed you are missing alt attributes and the image tags you are running wordpress, which is pretty easy to fix also speaking of wordpress I noticed that you are not running quite the latest versions so I recommend you upgrade blog for security reasons. We can also search your blog for security checklist some more suggestions on that regard. Couple of other things for users you have a PowerPoint and they have direct links I think which is great lot of people use that you may also want to post the actual link of the URL so that people using other software to get on context, I guess you do this on your blog yahoo link and Google link I think yahoo has 300 links just try to duplicate something like that one other quick tip is saw that you have in your blog a youtube video which is great I just also recommend also adding an html link to that video so that is someone is using iphone or something to view the video can still encode it so that the video can be viewed in that specific device. And that’s all see you in the group.

 

Adam: And we are trying to look at a last quick one and I would love to request John to go over this. The site is digitalbase.eu.

 

John: Alright it’s a really nice looking site I really like how it looks I can see it’s a web design company so it has to look nice. Nice to see something from Europe. I can see it’s a .eu domain. One thing to remember about .eu domain is that its country specific so you could setup geo-targeting if your site serves most of the countries in Europe any relative brands you can setup separate sub-directory for local and add content and set geo-targeting in webmaster tools. Also you asked about how the language information is collected , its done automatically based on the content of the page you need to make sure there is only one language on a page and might be you need to split across even which is even better. Other small thing I noticed about the site is that some of the images don’t have alt tags some of them are linked in JavaScript in the portfolio. I also noticed that you have 2 old versions of the site online as well. Version one and version two and I think that should kind of confusing for the search engine if they have same content on multiple versions. So, best option is to do a 301 redirect the old versions to the new version. Other thing I saw the title and descriptions which is great and I feel the titles can be a little bit more compelling like digital base project web design and development. US site designed by digitalbase Belgium and same thing for description which also could include something better about the company and kind of description which displays in search results little bit more prospective. I noticed you are running on a windows IIS server where URLs can be added in upper and lower case and usually its not a problem if you want to use only one version of the URLs but I noticed a lot of section of URLs specially the category URLs you need to take care of it and regarding the content point it looks good. One small detail is that you have not provided the last modified headers so that’s something you could add to the CMS which is something that will help the crawlers understand what date the content was updated. Also one small thing I noticed is that you don’t have a recognized redirect whether which version you want to use www or non-www. You can set that in webmaster tools. Ok that’s about it.

 

Adam: After a small break. Hello we are back. Now that lets see if we can get the video working one moment. In just a moment please no we don’t have the option of a video at the same time of the presentation of the show, so we are going to introduce you to Maria who will tell us how we can do most out of our images.

 

This is a slide show we don’t have the screenshots of the slide show since it went on very fast we just have the audio presentation which is converted to text below. There are references to the images in slide show so please don’t complain to us about the missing slides which are referred here.

 

Hi everyone thank you adam, Today I want to present you how you can make the most out of images on your site. Before proceeding let me check the functionality if it works sorry to interrupt everyone. There are 4 things we may want to cover today. First of all lets see where images are shown in first of all this will give a scenario, next we will go on to learn how we understand the images, what we understand about the quality of the image, what we understand about the topic of the images, and well we can also give feedback on how to make your site Google friendly for images. So let’s start where we can find images first of all. First let’s see Google search, I want to see images of rain barrel irrigation. So I go to Google search and type rain barrel irrigation photos you can see there are images which show in normal web search as well which is on in image search. So I play as a webmaster its not that you need to have your site always in search results you have to go for images and videos and things like that. You can have a real quick look at this.

 

So you are excited if your image features in one of these photos in regular search results or you have additionally images search results so you click on image search results you go to the next screen here is all the images indexed for the search rain barrel irrigation photos. For now I click www. Ne-design.net which was actually featured on main search results it has more images indexed from that website. Additionally its not just image search that is in here we also have advanced features when you go to the right and click on advanced image search you will come out to a screen it will give you more ways to search for images like related to all the words, exact phrase etc. Then we have content types which I will cover shortly. And of course safesearch is no filtering or moderate filtering or strict filtering.

 

I can see when you search in reference to content types it will highlight more of your images. If you select content types in advanced search you can classify any content, news content or faces. I don’t think you used this before and if you actually search for faces and use query type such as rain barrels you won’t see the pictures of rain barrels you will actually see faces of pictures of people.

You have ecologists who help installing them, there are also suppose of people who bought there mother a rain barrel and that’s the photo on the middle list and Mother’s day coming up and we can have photo saying that as Mother’s day gift. Alright that is where the screen is where you can see the image is showing for you so how do we go about understanding images. Ok here are the whole factors not in order of priority. We actually have content based signals compare when we are doing the safesearch. Think of what we can extract within the image. We can extract cover, texture, external layout there are something you can get about an image. Of course we all know its not the easy information to be added to the image like the headings. Another big factor is the quality of the image talking about the pixels if your images are really stretched out I don’t want that image to be in image search people will have hard time understanding what is featured in that image.

 

Another big factor is the quality of the site, if you also want the image to indexed in image search it’s going to fairly difficult if you don’t have the URLs that references to that image indexed in web search. The quality of the site plays a big part in how we understand the image, the important factors includes factors such as image attributes, alt tags and the image file name. The main thing I like to say even if it’s in the bottom of the page is stop hot linking. Googlebot will try to understand the domain referred to the image or if the image is outside. Actually if you go to the bottom and take a look at the sitemap left side you see ill visit example example.com/page.htm everything looks great in this page lets work together, people working together I don’t think anything wrong with it. Say if I were actually the webmaster I don’t feel bad. Say lets just pull up the source of the page I notice the image is not from this server but is hot linked that image on example.com is referencing an image that is on non-example.com this is no big deal for the webmaster of the site example.com I am not going to blame that webmaster of example.com, I am photographer, I invest money to buy photography equipment, I use models, I use models on casting that I am working on I don’t want example .com to take the best of this image and taking away my traffic and the users and even I don’t want them to use my resources for this hot linking from their site. To fight this you need to take a strong effort for stop this you can setup this configured on you server where you can actually stop hot linking. That’s not a difficult thing to do. You can keep the stop the hot linking through the configuration.

 

But there are other issues in this hot linking. Just to give an example myfriend.org actually helps hot link I guess to link to immediate.org so its pretty different throughout the web on the social convention about this so its going to be difficult. With all this in mind let’s talk about the website that you guys have, how to make a website that is Google friendly for images.

First and foremost it’s always important to make the images more accessible so looking forward to your coding I had it covered in tab prefix this is a computer site very difficult to understand on the top like love but the first line that is very acceptable and search engine friendly for us. See the bottom of the screenshot there are some URLs and recently put all the images inside this flash slide show and created a multi slide show for us. So I will come out with a little mock up how this is going to be search engine friendly and how this can be better in the future. We actually need some of those files may be a favor to all of them and need to create a set of static links so I can actually limit the photos and actually list on that page I could add some headings and also ill add things which I need to make it relevant like sun glasses which helps us to protect us from the sun.

 

This will help us understand an image, crawl an image and see for people for the accessibility issues with the screen viewer actually make it lot original to the site to make people to view. Additionally you can still include size if you wanted to but its URL connected to the bottom but need to scroll a lot since it’s a slide show. So you can do both of these First to all webmasters these are things you go to be concerned about, because if you are webmaster if you want to include the same image with a copy profile as well as to your slide show you can do with you pagerank. For Google it’s the most ideal thing but obviously but its important that even if you have a slide show you need to have static links to images and add to pages with high pagerank. I will put links to both the static URLs as well as the slide show so that way you will spread your pagerank to different source of images. So more about accessibility so to keep things for people etc looks like we did a lot of analysis today. There are some other things but we covered most important things as well. But image quality matters big thing don’t have your images embedded in JavaScript because we have section where we separate high quality image from regular ones. You can’t do the same thing to your images but you could do small modifications to the JavaScript it’s a really simply change what you could do is create some simple link to the images. Beyond accessibility there are other things. Let’s look at organization of the images one thing that’s important is that separating your adult content from the family friendly images. Imagine you are at home LOL, you need to have a directory section and sort images it will be good for safesearch people don’t have to use safe search if the images are sorted out properly when indexed by Googlebot. It’s good to have regular expressions which will separate adult images from family friendly its good to have two different directories.

Great, this is what we all want to talk about descriptive alt text, descriptive image names, One thing I noticed now is a lot of Googlers search for file names. So it will be good if have descriptive alt tags and file names for accessibility it’s going to be really nice. Say you have a car site you add a file name to the car picture as well as descriptive alt tags to the car picture. The one that we thought from your site is that you could add a more descriptive filename there you can make it like car-name.jpg. Last name of course is the search name makes it default just make it sound right I don’t want to spend 10 minutes on this.

 

So don’t just avoid don’t forget to put up the alt text it will be a bad idea to stuff keywords, like ford car, bmw car, benz etc. That’s actually so bad and it’s a violation of our guidelines. So this is the point googlebot likes content so keep this in your agenda to add relevant content. Making it look like an impressive site the search for barrel irrigation actually showed up that. I am not sure you are going to always search for rain barrel irrigation photos. Don’t make the images big and wide and it became indexed in image search because it’s all in content of your site and its descriptive it’s actually highlighted here that the photo came from that URL and actually in the text you can read that we are offering you a cheap selling rain barrel. I don’t know what I am saying anyway make sure to optimize your site and make sure to put on the relevant text there which is about the image / product itself..

Thank you thanks for everyone for joining I hope you had a good session on images and how to make most use of them with search engines. Also we want you to keep visiting webmaster central and Google groups. Thanks.

 

Adam: Thank you Christie (Maria): I have one question for Christie should we use alt tags or both alt tags and title tags for images?

 

Mariya: I actually want to put that question to MattCutts.

 

Matt cutts: Regarding images certainly you can add as much information as you can certainly the alt tag is very important but you need to make it as relevant to the context as you can. Google will try to read as much signals as it can to make it good for the search quality so you can imagine adding correct name, titles and all sort of stuff like that as much as you provide helps for search engine crawlers like googlebot or other search engine crawlers only problem there is don’t be spammy and give all sort stuff like 18 or 20 words with all sort of stuff.

 

Christie: Yeah we discussed that actually on the video I don’t think Google actually uses title tags in images but other search engines might like so you can add alt text and you can add title or both.

 

Matt cutts: And also someone asked a question in the Q and A about the keywords in the URLs. Specially for images descriptive names gives a lot of useful positive signal not only for the search engines but also for the users not only for images imagine of a blog its much better I think as a user to write word entirely in the URLs like the category name than just a random host number which doesn’t mean anything

 

Adam: Good Point, other image question, we definitely have few minutes to go to other questions as well. So John asked will including image URLs in the site map helps? So what you are going to say for that?

 

Christie: So this is a little bit touchy for us because originally when we had sitemaps here to go it was set to include all the content as well as the images included. As it kind of evolved it has it has become important. There is nothing like we go detecting for jpg’s or any other images in the sitemap file but still it doesn’t hurt so no problem in including it. But it compares to how we utilize the actual html URLs or not that it’s realized. So I wouldn’t have to make any extra effort to include the image URLs in the sitemap and nothing wrong to do with that if you like to,

 

Adam: Ok Cool. Let me cover some more image questions here, Alan asked what does image enhanced opt-in search function webmaster tools do? How does it help?

 

Christie: Actually it’s a programme where we can take your images and understand what it is like how is that image, where did that image came from and more.

Overall what we are doing is when we have certain set of images we make people view and label them based on their quality. That’s not going to be an automatic method but overall its going to improve the images in image search.

 

Adam: Thanks Ok we have some more image questions , Does using image cache delivery network like Akamai where the host is delivering the images will this cause problem for the Google image search? (Reference for this question) http://www.akamai.com/html/about/press/releases/2001/press_112001.html

 

Matt Cutts: Well it’s not a problem for Google image search I mean good thing is we did the image we did the natural illusion we get an Ip address we get something from the IP address the image gets transferred to us. For people who have geo location that’s not the best thing for images, On continuing if they are serving them great content out of the Russian IP address and that might confuse googlebot so the more you are going to damage in time any Canadians accessing say a company from Canada that just makes it that much simpler for all search engines. But for images I wouldn’t feel that’s a problem at all. Content delivery might be a problem but image delivery is not going to be a problem.

 

Adam: Thank you, Why don’t we just tackle few other questions we can later come back to image search as well, One question which was asked a number of times in chat today is what we call sitelinks, some folks ask what they are and some of them ask how to get them or change them, So lets talk more about sitelinks.

 

MattD: This is a decision an algorithmic decision made on the backend. Some people don’t necessarily want them or might have reason to modify them so we added the option in webmaster tools where you can actually go and remove them or you can actually ask for them and actually enable them. We think its one of the better features.

 

Adam: I just want to briefly tag on to that, you can actually choose the individual sitelinks I believe so you can actually take this one set of satisfied links and include in your page little promotion to your page or something like that you can pretty much remove a bad sitelink so we may add a sitelink we may not so for that it will help pick your site like if its updated or if its not updated in that respect. Also I want to jump to a question that quite a few of you asked and that is about audio and text transcript from this chat. We are not quite able to provide a transcript because those issues with logging both strangely a presentation of PowerPoint the same time have a transcript. So probably we are not doing this and put some challenges on WEBEX so no audio transcripts, however we are aware of at least 1 person who mentioned that he is going to be blogging this so I won’t mention Barry’s name but I can reflect if you search over some popular search engine blogs you will find a good lot of what we talked about today and I am confident too that we are going to take a lot of question that you had and to reflect upon it in Google as well. That’s the best that we can, One other thing I observe is that few of you have some general questions something like ok I have my site up I am not doing as well as I should be in Google it looks like everything is double ok in webmaster tools I checked the robots, checked for errors still I am not performing as I like.

 

What are the next steps? Well, I welcome all the folks including everyone in the panel to offer brief couple of talks as well. You think it’s a great help to post the URLs and the challenges you are facing when you are trying to achieve in the webmaster help group as well as webmaster central. So well focus a few minutes in this chat today there are non-googlers who had been of great help often times finding challenges, problems, opportunities that webmasters often gets caught. An other thing I’ll do is to give some basic ideas on how to achieve original unique content. This is particularly important for these sites to get bulk of their contents from syndication such as hotels and restaurant reviews or from articles that are already duplicated across the web. Its difficult for us to pick what is the best one from 17 different sites that have the same content so by adding your reviews or by giving opportunity for your users to provide their feedback or reviews something that gives additional original compelling contents. That is one thing that will include very particularly user experience and also will improve your sites presence within Google.

 

So I want to give a few of your guys a couple general tips for webmasters are asking what’s the Next step to better perform and better improve in Search Engines.

 

Yeah I think the lot of sites we checked out it takes of this and that, you can have some past experiences by testimonials and make Google bot understand your site content and images.

 

Adam: Also when you have Multimedia content images, music, videos all those can be a great compliment for your users already we tackled about images, Images can do better in Search you can have all those. Make sure you adequately describe the images you don’t need a complete transcript of course but something like this video, here are some highlights of this video, all these videos will make you understand the five core concepts because for Googlebot it has to understand what is the content that is in your video that includes for flash. Ill call out unfortunately one of the folks who was not able to be here today boogie who has to be in the Group who can give a great entry on what do with the flash in your site. How you can optimize it and make it accessible for both users as well as Google. So that’s also great one to me that will help your site to better go along another quick one. Ok other quick thoughts in general how you can do better with your site.

 

Someone: There are great helps on the web like webmaster central, Google groups, expert professionals who are willing to help in forums, bionic posters who are incredibly helpful in providing support and there are also a bunch of Googler’s as well who can help you.

 

Someone: I always like to stress on accessibility so if you all the great content don’t put them on your foot and not linkable so if you have a blog make sure its properly linked not embedding in some JavaScript of AJAX for your navigation a user can store link to a deep page with standard html and proper anchor text as well. If you look at that way people are much more likely to link to you and to the specific content that they like on your site.

 

I personally like about the online community say blogs, Blogs mostly talk about issues you can talk about puppies , tapestry , you can have people with the origin you have a web programmer it will help your site as well.

 

Adam: One thing I want to just say as to First of all we are already just past 10 O clock which is our official end time I seem we have a lot of questions I want you folks to stick around and answer some of these questions both in voice as well as in Chat. For those of you have to be on Job at 10 o clock I thank you for being with us today and for putting up with me in this chat. It has been a pleasure to be here and host this as you already know this is the first ever webmasters live chat. We had a pleasure working with you as well as working with this software that is WebEx we welcome you to give your feedback it seems we need to close this session we are hijacking your browser for a long time, in few moments we will send you to the random chit chat session with the webmaster help group and we will move on actually why don’t we have MattD to create a feedback thread in webmaster help group so you guys sit tight. Matt you are going to start a thread there and we will love your feedback on the questions we answered, please don’t ask new questions on that thread please post your questions elsewhere we need to stay on topic this thread. This thread is just for feedback we will be starting this thread in a moment. It will be open for you all this is just a early alert for those of you who are attending and those of you who will be attending in future. So again a big thanks to everyone here for being here for helping out answering questions, presenting, reviewing for being part of this chat. We thank the nearly 200 of you probably even more coming in and out to participate in this chat so big thanks for all of you. Also we will spend the next few minutes some panelists are going to stick around and answer a few more questions and I want to tackle that one also as we talk about videos one of the member asked “when are we going to be better on indexing videos other than Youtube? Hmm that’s a fair question so you know universal search we currently feature videos inline from youtube as well as two other sites as well. And questions I got from other conferences is hey how can my video sites get videos there right now.

Answer: We are looking out for sites really high bandwidth so that users click through that video they are going to have to get good user experience and not a problem with that. So I think what we are getting at to is if she has videos on youtube may be she can encode in results and results can go to that site and definitely we are getting better and will be able to check videos that are on big portals. And I also can say if you want to place your videos on youtube or goggle video or what ever site that is currently featured in universal search we are working to add more within universal and Google is moving cautiously.

 

I think what I noticed is videos that talk about business talks are more logon video. A lot of people focus just on website videos and you know as simple I guess say 15 videos say a year and half ago and then watched a quarter million times I don’t want those videos you know so if you are in a local business center make sure your business is working and you have good references all those images and videos can be different ways for people to find your website results but there are a lot of competitions especially universal image search there are lot of opportunities for your websites to come up. So make a great type of video it can be fun it can be educational , you can have the skill you can have screen cap setting you can get a ton of free view and a ton of great exposure as well. Coming to URLs in videos on your site one way you can make us grab one of those videos is be adding it in your site map and submitting it to Google videos (https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=10079 )

 

Q and A session I think:

 

Answer most probably by MattCutts:

 

So a site that sells links you know that they are selling links you can see the links on a page and you know they have control over that page. So if a site wants to sell links its certainly their choice they are welcome to sell links especially for the sake of advertising but if you want to see Google and Google search engine you need to make sure that the page that is selling links doesn’t pass Pagerank and if it does pagerank then you loose trust to your site that’s sort of a straight way you know and of course we can take action against your site so that your site don’t show up in search results and in fact don’t show up at all. We are trying to be very clear about Pagerank we have send out message a lot of times and a lot of people discussed it and you know about pagerank we need to maintain our algorithm. If you are selling links there is a high risk in Google so if you are selling links you can block those pages in robots.txt you can nofollow anything that can be prevented from search engines and keep those links for users.

 

Yes the main think about if that something she got because of pagerank can you tell the reason that it gets picked from the site.

 

Yeah a great way to do it is you can register your site in webmaster tools save all your backlinks and check which are links that are not under your control or that are hurting your site or something that you don’t want it there to be and email the site owners and tell them to remove those links. If you can’t do that you can just block those links from passing pagerank in your robots.txt or something like that, that’s the best way to do it.

 

Adam: We got a lot of questions today about sub domains and two quick questions I got in my mind, one of them is when is best to use sub domains instead of subdirectories and the other questions is; Hey we see some folks in Google search results that gets listed for more than one results for several sub domains why is that how can I get something like that? So let me first get to the first question of course you guys want me to tackle the 2nd question first thing is a website has sub domains were there links such for your users this point if you already have your site setup with some sub domains there in no point in taking it down you are doing fine with subdirectories actually that’s fine as well. Use sub domains where it really makes sense for your site for instance you need to have a help support section, you need to help.yoursite.com and you have a lot of content under that. One thing you don’t want to do in either sub domains or sub directories is to have really dodgy ones say you want to have a sanfrancisco.yourdomain.com if you don’t have any pictures or anything relevant to San Francisco then that’s not good for the users and that’s not good for the search engines. What you guys want to tackle is more than one sub domains listed within the search results. Yeah there are so many types in hp or IBM or so many types in eBay so that’s normal sort of behavior. At the same time you need to balance that for the desire to limit, there are nth results for one site you need to limit that since it’s not good for search results and not good for users. We had a joke about this today she saw a site who was listed six times in top 10. So there are instances where there are sites which have more than one or 2 pages relevant to a query even though other pages gets downgraded that’s also one thing you need to worry about its not like we try to same site after all we are trying to get an accurate fair amount of representation of each site in the search results. And in future the trend will be changing and there will be more diversity over search results and if you are looking for top 10 there is no guarantee about getting multiple pages listed.

 

Adam: Thanks we also have other folks ask about syndication, so can any of the folks talk about what can you do if you syndicate your contents to lot of other sites. Should that be a concern what can you do to tell Google that the content is yours?

 

One thing what you can do is link back from the article to your site and say that you are the source

 

Adam: That’s a really great idea so we say we have article from and your site with a link back saying that the article is yours. That’s fine so how can Google better understand this content is originally yours.

 

Keep in mind that if you are syndicating your contents regardless of understanding what it is, It is going to be more repeat less value, you can come to a certain stand point that if this content is available in 200 different sites, if we find the content on 200 different sites we might very well highlight a different site other than you, so that could be good or bad at time for you it could give your company good branding, good awareness but the risk is there you cannot be always No.1 site to pick your content.

 

Adam: You guys have other questions that you can tackle? So some one asked me this is a great question.

 

What’s the good percentage ball point for duplicate content? And we have more questions

 

How many links can I have on a page?

 

How many links can I have that goes to other pages?

 

How long should my pages be?

 

So how many text links you want for Google so no there is no fixed numbers for this, how about a 100 or so links which is reasonable not more than a 100. For other things like you know how much percentage of duplicate content can be on a page. We don’t say 42% that’s it you are not going to do more than that. For all these things you need to apply what we call the common sense test and do what you think is best for your users yeah one other thing that I want to comment on whether you have any inside out blogs sounds like you pick on blogs how would you rank the blog software out there? In sense which has the most SEO friendly coding so we can best succeed in Search results.

 

I think a little biased we have blogger. Of course you need to look for great general things to look for in your blogging software that will help your presence in Google. Whether you are using word press or whether you are using blogger there are lot of different ones you need to take one that you thought is best for you. As far as I know I don’t see any big difference in quality of the blog software. On speaking of specific aspects of blogging softwares you use things in blogging softwares that should do or should not do. So Couple of thoughts I have on that is there is something in blog softwares something you can do both for users as well as search engines like Google. One thing I have seen that is good especially for the users is the URLS can actually have the title in the URL. So instead of hostid=37495 it could be entry/best-basket-balls-in-Romania that’s definitely one of the things and one of aspects is Romania. That’s one of the random things LOL. Mixable aspect of it is the tone people will mix it in chat, mixing it in chat, mixing it online ohh that’s what that page is all about I am more interested in clicking on that sharing it linking to it. Other issues with blog softwares is that they have the tendency all the times to expose a lot of duplicates they reference a same page in 3 or 4 different ways by the ID number by the title and several other. We do a pretty good job in Google when dealing with duplicate content that really is the sort of thing get penalized for this reasons. But one other thing you can do is to include the version you like best and include them in sitemaps. So Google knows to seek those sitemaps is that we look at those to help give us canonicalization hints. If so there are two different URLs with same contents on your site one of them you can add to the site and that one of them will be the preferred versions.

 

If you can 3 of ones great. One other thing on your blog software is if you enable comments be always on top of those if you are not you will be getting comments on Viagra , adult stuff and potentially things that you don’t want your users to see. You don’t want Googlebot either to see the spam in your blog comments. So NOFOLLOW can help prevent a bit but even then just make sure to take care of your blog. Make sure your blog is safe from spam and adult comments and maintain your blog what we call a good neighborhood. That’s what we have on blogs. Other questions there are some of those that you guys already answered but there are some interesting to tackle with a little bit more in-depth

 

There is lot of questions that was answered in Q and A and chat as well. We are going to save the whole Q and A and take a copy and review it and possible to answer the unanswered ones in the Google groups. I am personally going to review this Q and A and use it for internal research purpose.

 

If you thing your site is banned or not working out in Search engines you can login to webmaster tools and explain everything you could about the site and request reconsideration of your site. Especially what you have done to your site previously whether you had any paid links did you remove every single link if you had then before, if you did anything against our guidelines. Make sure we will be able to tackle your application

 

There is a really interesting question coming on.

 

I can see lots of people are obsessed on pagerank. If you take the terminology of pagerank. You should spend your time on adding great content and great content means great links and great pagerank, I don’t think you should pay attention on how pagerank is spread across your site you can make pagerank flow well across your pages by hyper linking pages and stuff like that.

And including sometimes with a little bit of those I would like to get more reputation and more pagerank because when you get known all the pagerank will go around your site even better and you can actually don’t have to worry.

 

There is really an excellent point that I want to share for today what I want to say was information architecture plays a key role in how pagerank is flowed on your site probably from the beginning you have a clear structure, very clear linking, something like that will definitely give the best results for your site.

 

You don’t have worry too much about pagerank leakage, your contact page or privacy page you don’t have to worry too much how much pagerank passes to those URLs. So what I do want to say is have clear architecture and internal link structure so that pagerank flows well and the pages have reasonable link juice. That’s what I totally recommend you do the best. So actually once you have a pretty reasonable structure any sites do work whether its word press or any content management system works and pagerank flows around in a relatively reasonable way.

Once you have got that make sure to make it a little more sensible think about adding great content which can in turn attract great links which in turn gives great pagerank. Make sure you keep doing you will get what we call a web effect like turning and tweaking you know where links come into one page and from the architecture goes to an other page and the pagerank flows well over your pages. So you don’t have to worry too much once you have link on the front page pagerank flows and its going to flow to any URL that is listed here. There is no need to worry which page or which link you pass the pagerank what ever page it is there will get its pagerank there is nothing to worry about that. Most of the time if you do have reasonable site architecture then there is nothing to worry about you need to think about how you create a site. If you do have a good reasonable architecture you need to spend your time thinking how do we add more content and how we attract more good links ok with that I really think I need to head out if you have more questions feel free to ask in groups we will be pleased to help you out.

 

One thing we saw more often is this question asked in Google Groups and Online webmaster chat is that this person Amit agarwal asks that he sees sites I have seen aggregators like megite.com, social sites like Digg and even splogs rank above in Google than the actual webpage. Can we prevent this?

 

For Google a splog is a spammy blog. I don’t think you will know what a splog is,

 

A splog is the nickname for sites that essentially steal contents from the original website and claim it to be themselves trying to get high ranking themselves to get money from advertising. So what we have seen on this is that there is a flag, the site goes affected negatively often time violating our webmaster guidelines in so many ways. So we de-prioritize in favor of other sites we also have seen some times that rarely, rarely that other splogs will rank higher under dig you can aggregate the blog to be popular its certainly possible that for a temporary amount of time they can rank higher than your site for a given content. The tendency of these aggregators they tend to offer the page natural buoyancy and that should be one of the short time considerations.

 

I’ll see what other questions we have.

 

All we have actually is a couple of minutes then we are going to be kicked out of the room from here. Other questions you guys have seen that you guys would like to tackle

I can see you were talking about splogs that someone else were doing better than your site with contents stolen from your site violating the webmaster guidelines you can actually go on to report that. Very best way to report that is you can login to webmaster tools and just click report Google. We also have a spam report form where you don’t have to login to webmaster tools but to say if you are logged in you will have more effect in reports and they are always prioritized. Yeah if you see some one really violating the guidelines you don’t really want to help them.

Somebody asked me whether we want to know we are penalized or not-penalized in webmaster tools it will be much appreciated.

 

We definitely want to share more and more information to webmasters however I have to be frank with you is that we need to keep a delicate balance and sometimes it’s a bit frustrating thing for us, there are still a huge number of webmasters none of you guys from chat of course that has intention of spamming versus quality contents and so we do ask folks to give out too much information too quickly that will help folks ohh they caught me now lets see if they catch me now and try push things that wide so that they can be more effective in spamming. With that said thought we are showing a good number of penalties in webmaster tools along with warnings on various problems a site might have like the robots.txt for instance.

 

Yeah I just want to say to in general we have a lot of questions left over here but we were able to solve a lot of questions like on duplicate contents, image questions had people if they have problems in image search, so we do want you to do good in searches whether its local or global, there are lot of information out there so we did our best and will do our best in future.

Thanks its time to wind up its ½ past 10 here. It has been a great thing sharing our thoughts with you; we look forward to seeing you guys in future and look forward to seeing you guys in groups.

Thanks Everyone from Google, Thank you Google.

 

Prepared by Search Engine Genie Team with world webmaster's in MIND :-)

 

 

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