Google's Answers to Webmasters

This was a meeting organized by the Search Engine Genie website with webmasters from various countries and the team at Google Webmaster Central, including Matt Cutts, well-known by webmasters.

Webmasters have asked all the questions they wanted to ask but that they could not do before, and someone in the team gave an answer.

Here is a summary of main infos provided by the team:

Domain name and geotargeting

Sub-domain and visibility: Not any more visibility with sub-domains or subdirectories that in the domain.

Penalized domain bought: In this case you have to submit the site again and to indicate the change of ownership.

Generic TLD or country TLD: Extensions of countries (ccTLD) have better treatment on local searches.

ccTLD: Geotargeting does not work for country code extensions such as .fr, .jp...

Sub-domain in results: There is usually a connection between domain and sub-domain (not competing with domain in SERP?).

ccTLD or GWT geotargeting: Both operate in an identical way.

URL

HTTP and HTTPS: They are treated in an identical way.

Country code for sub-domain: Country code such as jp or country name as japan, used as sub-domain are not recognized for geotargeting. Only Webmaster Tools may be used for geotargeting.

Static via dynamic: No difference between static links (html etc...) and dynamic links (?=xxx).

Dash or underscore: It does not matter.

Keywords

Meta keywords: It is ignored.

Keywords in filename: It is pointless if they are already in the page. But it is useful for pages containing only images.

PageRank

Duplicate content: Multiple links to a same page divide the PR.

Working to improve PR: It is better to spend time to improve the content, accessibility and to promote the site.

Lowered by a page: No.

Images

Replacement image: Once the replacement image is good for the visitor, this is not a problem.

Alt and title: Alt is used for indexing, title only serves to your visitors.

Links

Social media: The media industry are a good way to attract visitors.

Too much link in home page: As long as you have less than 100 links, depending on what you think is best for the visitor, the number is not a problem.

Duplicate content

RSS: RSS feeds should not be indexed. They must be blocked by robots.txt. You must also ensure that the feed, when it is displayed on another site, has a link to your site.

Several links to a same product: Google is trying to choose the best to display it in the results.

Robots.txt

Page removal: To have pages removed from the index, it is better to put the noindex attribute in the page, and to allow the robot to crawl it.

PR: Indeed, the PR can be taken even if a page is blocked by robots.txt.

Sitemap

Usefulness: The sitemap can see URLs added and modified. They can be scanned faster than falling over by accident.

Image in the sitemap: It works, but it is not worth the image into an HTML page.