Google Webmaster Event – Tricks and Treat

I attended the online webmaster event on 22nd. Mostly it was basics and new webmasters and budding SEO’s would have found it useful, for others a quick revision.

There were more than 10 panel members and 300+ attendee’s – the chat room is a disaster as there was no possibility of private messaging – it was quite useless and with lots of spam.

Among the googlers, Matt Cutts was present and the rest I am not quite familiar yet.

John Mueller gave presentation on SEO and Website Myths, Jonathan Simon on Links and Maile on Doctypes (and excluding pdf in search engines – REP HTTP headers).

I took some screenshots of presentation – so that it can be referred later. I think John’s presentation on SEO myth buster will be found useful by many of basic and intermediate SEO’s & Webmasters. Below you can find most of slides:

SEO Myths Buster – Agenda:
Get advice before following myths that you hear/read, top myths and how to recognize them.

New business website owners start learning on their own with books, ebooks and start some where on their own like the below steps of adding/changing keywords, title, submitting to search engines and finally to know only that they had wasted time.

1. Duplicate content had been a major issue discussed in recent times (especially after wordpress, typepad, blogspot and other such cms sites). Few people suggested and implemented as well, that let that post be in one category and if its inside a folder – it is treated as a duplicate content and it will hurt rank. Search engine algorithm are efficient enough to understand this and whenever we have to refer content from other websites – it is better to use them as snippet rather pasting the complete content and to refer them back (credit)

2. Mixing XHTML and HTML will break verification – not true!

3. There are only few major search engines that people are using and then 1 or 2 search engines as their fav. If the search engine is popular – it is capable enough to find your website and crawl the contents.

4. There are rumours that participating in Google Programs will improve or hurt your search rankings. Signing up in adsense or adwords does not affect your website in anyway. Do you think just because signing up for gmail will help your website? or that visiting google.com everyday will make them treat your website special?

5. I have a different opinion about this myth. I could agree half – Keywords are definitely important – you dont have that keyword in your website – there are less chances that your website is going to get listed in rankings. But overusing it in meta’s, page and wherever possible had to be avoided.

6. Sitemap’s hurts rank – Nope. Sitemap helps your website – it helps the crawler to find the missing pages and also how frequent they can visit your website/webpage. My suggestion would be dont play with priority or how frequenty you change the page.

7. PageRank is the core of google and there are always two talks – one is PR is dead and the other is Page Rank is everything. PR is one of the factor and there are 200 + signals and classifiers that defines your website rank. You can read some of top classifiers and signals here

8.Resubmitting the site to search engines boost rankings – not true. Rather – you can have the updates in the xml sitemap and crawlers will identfy through that.

9. Most SEO’s and/or webmasters stop doing anything when they see high rank in search results for certain keywords. You have to continue updating the page/site if required and continue with SEO efforts as other websites will not sit idle.

10.There are only 5% of websites that are valid in XHTML. That also means in other words that 95% of people who have their website does not worry much about validation rather focussed on users/visitors. But in general, if you aware that your website is not xhtml valid, it is better to modify it.

More SEO/Website Myths:

You can check Google Webmaster Blog for more information on this topic.