Google hosted a live online webmaster chat on October 22, 2008. They had a presentation on “Frightening Myths and Misconceptions” where John Mueller demystified some webmasters myths related to Page Rank, duplicate content, links, 404 errors and geo targeting. There was also a return of their popular “Three for Three,” in which they had three different Googlers tackling three different issues … in less than three minutes each!
The best part was the Google Moderator tool where one could ask questions and also vote for the questions that were asked by others. Have listed few of these questions along with the responses posted by Googlers.
Q)”What weight does the age of a site and the amount of time a domain is registered for have on it’s search placement?”
A)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.
Q)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?”
A)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.
Q)”Until recentley (the last six months or so) a high ranking was achievable by submitting articles to article directories (providing they were 40%-60% unique), it no longer seems to be the case. Have links from article sites been de-valued at all?”
A)In my experience, not every article directory site is high-quality. Sometimes you see a ton of articles copied all over the place, and it’s hard to even find original content on the site. The user experience for a lot of those article directory sites can be pretty bad too. So you’d see users landing on those sorts of pages have a bad experience.
If you’re thinking of boosting your reputation and getting to be well-known, I might not start as the very first thing with an article directory. Sometimes it’s nice to get to be known a little better before jumping in and submitting a ton of articles as the first thing.
Q)”Are .gov and .edu back links still considered more “link juice” than the common back link?”
A)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.
Q)“What weightage is given to the links from social networking sites and blogs?”
A)I would treat social sites and blogs the same as any other site.
Q)”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?”
A)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).
Q)”How will social media or more specifically share of comments (buzz about a brand) influence the serps?”
A)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).
Q)”Will it make any difference between a shared IP and a dedicated IP on SEO or search results, as opinions are divided on this aspect?”
A)Most of the web is on shared IP addresses, so it doesn’t make much sense for us to give those on dedicated IP addresses any advantages. That said, if your server is struggling with the load of your website, it might make sense to move to a dedicated server that helps to make sure that your users are happy when visiting your website.
Q)”Are natural results geotargeted?”
A)Yes. If you search for [bank] in the U.S., you’ll get different results than if you search in the U.K. or Germany.
Q)”does getting a lot of comments in a blog help in being well indexed/ranked by google?”
A)Having a lot of enthusiastic users commenting on your posts and doing so generating content on your site, certainly does not harm your rankings 
Furthermore, a large fan base gives the webmaster a bit of independence from search engine traffic, which is the reason why generating original and compelling content in order to nurture a group of committed users is something I would highly recommend to any blogger
You can check all the questions at http://tinyhttp.com/tatask.The audio and video of the event will be available soon on http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/ . Online chat is a good way through which SEO experts and webmasters can get their queries answered in real time from someone at Google. Hope we have many more such events from Google.
