Por cortesía de Pedro Serrano, os adjunto el resumen de las preguntas/respuestas mas destacadas del webmaster chat hasta Octubre del 2008.

Muy interesante

Resumen del Webmaster Chat del 23/10/2008

What weight does the age of a site and the amount of time a domain is registered for have on it’s search placement?

Matt Cutts: In the majority of cases, it actually doesn’t matter–we want to return the best information, not just the oldest information. Especially if you’re a mom/pop site, we try to find ways to rank your site even if your site is newer or doesn’t have many links. I think it is fair for Google to use that as a signal in some circumstances, and I try never to rule a signal out completely, but I wouldn’t obsess about it.

Recently, you removed this suggestion: “Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!” from your guidelines. Is there any chance that you will be discounting these kinds of links for ranking value in future?

Matt Cutts: There’s always the chance that we’ll discount directory links in the future. What we were seeing was quite a few novice people would see the “directory” recommendation and go out and just try to submit to a ton of directories, even if some of the directories were lower-quality or even fly-by-night directories that weren’t great for users. Right now we haven’t changed how we’re weighting directory links–we’ve only removed the directory suggestion from the webmaster guidelines.

Since Google is against using ranking software (ie:WebCeO) to monitor SERP rankings, is there any plans on Google creating an approved, in-house rank check application that webmasters can use?

Matt Cutts: It’s something that we’ve talked about. My concern is that sometimes people get too worried with paying attention to their “trophy phrase” and want to rank for that even if that’s not the best phrase for them, or concentrating on one phrase to the exclusion of all the other stuff they rank for isn’t the best idea. I think paying attention to server logs or analytics data gets you a really nice array of keywords that are practical to work on. But this is feedback that we’ve heard, and personally I think it would be nice if we offered this for some reasonable size of keywords.

Do inbound links from other sites owned by the same company help or hurt rank?

Matt Cutts: I find that inbound links from the same company tend to break down into two camps. You’ll find mom/pops that have a very few sites in one camp, and that can make sense if those sites are linked; in the other camp, I’ve see SEOs have 1000 or 2000 different domains and cross-link them. I definitely would not recommend that.

I think a lot of the litmus test in my mind is whether it makes sense to a regular person for those domains to be interlinked. If you look at a product like Coke, people aren’t surprised to see that they have coca-cola.co.nz and several other domains. If you go to coke.com, it’s perfectly reasonable to ask users which country they’re coming from, and then send them to one of a bunch of domains. But if a regular user lands on example.com and finds 20 or 30 cross-links at the bottom of the page and they look like off-topic or cookie-cutter or spammy domains, that’s going to look bad to almost anyone.

Will Webmaster Tools ever give us an option to “disassociate” from sites that link to us? This feature exists in Yahoo’s Site Explorer, but not Webmaster Tools.

Matt Cutts: So far because we work really hard to make it so that one site can’t hurt another site, we haven’t really offered this. It’s something that people have suggested and we’ve thought about though. Part of the challenge would be if a site owner wanted to disassociate a bunch of links from their site. If you have a ton of links pointing to your site, scanning all of them would get really tiring. So that’s a challenge, and since we haven’t seen a need for it yet, that’s why we haven’t offered it yet.

Sitemaps question: If my website has an extremely large number of pages, like Amazon.com, should I include every single URL that I want indexed in my XML sitemap? If not, how should I go about populating my XML sitemap?

Wysz: Feel free to use your Sitemap to list all of your pages… that’s what it’s for! However, if you have many duplicate URLs for the same content, then you may want to only list your preferred versions of the URLs in your Sitemap.

Are .gov and .edu back links still considered more “link juice” than the common back link?

Matt Cutts: This is a common misconception–you don’t get any PageRank boost from having an .edu link or .gov link automatically. Hah John, I beat you to it! If you get an .edu link and no one is linking to that .edu page, you’re not going to get any PageRank at all because that .edu page doesn’t have any PageRank.

In addition to a XML sitemap, does it make any sense to have also an HTML sitemap on the same website? Does HTML sitemap helps improve the rating?

JhonMu: A HTML sitemap file can help search engines, especially those that don’t use XML Sitemap files. Also, the 404 widget in Webmaster Tools (which you can place on your 404 pages) will use “/sitemap.htm” and similar files to help users to find the content they’re looking for. So yes, I would recommend making HTML sitemap files, however I’d focus on the user and not the search engines.

Suppose my website supports English and French. Should the English version of a particular page and the French version have different URLs? Any other best practices for multi-lingual site architecture?

Matt Cutts: If you can afford it, I would do domain.com and domain.fr. If that’s not possible, I would consider doing en.domain.com and fr.domain.com. If that’s not possible, then domain.com/en and domain.com/fr can work. In webmaster tools, you can geographically target a site (and I believe parts of a site such as fr.domain.com), which will help as well.

What weightage is given to the links from social networking sites and blogs?

Nathan J.: I would treat social sites and blogs the same as any other site

Does the geotargeting feature in Webmaster tools hold as much weight as having a country-specific TLD?

Kaspar aka Guglarz: Google uses a bunch of signals like location of the server or the TLD in order to determine which users might be interested in the sites content. Geotargeting is a way for webmasters who use non country specific TLD’s like .net/ to tell Google which your target group was, if the site is specifically targeted to users from a particular area. Think of the site of a small, local hardware store or a vet for example. Potentially, their main target users would be people living in the nearby area. Geotargeting is not to be used for language targeting though.

Do you feel that the webmaster should be informed in case of a manual penalty & the reconsideration requests should be looked into more seriously in case of a manual penalty?

Kaspar aka Guglarz: That is a very good question, that we are being asked on a regular basis. So, imagine you have a site on which you add original content and/or tools on a regular basis.
If it has been hacked and contains hidden content/links or you are a website owner and your webmaster did something he/she was not aware of being outside Google webmaster guidelines, like a 0 seconds redirection. In that case chances are high you would be informed about a temporary removal from Google results via Google Webmaster Tools. The message will surely contain hints regarding the problem on the site. Once you have fixed it, your reconsideration request will be reviewed very carefully.

On the other hand, if you have a couple of hundreds of identical sites with - for example - scraped content from other sites, these are not adding any value to the Internet and I would not expect any notifications from Google.

Some blackhat linked to my blog from 300+ adult splogs as revenge for calling him out. My blog had #1 ranking for it’s keywords, now it is on the second page at best. Can mass amounts of links from “bad neighborhoods” cause a drop in site ranking?

Nathan J.: We work hard to make sure a site can’t have a negative effect on another site. Feel free to report spam if you think you find some - https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport.

Will too much of “rel=nofollow” or totally “nofollow” to all outgoing links by the author of a blog be stamped as over optimization and penalized? Is there any penalty for over optimization sort of stuff?

JhonMu: I wouldn’t worry about this, Raj. I would try to work on making the site as natural as possible.

Is the bounce rate and speed taken into account when ranking a page? i.e. if you see a searcher click on a result then return very quickly and choose another result, is the first page ranked lower?

JhonMu: Hi chrisff, assuming that users will be jumping out of a site like that, there’s a high probability that they won’t be willing to recommend it to others (or come back themselves). So yes, indirectly at least, if a site is made in a way that users run away right away, then chances are that we might not be recommending it as much as other sites that users like (and recommend to others).

Many believe that to rank well, you simply need “quality” backlinks. But how important is having your keywords in the , and throughout your site? Is keyword density of any importance to show what the page is about? What % is suggested?

Wysz: Links are just one factor involved in Google’s ranking of pages. We look at both on-page and off-page content, so what you have on your page can be an essential part of ranking. However, there is no recommended “keyword density.” Your content should be high quality and written for users. If you try writing for search engines, the language can become very unnatural, which may end up hurting you more than it helps.

How will social media or more specifically share of comments (buzz about a brand) influence the serps?

Mayle Ohye: Social media is great! But, there are a few things to say about this… Social media can add buzz to your site, finding new visitors, people linking to you, etc. That’s a bonus and the more users that enjoy your content, often the better your site will show in SERPs. We want results to reflect what users are searching for, so social buzz can certainly be helpful.

A few things to note: 1. If you allow user-generated content on your site, remember to monitor for spam. 2. Also, if you’re looking to get buzz to directly help your site in SERPs, know that we normally don’t crawl javascript, so if it’s hosted in javascript you’ll still get the user traffic from the buzz (which can eventualy lead better rankings), but the user comments themselves won’t be indexed. 3. If you want to get the user-generated content associated with your site (as part of your URLs), then make sure you host the user-generated content on your domain (so it’s not link to a separate site).

Does inconsistent capitalization of URLs cause duplicate content issues and dilution of page rank? For example www.site.com/abc vs www.site.com/Abc. On Windows hosts, these are the same page, but are different pages on Unix hosts.

JhonMu: Hi John, based on the existing standards, URLs are case-sensitive, so yes, these would be seen as separate URLs. Since the content on the URLs is the same, we’ll generally recognize that and only keep one of them. However, we’d recommend that you try to keep all links going to one version of the URL. Keep in mind that this also applies to robots.txt files.

Can my site be penalized if somebody else uses ranking check software on it?

Kaspar aka Guglarz: No! Don’t worry abut that