Google webmaster has opened a chat session on 22 October 2008. Here are a recap of their live sesssion chat session. One interesting thing at the chat session is the myth about Google ranking. Here are the summary:
Myth 1: Duplicate content will penalize your site. Don’t worry too much about duplicates on your own site. They are good at ignoring duplicates. Well, the cost to punish duplicate content is also high.
Myth 2: Mixing HTML/XHTML will break verification. Webmaster Tools accepts both kinds of meta tags, regardless of your page’s code or doctype.
Myth 3: Getting listed in 1000s of search engines and directories is important. Most search engines will find your site before you submit to them. It will also bring you email spam. Just submit your website at top search engine, like Google, Yahoo, and MSN to speed up their indexing.
Myth 4: Participating in AdWords, AdSense or Analytics will help or harm your site. The truth is, it won’t affect your website.
Myth 5: If a keyword is important, it’s important to repeat it in important locations on important pages so that the page looks more important to important search engines. They said there is no optimal “keyword density”. Don’t stuff keywords into your content and write content naturally.
Myth 6: Using XML Sitemaps will make your site drop. It won’t. It is usefull for search engine to learn about your content.
Myth 7: PageRank is dead / PageRank is everything! PageRank is not dead, Google still use it. It is a measure of the quantity and quality of links to a page.
Myth 8: Resubmitting your site regularly is vital. Resubmitting does not change crawling, indexing or ranking. They will know when to crawl.
Myth 9: Once your site ranks high, don’t touch it. Changes in ranking can and will happen, because your competitor change. If you don’t touch your website, user won’t get new content.
Myth 10: Valid (X)HTML will make your site rank higher. Most of the web uses invalid code (less than 5% is valid!). But you should have valid code works on more browsers.
