Holiday Webmaster Google Webinar

Lauren Dolymer of Google Inc., along with Google engineers' Adam Lasnik and Fred Vallaeys conducted a webmaster Webinar earlier this month Nov. 13, 2009. Below is a follow-up to the participants Q&A session.

1) What is the new Caffeine Ranking System? Are there any updates?
- Updates can be found at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-caffeine-update/

2) What are some best practices surrounding how to get sitelinks?
- The best advice remains: make your site's navigation clear, intuitive, and accessible, and we'll continue working hard to show what is most useful for our users.

3) Do sitelinks only appear for the top result?
- In general, sitelinks are confined to the first result.

4) Why do you still show PageRank in the Google Toolbar if Google continues to say it's not reliable?
- Google isn't saying that indicator is not reliable. Rather, it's a quick and easy way to see about what a given page's PageRank is.

5) When doing a site redesign, what are the best practices around using redirects?
- Check out our Change of Address blog entry (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83106), and the broader guidelines linked to in that post.

6) Does webpage load time affect ranking?
- I'd focus more on whether it affects your visitors (the answer is YES!). Check out our blog entry here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducingpage- speed.html

7) Are there plans to roll out new features in Webmaster Tools like timestamp's for reports and a bug tracker?
- I've shared the time-stamping idea with the Webmaster Tools PM, thanks! And for both feature requests and bug reports in the future, please don't hesitate to post them in the Webmaster Tools section of our official forum; our Webmaster Tools folks regularly hang out there!

8) Some users are noticing more videos in our results. Is Google putting more weight on them?
- Hard to say. We're changing our algorithms all the time, though typically they're not engineered to favor a particular type of content over another.

9) Are there any new conversion features in AdWords and/or Analytics?
- We recently improved the Conversion Tracking feature in AdWords:
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/11/adwords-conversion-tracking-is-now-even.html
And we also added some new options for Goals in Analytics:
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/10/new-feature-spotlight-engagement-goals.html

10) What is a "good" bounce rate. Does Google provide this data based on market/ vertical/site?
- There is a feature in Analytics called Benchmarking that will tell you how your site's bounce rate compares to that of similarly sized sites in the same vertical. Check out our blog post about this feature: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2008/03/benchmarking-datanow-live.html and here's where we describe the feature in detail in our Help Center: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=89382

11) What are the factors and prerequisites for getting products into Product Listing Ads and how does Google determine which merchants are shown?
- Product Listing Ads works with an advertiser's Google Merchant Center account to serve highly targeted ads that include richer product information directly in the ad itself. At this time, Product Listing Ads is still a beta feature and is only available to a limited number of retail advertisers. Over time, we'll increase the number of users who see Product Listing Ads as well as the number of advertisers able to participate. Here's our recent announcement about this: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/11/announcing-product-listing-ads.html

12) Is A/B or Multivariate testing ever considered cloaking since the source doesn't match what the user sees during the test?
- Google doesn't view the ethical use of multi-variate testing tools such as Website Optimizer as cloaking. Read more about our thoughts on this topic at
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=72507

13) Goes Google read content in AJAX based modules ie. left navigation links?
- We try to read and understand all content and links, but Googlebot has a much easier time with plain html than anything else..