Kansas City SEO and SEM

by: Anne Haynes

Today I was checking out my friendfeed and noticed @mattcutts feed talking about an event; Google’s Webmaster Tricks and Treats webinar

This event was a great way to ask Google questions about ranking your websites. As a search marketing specialist I watch SEO trends and consult with other specialist on tactics. What one person says works another person says it won’t work. At times the industry can be confusing. This event allowed webmasters to submit questions to the Google Search team through Google Moderator. The Google Moderator was open a few days before the event, so people could submit questions and other users could rate the questions. The questions with the highest ratings were at the top and had a better chance of being answered. When the event happened today, everyone entered a WebEx session to view presentations and chat with Googlers and other webmasters. After the presentations the Google Moderator was used to answer additional questions. John Mueller’s presentation was my favorite because it focused on shedding light on myths regarding the search engine optimization industry. Following are my notes from the presentation and my thoughts:

Duplication Content
Apparently, duplicate content is not as bad as I thought. The Google team mentioned it’s best to show your best content. However, with this statement I think it states that having 4 pages with the same content is not showing the best content. I’ve wondered why duplicate is a bad thing with Google because Google knows when a page is created based on the creation date, wouldn’t the first page created be the most authoritative? However, as link building and offsite optimization starts I can see how ranking 4 pages with different inbound link values is more complicated. The Google team suggested submitting an XML site map to support Google knowing which pages the site owner wants in the index. So, for those people that think XML site maps don’t help with your overall rankings, you’re wrong.

XML Site Maps
John Mueller stated some believe that XML site maps hurt your rankings. The opposite is true according to John. John mentioned keeping the XML site map up-to-date as being an important factor. At this time @mattcutts mentioned that submitting an XML site map won’t boost your rankings, so it was kind of confusing. Here are my thoughts on XML site maps; why wouldn’t you submit your favorite URLS to Google? Google looks at the XML site map to determine which of your sites pages to rank. There is a reason why keeping them up to date is important – Google accesses your XML site map regularly to rank your pages. And if your XML site map is out of date, then you are confusing the algorithm and making it work harder. Here is an XML site map resource for more information.

PageRank is Dead
Yes, there are SEOs that say PageRank doesn’t matter anymore. John Mueller and the Google team stated PageRank is not dead, it’s just one of the 200 other factors that help a website rank in the search engines. While many webmasters begged for information on the other 199 factors, Googlers wouldn’t play.

Site Submission
SEOs that think resubmitting a site regularly helps with rankings, Google says no. My golden rule is to submit a site when the site has changed substantially. The big question came up about Google recently updated their webmaster guidelines by removing the DMOZ Directory and Yahoo! Direcotry submission recommendations. Matt Cutts, in his own words, mentioned the removal was designed to prevent new webmasters from submitting sites to fly-by-night directories.

If you think you need to submit your website to thousands of search engines in order to rank well, this is a myth as well.

Content Refresh
The next myth John Mueller mentioned; optimize your website and don’t touch it again. For years I’ve been educating clients on the need for fresh content and I’m still doing it today. My approach for this has been to install blogs for the clients to manage and add new content on their own. And let’s face it; clients don’t want to have to pay you forever! Installing blogs has been one of my very best approaches to fresh content.

Shared Hosting
While there may have been a time when having a static IP address would benefit your rankings, Google stated sharing IP addresses is ok because IP addresses are running out. Someone needs to make some more IP address before we need a Government bailout.

I’m not going to talk about how to prevent a URL from being indexed, because a good portion of the event covered this topic, that’s for you @brianrutledge In a few days, everyone can listen to the audio and watch the presentations. If you’re needing help with navigating through all the facets of search engine optimization and making your site friendly to your users and the search engines, check out Google Webmasters Group

One thing that struck me as odd; when the event was taking place there were 200+ questions on the Google Moderator and when the event was over only 28 questions remained. Spooky…