25+ good updates from Google meet – India Search Masters 2009

At around 6:00 pm, I left Google with a free diet coke from the Adwords sponsored fridge (which had everything from Juices to active drinks). Just before leaving Google, I took the pics of the team responsible for my day at Google (Wonderful team of energetic, confident and good looking people).

They talked as average as any of my colleague at any company. There was nothing exceptional about them except their confidence level and enjoyment at work. Just before this pictures, I had a talk with Jayshree, Alok, Eric and some more Googlers about Indian webmaster crowd. I explained to them that how many of us are required to work on plain SEO.

Last session at India Search Masters: Adam Lasnik closing note

I think he got some sleep after his morning sessions and was looking a little fresh and more sleepy. He answered some of the queries in his own styles. A lot of things were very basic, so I am not covering all these things here.

Google Analytics and Website Optimizer by Deepak

This session was again ok, there was nothing new except that I get some good example for impact of small things. A small change increased the revenues by $3 millions. I felt it was a plain common-sense (or advance sense) violation. Google analytics take it to their credit as they feel people used Google analytics to figure this common problem. (Asking for login before buying). We had some similar long discussions at WMW. It was a long session.

Coffee break, India Search Masters

(Had some interesting talks and networking, met Amit of Labnol.blogspot.com and Alok of Google)

Building Mobile Friendly Websites – Ankit Gupta

Was an interesting session. Though I could not agree to him a lot on his approach towards website designing. He was confusing me about web based application and websites. He took the example of Orkut and showed some of the sample, I felt it to be more of an application than a website. More details at /blog/marketing/website-development/googles-most-computationally-expensive-tool.html. I liked http://ready.mobi/launch.jsp?locale=en_EN and some of the tools that they introduced.

Google Custom Search – Rajat Mukherjee

I did had a talk with Rajat Mukerjee when he was in Yahoo. We exchanged some emails regarding ban on one of our websites. He is an amazing speaker, he puts so much energy into it. He explained how CSE servers and different from the main search servers and thus has no impact on the main search results. He explained about Adobe’s implementation of CSE. AFS (Adsense for Search). He also explained about on-demand indexing under CSE. Was overall a good session.

Lunch at India Search Masters 2009

This was good time. Meals was good, so was the time with other web masters. There was a set always following Adam everywhere including the lunch.

Pathetic Hands-On Session by Adam and his team

They were talking randomly, they did it for 2 sites redbus.in and http://tarladalal.com/. Seriously speaking they were not prepared for it. They had no check list, they just randomly picked here and there. Was not of much use except that the http://tarladalal.com/ was hacked and Adam gave some tips on hacking. Also Adam introduced the new feature where Google also notifies you of possible hacks. I have plans of doing a Hands-on for these 2 websites including the keyword analysis.

Webmaster Help Forum by Koti Ivaturi

Was good. I started participating more in webmaster forums. I had some conversation with the Google team after this as I wanted some more features. They helped me with some of the things but still I am waiting for some more help. I wanted to help Indian webmasters and wanted to know the forum where I could do it. Overall a good and light sessions.

Coffee Break

Cookies, sandwiches and a lot of things … Some were busy eating and some (like me) busy in distributing cards.

Webmaster Central and Best Practices – Adam

Overall good session, very basic. I asked the first question about video xmls. I will be covering the Q&A in the next paragraphs.

Welcome Note – Vivaik Bharadwaaj

Reminded me of Army. He gave an overview of Indian websites. Very strict Army welcome. He gave some stats about Indian web and web users:
Some numbers that were given by Google about the Indian internet and mobile users were,

• 8% of India’s population is English speak
• 11.7m Internet subscribers (of which 4.38m are broadband users)
• Mobile: 300m+ users
• 76-80m mobile handsets are GPRS ready

Registration to India Search Masters 2009

They did not allow me to take the pics but the office was really cool. I loved the presentation style, office, registration process … It was a good experience. We had to keep running back to a room to get our Laptops charged. WAN is good.

All good questions at India Search Masters 2009

1. Why site:example domain shows only few pages of my website?
   Possible Answer: site:example.com is not showing all the pages, it shows just a sample of pages. This is to speed up the process. The site: operator in Google is designed for performance and not comprehensiveness. In order to view all the crawled pages, visit the webmaster tools. Generally site:example.com shows the important pages. (Answer by Adam)
2. How do we get more and more pages to the index?
   Possible Answer: Add the xml sitemap, show the important pages some respect by making it accessible within few clicks. (What I could get and also what I knew from a long time is: 1) Interlinking of pages, 2) Making your website worth many pages by getting more and more links 3) Good navigation structure, XML sitemap and HTML sitemap 4) Unique content 5) Unite title and meta description helps)
3. Is there a supplement index and what does it do?
   Possible Answer: In the talks Google members did acknowledge that there was a storage and resources problem. They had an option to either throw away the not so important pages or store it somewhere where the resource consumption on operation is less. They decided not to throw the pages but to keep it in a different location with very minimum operation on it. Supplement results have a different bot that uses different resources not the main resources.
4. Why does page 1 of SERP shows 1- 10 of X results and page 2 of SERP shows 11-20 of Y results? Why is X and Y different for 2 pages for the same query?
   Possible Answer: All the data on the search result page is calculated separately as module calculation. There is upper cap for all the calculation. Say on page 1 or page 2 if the calculation of total pages is taking time then the page will load with the available number. It sometimes will load without the ad or without some other sections to meet the loading time standards.
5. Does Validation help in ranking?
   Possible Answer: No, it doesn’t. Google algo doesn’t give any extra credit for being fully validated. (We all know that we do validation to make sure that pages are rendered across all the browsers properly. Google itself is not fully validated. I remember an interview, probably by Matt Cutts, where he explained that adding extra quotes for validation will make Google’s homepage and other pages a little slow and with millions of query every mins, it saves a lot of resources. Do validation and checking to make sure pages are properly rendered nit to score ranking points.)
6. Is mobile ranking and web ranking different?
   Possible Answer: yes, both are different, look at http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mail&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq= and http://www.google.com/m?mrestrict=xhtmlonly&eosr=on&ct=fsh&q=mail. Mobile search returns the web pages that are optimized for mobiles. You may like to use http://ready.mobi to check the mobile friendliness of your website.
7. Why many analytics doesn’t have individual click path?
   Possible Answers: I desperately wanted to know this answer as I was spending some $50 every month to get click paths. They explained me that it is a privacy concerns (YES, GOOGLE thinks about PRIVACY, Don’t laugh ok ). I tried to convince them but I guess many in the industry as with the opinion of not going for click paths for individual visits. Even at Search camp, some of the analytics people supported the non-availability of a click path. Hmmm … I still like Click path and use my own application to track it.
8. Google penalized by website, it is out of Index: I remember some of the top brass consultants we had who used to shout hacking for every php error on website. We are used to some quick conclusions. Adam explained that the most common problem is uploading a old robots.txt to the main server (by mistake). So guys, whenever you see an issue with indexing, do give your robots.txt a check. Also get a architecture in place. Our architecture used to create robots.txt on fly for production, beta and alpha. This made sure that we are using the right robots.txt.
9. Adding new URL to google submit page can speed up indexing: This service is an old service (much before the sitemap xmls), use it only to introduce your website for the very first time. Don’t submit the pages/urls to it. Use Sitemap XMLs for it. (BTW, why don’t then Google change the field name as Add domain, instead of url)
10. If I buy a domain, all the backlinks can be used for my new website: I remember that was quite prominent in early 2003. One of our friend bought a domain selling company, with tons of links from big websites, and changed it to a debt consolidation and he started ranking really fast. Now Google is giving check to the content change and also the domain ownership change. They may discard all the previous links if the topic changes significantly. Same can happen, if you are buying a lot of domains and doing a 301 to another domain with different theme.
11. Priority in XML sitemap helps in ranking: Sitemap XML is only to discover new URLs, it doesn’t play a role in ranking. It does give Google some hint on the important pages according to you. It is just hints, Google gets better signals from navigation, do respect the important pages by place them within few clicks from homepage.
12. Using divs instead of tables are good for ranking: Adam explained that how many people struggle in creating a div based website that is compatible with all browsers. He encouraged people to use tables if that makes the life easier. It doesn’t effect your ranking. (Aji: I do appreciate div based designs as tables are not meant for designing but I also agree with Adam that it is difficult to achieve. Do read progressive rendering post at http://www.idealwebtools.com/blog/downloading-speed/.
13. Then there was something about Empty reviews http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/empty-review-sites/.
14. Your page title should make sense, it should not be a keyword stuffed title. Semantically valid sentences as Page title are more preferred.
15. Before buying a domain, do give the backlinks a check from webmaster console. If the previous website was linking a lot of bad websites then you probably will have to get those signals removed using webmaster console.
16. Legendary links getting changed, will I be considered guilty for it: This was a very smart question by Amit. If my website is linking to some good website which after many months is converted to a porn website, will my website be held accountable for linking to porn website? Adam explained the concept of few signals and trends, if the site links to one or two bad websites then it is not an issue but if the site continuous to link to a lot of bad websites then that trend can be damaging. So no need to worry about a small % of links going to bad websites. (Aji: I will be a little careful though, If I am used to linking to a lot of websites, I may consider using no-follow, esp with sites that are making news for something strange like “Medical shop for dogs bitten by human”, this is linkable story but may not be on a linkable domain).
17. Video optimization: Use the video xml to let Google know about the video but add a lot of text near the video to help Google bot understand the content of the video. (Aji: There are better thread about it at WMW, do converse with Tedster, he knows a lot about it, see http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3811733.htm)
18. Always use the email that is associated with your Webmaster account as that is given more value. Also use webmaster help sections.
19. This was a question Adam asked, “How to prevent a page from Google index”? We all answered like robots.txt, Meta noindex etc but the answer was password protect the page … (Aji: I am still not very sure about this.)
20. Google is not considering microformats http://microformats.org/get-started/, There was a lot of talk about it in Search Camp too.
21. Good way of image optimization is 1) Alt tags 2) Make the image name descriptive like the once you see in SEO for clients … website-design-mcl.jpg etc.
22. Local results depends on following things – 1) Hosting, 2) Addresses on the website 3) Traffic to your site from that location 4) Way of writing (this was something new) 5) TLDs etc
23. Show respect for your important pages by making them available within few clicks from homepage (Aji: I will also encourage you to link from other internal pages as well)
24. Then there were some talks about duplicate contents. Adam repeated that there is no penalty unless there is a significant % of pages that are duplicate. May be those pages will be ignored from ranking. Google doesn’t want to show duplicate content under the SERPs. (Aji: Always get the syndicated content link back to your original page, keep checking for people who are duplicating the content and take legal actions. Remember it is very difficult for Google to know which is the original, also Adam asked to use http://knol.google.com/k. Also in case of a copy, you can file a DMCA complaint to Google and mention this under Google webmaster forums. Google will certainly look into it and help with it.)

I think rest of the discussion was just normal used too stuffs.

Tags: Analytics, GA, google, google india, india search masters, SEO, web, webmasters