StrategyNode.com
SEO | SEM | SMM | Analytics

Some Interesting Questions Answered by Google Spam Team

On June 19, 2008 there was Google Webmaster Live Chat Event. It was for the general public to ask questions to the Google spam team.

Below are some of the most interesting questions and answers:

1)   Kien Lai - 5:03 pm

Q: Q: “can google crawl flash sites/”

John Mueller - 5:05 pm

A: “Somewhat — we can extract some information from the flash files, but it’s generally not the same as with HTML sites/pages.”

2)   Quentin Muhlert - 4:37 pm

Q: I’ve got a question about internationalization: I have a multinational site with country-coded subdirectories and I’ve registered these as such in Webmasters’ tools, will this be exempt from duplicate content rules for a site spanning uk/us/aus ?

John Mueller - 5:07 pm

A: That’s generally ok. I would still make sure that the pages are obviously well-targeted for those audiences. It wouldn’t make sense to send users from specific areas to one general page. In that case, I would use a single page without geotargeting.

3)   Quentin Muhlert - 5:07 pm

Q: Is there a comprehensive list of the tags that GoogleBot can read somewhere?

Matt Dougherty - 5:11 pm

A: Hi Quentin, try this HelpCenter doc - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=79812

4)   Oliver Gonzalez - 5:10 pm

Q: Is there any limit on the number of redirections 301, a Web site?. In a large site, if you change the URL structure, is the optimum time to do it with 301? or is best done gradually

Matt Cutts - 5:17 pm

A: There’s no per-page limit on the number of 301s you can do, so you could move 100K pages to 100K new location. However, if we see a really long chain of redirects, eventually we will decide to stop following the chain.

5)   jeremy rivera - 5:06 pm

Q: If a website’s Robots.txt file is goign to a 404 error will it be removed from the index? What if it is missing altogether?

Michael Wyszomierski - 5:17 pm

A: If there is no robots.txt file Google will assume that there are not any crawling restrictions, as long as there are no other robots directives via meta tags or the x-robots HTTP header directive.

6)   Jacob Bandes-Storch - 5:07 pm

Q: In regards to the Flash files, I believe it is possible to create Flash movies with extra accessible content, correct?

evan t - 5:19 pm

A: We encourage building flash sites with html accessibility for googlebot to crawl. For more information check out our blog post on flash: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/07/best-uses-of-flash.html

7)   Lauren Fortner - 5:07 pm

Q: Our pages are using mod_rewrite to strip “.html”– Will google think of “process” and “process.html” as separate pages?

Susan Moskwa - 5:20 pm

A: If both URLs serve content, we will interpret them as two separate URLs. If the one redirects to the other (e.g. with a 301 redirect), this will let us know that one is the preferred/permanent URL.

8)   Abhijeet Mukherjee - 5:18 pm

Q: Whats the average time after which the PR of a site gets updated?

Matt Cutts - 5:22 pm

A: We typically do pushes to the toolbar every 3-4 months, so it can take that long between toolbar data pushes.

9)   paul brewster - 5:09 pm

Q: does google ‘value’ a website incorporating a relevant blog and forum

Matt Dougherty - 5:22 pm

A: Hi Paul, I would say that an organic blog or forum definitely adds value to your website by creating a community effect.

10)  Chris Hornak - 5:08 pm

Q: Does google take anything from links taged nofollow, for example does it read the anchor text and credit that to the destination?

Susan Moskwa - 5:24 pm

A: No, it basically drops that link from our link graph (it ignores it).

11)  Jonathan Faustman - 5:21 pm

Q: Will hiding navigation items with css (that are displayed on certain pages/directories) have a negative impact when google indexes the site?

Mariya Moeva - 5:26 pm

A: Hi Jonathan, when building your site and considering hiding navigation elements, it’s best to always think, “is this good for my users?” and “would i do this if there were no search engines?

12)  Morris Rosenthal - 5:24 pm

Q: What reasons may cause Google to ignore a small percentage of pages in a small sitemap (less than 1K pages submitted by Console).

Matt Cutts - 5:30 pm

A: We do look at the number of links when we decide how much to crawl, so just submitting a sitemap doesn’t guarantee crawling.

13)  Brian Rutledge - 5:24 pm

Q: Where does Google stand on Sub-domain spam/doorway pages right now? In some verticals, sub-domain dw pages are more than 50% top 10 serps.

Reid Yokoyama - 5:32 pm

A: Hi Brian - just caught your question. Google still considers doorway pages and obviously webspam as violation of our Webmaster Guidelines.

14)  Carlos Obregon - 5:31 pm

Q: Typically, what % of the websites’ pages does Google index from large sites

Bergy Berghausen - 5:33 pm

A: That depends on the size of the site, its PageRank, and a bunch of other factors. This is hard to generalize for.

15)  Ash Buckles - 5:32 pm

Q: Are there any amount of duplicate content pages that are acceptable? In other words if we have 2 pages serving the same content is that just as bad as 40 pages serving duplicate content?

Susan Moskwa - 5:33 pm

A: The real issue with duplicate content is that Google will try to filter out duplicates when we serve search results. Generally you don’t need to worry about it, but if you want to have more control over which version we serve, you can try to mitigate it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 4:02 pm and is filed under SEO, Web Design Tips | . You can follow responses to this entry through the Comments RSS Feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.