Google Webmaster Chat Wrapup Pt. 5

continuing ….

Question: Does inconsistent capitalization of URLs cause duplicate content issues and dilution of page rank? For example www.site.com/abc vs www.site.com/Abc. On Windows hosts, these are the same page, but are different pages on Unix hosts.

JohnMu: Based on the existing standards, URLs are case-sensitive, so yes, these would be seen as separate URLs. Since the content on the URLs is the same, we’ll generally recognize that and only keep one of them. However, we’d recommend that you try to keep all links going to one version of the URL. Keep in mind that this also applies to robots.txt files.

Question: Does appearing high in image searches help improve the host sites PR and appearance on standard searches?

Answer: Well-optimized, relevant images could definitely help increase traffic to your site, especially with the introduction of Universal Search, where we mix images, videos, and more into the web search results.

JohnMu: Your site’s ranking in Image Search doesn’t impact your site’s PageRank. However, as we continue to include images and other types of content in the search results, we might start showing your images in normal web search results as well. So I’d definitely recommend making sure that your great images are available to search engine crawlers.

Question: Does Googlebot strip URL fragments? In other words, is a link to /path/#fragment the same as a link to /path/ ?

JohnMu: Yes, we remove URL fragments since they are processed on the client side and not relevant when fetching URLs from your server.

Question: Is there a META tag we can use to tell Google the geotarget (country) of a particular webpage?

Maile Ohye: We don’t have META geotargeting capability at this time. So the best ways to target a geographic region are talked about here:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/08/how-to-start-multilingual-site.html
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/10/better-geographic-choices-for.html
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/where-in-world-is-your-site.html

Question: Until recently external links from article directories could improve page ranking. Is this still valid? Do links from article directories have a better weight than links from web sites or blogs?

Matt Cutts: Article directory links certainly aren’t inherently worth more and don’t get more weight than other web sites or blogs. I answered another question about article directories as well.

Question: Can my site be penalized if somebody else uses ranking check software on it?

Kaspar aka Guglarz: No! Don’t worry abut that.

Question: Does a page load time play a crucial role in Google Page Ranking? If yes how important is it?

Nathan J: I think the more important issue here is user experience. If your site loads fast, your users will be happy; if it loads slow, users will be less happy. Make your users happy, right?

Question: I have a website in 5 languages (and I cannot buy 5 different localized domains), which option is the best? To have different subdirectories (domain.com/en) or to have different subdomains? (en.domain.com)

JohnMu: Both versions are fine. I personally generally recommend using a subdomain when the sites are completely different and using subdirectories when it’s more or less a shared site, but it’s up to you.

Question: What is ok/not ok to sell links? We get requests on a daily base, we not offering to sell links, but sometimes we get a related request and wonder if we are “allowed” to sell one or two links without hurting our rankings?

Nathan J: Paid links that pass pagerank are not a good idea; more info here - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736

Question: Any chance of Google favoring sites with valid markup anytime soon? On the principle that if the webmaster has taken the trouble to write valid markup, it’s less likely to be a spammy site?

JohnMu: Since less than 5% of the pages out there actually validate according to study done by Opera, it wouldn’t make much sense for us to give the other 95% of the pages any trouble. You can find the study at http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama-markup-validation-report/

Question: If my sub domain got high Page Rank, how far it will contribute to the main domain?

JohnMu: PageRank is on a page-by-page basis. The PageRank of a page (on a subdomain or not) is based on the links to it.

Question: Given, the incoming links are intact and there is no link buying/selling. Can there be any other reason for a drop in Page Rank?

JohnMu: Assuming the number of links stays the same, it’s always possible that some links change with regards to the way they pass PageRank.

Question: How will i know that a website is banned by google in SERP (search engine result pages).

Wysz: To see if you’re indexed in Google, try a site: search on your site. For example, site:example.com. We may also drop a message in the Message Center of your Webmaster Tools account if we detect an issue with your site.

In general, it’s best to make sure you stay within the webmaster guidelines.

If you feel your site may have been penalized, go ahead and fix the problems, then file a reconsideration request.

Question: When we report a site for buying links, how long does it take for Google to act on it? If the violator is still listed ”and the bought links are still present”what other action can we take?

Nathan J: It’s tough to give a specific time frame, but rest assured that we do look at all requests.

Question: Is there a “glass ceiling” that either prevents sites from monopolizing the index or throttles traffic to specific sites?

Maile Ohye: Our index has lots of sites, it would be hard for one to monopolize it. There are certain things we do to prevent one site from monopolizing search results (for a given query) because users tend to prefer seeing multiple sites in their results when they enter a search term. Also, results are filtered when the title and snippets are identical (even if the domains are separate) because that users don’t like seeing the same title/snippets.
I’m not sure if I’m addressing your concern, but I wouldn’t worry about a “glass ceiling.” Every site has a chance of being returned in search results.

Question: Recently you posted on the webmaster central blog that you would suggest to not rewrite dynamic urls to static. Is there penalties for sites that rewrite? Would you suggest changing if a site has 5+ years history? Can you discuss further?

Maile Ohye: If your site is already doing well and you have rewrites, then you’re probably doing them properly so please don’t worry about it.

In our blog post, we wanted to discourage new sites, or less experienced webmasters, from feeling they HAD to use rewrites. We’ve improved our processing of dynamic URLS, so there’s no need for newer webmasters to be afraid of them any longer.

Question: Does 301 Redirect moves the Google Page Ranking to the new location? If so how long does it take for this to take effect?

Wysz: Where appropriate, ranking signals will be transferred across 301 redirects (if the same page has moved from one URL to another). This may take some time, so you should probably leave the redirect in place as long as you have control over the URL. That way any new links will make our crawler follow the 301.