Google Webmasters Chat - Tricks and Treats

Ayer tube la suerte de participar en el evento que organizó google para explicar algunas cosillas para los webmasters interesados.

En el mismo pudimos intercambiar dudas, preguntas con otros webmasters y tambien con algunos muy reputados Googlers como  Matt Cutts.

Os adjunto algunas de las respuestas:

Pregunta: "For SEO, I'd like to improve my rankings by removing technical obstacles (starting with dynamic URL parameters), what are the most important site fixes to make and how can I document before and after success metrics using the Google Webmaster Tool?" Respuesta: To check the crawlability of your site, I would recommend crawling your site with a crawler like Xenu's Link Sleuth (freeware, for Windows). Doing that gives you a rough look at how search engines view your site and can point you towards areas where crawlers get stuck in a loop or start crawling duplicates based on the URL parameters. What weight does the age of a site and the amount of time a domain is registered for have on it's search placement? 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. Matt Cutts, Bay Area, CA 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? Hey Marjy (testing out this 'post a response' thingie). 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. Matt Cutts, Bay Area, CA Does Google plan to let us see rankings/positions of keywords in the webmaster tool? We already do, for a limited number of keywords, in the "Top search queries" section of Webmaster Tools. While we generally don't comment on future features or plans, expanding this functionality is certainly an idea that's been suggested to us. Susan Moskwa, Kirkland, WA Do inbound links from other sites owned by the same company help or hurt rank? 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. Matt Cutts, Bay Area, CA Hey Scott, I'm not trying to give you the run around, but this is a bit situation specific... overall, though, I wouldn't look at these links as helping or hurting your rank when written in a helpful manner to the user.  So, if you run a sporting goods site, and you link to your sister companies for camping and tailgating equipment, that's good for the user. More happy users can lead to more buzz, leading to better rankings.  If your sister companies are just linked at the footer of the page, in hopes of cross-advertising or getting more links, it's not likely to add value to ranking or the user. In extreme cases, if it's a bad neighborhood, these links will certainly not help you.  Put yourself in the user's seat, and do what makes sense for these links. Good luck! Maile Ohye, MTV, CA