Notes from the Google webmasters “Tricks and Treats” event

Just logged off from the Google Webmasters Tricks and Treats event and it was fun and tiring !

The session started off with presentations from Googlers on various topics such as “Myths in SEO” and ended with a vibrant question answer session on the Google Moderator tool. The panel was awesome with Matt Cutts and Adam Lasnik in the lead, and some 400 plus SEO’s and Webmasters in the chat !

It was exciting to be a part of the discussion because this time around, we got to listen the “real stuff” from the horse’s mouth. And what more can we get ?

Here are some of the interesting questions and their answers.

Keyword density is not something you should be keen on

Adam reinforced this once again that there is NO particular percentage keyword density that webmasters need to follow on their pages to “artificially” highlight keywords. The focus is more on relevancy of the page as a whole and just by increasing the keyword density and using variations of it, one cannot force search engines to get “ideas” off a page.

Shared IPs and Penalizations

There is no such thing as “ill effects” of being on a shared IP. Google understands that exclusive IPs are not within everyone’s reach and it is not a webmasters fault that he is on a shared IP. In fact,what’s more important is the content of your website and who links to you, than who shares your IP. It is very possible that you are the only non-porn guy on a shared IP, which is shared with 99 of the porn/poker/pharma guys. That does not mean that you are going to be penalized. But as usual, if you don’t have any valuable backlinks or popularity, you should not blame it on the ip for not enjoying the positions on SERPs, It’s probably a problem with your content.

Good quality servers are preferred to cheap ones

Google also suggested that quality servers are better than cheap ones as cheap ones prefer to accommodate a lot more websites than the normal rate and tend to give more down times and glitches. This may not help the user and in turn the search engines. Try to stick to a reliable host with decent uptimes and less crashes.

Does W3C validation score affect the ranks?

Apparently, no. W3C validation is again more a technical thing that not all would be aware of. Imagine a yoga teacher designing a page himself with valuable information. If his page does not validate, that does not mean that his information is bad. So google gives more importance to the relevancy factors of a site than the W3C validation issues.

A lot more SEO stuff was discussed at the event, that it was overwhelming. There were as usual lot of questions on penalizations and “I lost my PR F*&%^ you Google” kind of questions on chat, but I think the folks at Google made it clear again that those are the things you should ignore, and focus more on the user experience.

Make a site for the users, give them access to more valuable information, and let your SEO side take the backseat. If you are good stuff, the crowd will vote you up and we trust the crowd – was the ideology Matt Cutts and his team was trying to propagate. And I think that makes sense.

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