Q: Does Google look negatively on all caps?
A: Nope, we take the letters as they come :)

Q: I've got a question about internationalisation: I have a multinational site with country-coded subdirectories and I've registered these as such in Webmasters' tools, will this be exempt from duplicate content rules for a site spanning uk/us/aus ?
A: That's generally OK. I would still make sure that the pages are obviously well-targeted for those audiences. It wouldn't make sense to send users from specific areas to one general page. In that case, I would use a single page without geotargeting.

Q: Is there a comprehensive list of the tags that GoogleBot can read somewhere?
A: Try this HelpCenter doc - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=79812

Q: What about a feedback status on Spam Report? I mean when I report a spam site, I immediately get a message that the suggestion will be taken on mind, but nobody let us know when, or if the reported site or submission are right or not.
A: Normally we're able to take a look at the reports pretty quickly. I like the idea of giving a little more feedback though.

Q: Is there any limit on the number of redirections 301 on a web site? In a large site, if you change the URL structure, is the optimum time to do it with 301? Or is it best done gradually?
A: There's no per-page limit on the number of 301s you can do, so you could move 100K pages to 100K new locations. However, if we see a really long chain of redirects, eventually we will decide to stop following the chain.

Q: Can you explain the efficacy of the Link: operator in regard to its "accuracy"?
A: The link: operator is only intended to give you a sample of your backlinks. Logging into Webmaster Tools will give you a more comprehensive list.

Q: If a site is designed with css, does the crawler throw out the .css and look only at the HTML?
A: Typically we wouldn't crawl CSS, but in a few limited circumstances we can (e.g. if we're checking for hidden text).

Q: Is quoting, or "block" quoting for this matter considered as duplicate content? Does it "hurt" at all? And to what extend it does if it does indeed?
A: I would be careful not to "block quote" an entire article and then not add any of your own info (that's essentially spam scraping), but just regular quoting would be fair use and shouldn't cause you any issues.

Q: Is there a limit to the number or % of results from a single site in the Google News home and category pages?  Would it perhaps be better for a company to have multiple news sites (different domains) in order to get more links on Google News pages?
A: I would recommend taking this question to the Google News Help Group here: http://groups.google.com/group/googlenews-help.

Q: What’s the average time after which the PR of a site gets updated?
A: We typically do pushes to the toolbar every 3-4 months, so it can take that long between toolbar data pushes.

Q: Does Google 'value' a website incorporating a relevant blog and forum?
A: I would say that an organic blog or forum definitely adds value to your website by creating a community effect.

Q: I think my site was hacked through an XSS hole (search functionality).  How can I protect that hole in the future?
A: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/check-your-search-box-for-xss-exploits/ talked about this a bit and pointed to a good blog posts.

Q: Will hiding navigation items with css (that are displayed on certain pages/directories) have a negative impact when Google indexes the site?
A: When building your site and considering hiding navigation elements, it's best to always think, "is this good for my users?" and "would I do this if there were no search engines?”.

Q: Are there any guidelines available on keyword density - we have pages that are about one single subject and the keyword density is quite high?
A: You may not believe this, but we tend not to think much about KW density here at Google, b/c our algorithms handle it pretty well. My advice is to pull in an innocent/non-search friend and have them read the text. If they raise their eyebrow,...

Q: Does Google differentiate between searches in lower case and searches with proper capitalization?
A: We may take this into account if we can recognize that it is relevant to the query.

Q: I have been trying to figure out why Google is showing different search rankings for my website.
A: That could be personalised search. It's also the case that our rankings do change naturally as we crawl different docs, too.

Q: Is it possible to talk to a Google tech by phone?
A: If you have a question, it is best to post it to our Webmaster Help Group http://groups.google.com/group/GoogleˍWebmasterˍHelp

Q: After a reconsideration request, do you typically notify webmasters that the penalty has been lifted?
A: If you recognise that your ranking / indexing has improved, chances are that it has been accepted. If not, I would recommend posting in the Webmaster Help Groups.

Q: What is the explanation for Google finding and registering a site and then having it disappear completely a few days later?  They don't recognise that they registered it at all?
A: By "registering" do you mean "indexing"? Sometimes a site may fall in and out of the index when it's very new, but this usually stabilises after a while. I'd give it some time.

Q: How long does it take for 301s and 410s to take effect?
A: 301s and 410s can't "take effect" until after we've had a chance to crawl them – that's the real variable.  After we crawl the URL and get the status code, your removal / move should happen within a short period of time, most typically within a few days.

Q: What reasons may cause Google to ignore a small percentage of pages in a small sitemap (less than 1K pages submitted by Console)?
A: We do look at the number of links when we decide how much to crawl, so just submitting a sitemap doesn't guarantee crawling.

Q: Is it true that Google first gives free organic traffic and after a while stops giving free organic traffic and encourages to use Adwords?
A: No; there is no relationship between paid search and organic search.

Q: What about paid links? Does Google really manage to identify paid links?
A: Yes, Google does identify paid links.

Q: If another website is copying my content, is there any place where I can report that?
A: www.google.com/dmca.html

Q: Will we ever have control over sitelinks to bring searchers to the better pages on our site, vs the ones Google thinks are the best pages?
A: Sitelinks are automatically generated by our algorithm and are meant to help users navigate your site.  While you cannot opt into having sitelinks, you are able to block sitelinks using Google Webmaster Tools.

Q: Typically, what % of the websites' pages does Google index from large sites?
A: That depends on the size of the site, its PageRank, and a bunch of other factors.  This is hard to generalise for.

Q: Are there any amount of duplicate content pages that are acceptable? In other words if we have two pages serving the same content is that just as bad as 40 pages serving duplicate content?
A: The real issue with duplicate content is that Google will try to filter out duplicates when we serve search results. Generally you don't need to worry about it, but if you want to have more control over which version we serve, you can try to mitigate it.

Q: I recently got one of my sites de-indexed out of Google, I believe it was because my Adsense account got banned for invalid clicks, is this a valid reason to de-index the site? And if so, how long does it take to get my site back in there?
A: If your website suddenly disappeared from Google Search results, and you suspect it might have been due to a violation of our quality guidelines, it might be a good idea to submit a request for reconsideration after fixing the issue.

Q: I have a client that uses "+" for word connectors not "-" or ˍ", is that bad? Or worth changing ... ie http://pacificbuildinggroup.com/PBG+News.html
A: Using + as a separator should be fine.

Q: Does GoogleBot tend to have a preference for long or short filenames/directory names?
A: No, Googlebot doesn't have preference on short or long filenames/directory names, usually short names are preferred by users for usability purposes.

Q: I'm thinking about serving up an optimised version of my site for accessiblity reasons (no javascript, high contrast css, reduced usage of forms), would Google be OK if we served them this version?
A: This sounds reasonable as long as the user doesn' t get something they didn't intend on. There are plenty of sites that link off their flashy home page to an HTML version of their site.

Q: I've been using Google Analytics for a while. Since then, some customers complain about slow access. Could it be related?
A: If you're experiencing problems with Google Analytics, feel free to check out the Analytics Help Center to troubleshoot: http://www.google.com/analytics/supportˍoverview.html

Q: When you use the robots.txt tool in Webmaster Tools does it abide by this case sensitive rule?
A: Yes. The robots.txt analysis tool is case sensitive in the correct areas. Directives like "disallow" can be lower or uppercase. Path and directories are correctly case sensitve.

Q: Is fluctuating in ranking also depends on which server is active or inactive on that certain day?
A: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34444&topic=8524

Q: Is there any chance that problems in receiving robots.txt can completely prevent site from indexing?
A: If you suspect that there are issues with the robots.txt file for your site, a good place to check for more information is your Webmaster Tools account – on the Overview page you will be able to see if there are any robots.txt-related errors.

Q: My site disapeared for seven days and came back today. Should I be worried that it might be a warning of a problem?
A: It's always good to be on top of changes. If you can't recognise anything, I would recommend posting in Webmaster Help groups.

Q: I work for a Digital Agency and I was wondering if there is any way to share Webmaster Tools access? Just like Analytics, I would like to share the data with colleagues and clients.
A: Multiple people can register in webmaster console, so that's one way to do it. It's not quite as clean as MCC or some other things, but it is possible for multiple to access the data that way.

Q: Does a Custom Search Engine use the main Google Index to perform a search, or is it a separate indexed version of the site?
A: It's a bit of both. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/05/sitemaps-offer-better-coverage-for-your.html

Q: how long before googlebot revisits a previously timedout site?
A: That varies quite widely based on the site and the page on it.  Look at your server logs to see how often Googlebot read the page before.  It will probably be around that long.

Q: Is there an XML sitemap generator that Google recommends? Or is it better to create by hand?
A: We have a python XML Sitemap generator if you'll familiar with command line execution. Otherwise, we've listed other options as well: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34654

Q: Is 301 redirect considered as SPAM?
A: A 301 permanent redirect is not considered webspam itself, but if you end up on a page that IS webspam, then that's another problem :)

Q: I have noticed multiple times that some of my competitors have multiple pages listed on certain keyword search. I believe Google is trying to make sure only one page from a site is going to be listed. am I hearing it wrong?
A: We're typically happy to show up to two pages from one hostname in our search results. For a navigational search, it might not be bad to show more results from one domain. But we like diversity and try to preserve it.

Q: My blog moved to a new domain, but I still have both blogs running with the same content, so that old visitors don’t miss my blog.... is this treated as duplicate content?
A: If you have settled on using the new domain for your blog, it might be a good idea to consider setting up a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain.

Q: I have not seen any change when submitting paid text link and spam reports. What happens with these and if someone is grossly using paid text links why is nothing happening?
A: We usually use them to improve our algorithms, so changes may be more long-term than immediate. But we definitely take these reports into consideration. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/impact-of-user-feedback-part-1.html

Q: Does Google favor .html over say .php or do you treat all URLs the same?
A: A URL is a URL.  As long as it's serving content we can read, Googlebot doesn't care what the file extension is.

Q: Is informational content better added in a blog or plain pge (html) format?
A: You can do it either way. For Google rankings, it doesn't make a big difference either way.

Q: Does Google crawl all the links in a submitted sitemap? If a sitemap, with no errors, is only partially indexed, what could be the meaning behind this?
A: A Sitemap isn't a guarantee of either crawling or indexing; it's just an additional way of making sure Google knows about the URLs you'd like crawled. I'd start here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34444&topic=8524

Q: Is there a way to see search listings from the past? To see how ranked yesterday or the day before for example?
A: Not at the moment, but that's an interesting idea!

Q: Why are rankings fluctuating by the minute sometimes?
A: We really do crawl that fast at times, so if someone else does a new blog post or if there's breaking news that causes new web pages to show up on the web, that can cause our rankings to change pretty quickly. When I started, it was more like monthly.

Q: Currently the SiteLinks displayed for my site aren't very helpful for users. Does the design of my site effect how these links are compiled? What can I do to help Google compile better SiteLinks?
A: You can have bad sitelinks removed in your Webmaster Tools account & give general feedback while doing that.

Q: Does removing your site's low value pages from the index help the other pages rank better?
A: If they are just regular web pages, I wouldn't remove them. If they were really spammy or doorway pages and you suspect that it could have affected your site's ranking or reputation, then I would remove any spammy pages.

Q: Is data and information that is sent via RSS given preference over content that has been discovered by Googlebot?
A: We normally crawl normal/static web pages. Most users don't want RSS to show up in their search results at all.

Q: We are changing the name of our site that has been live for some time.  Do you have some best practice suggestions for making the switch as smooth as possible from a search-results perspective?
A: Check out our recent blog post about best practices when moving a site: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/best-practices-when-moving-your-site.html

Q: I am wondering why is it that the sites that are ranked high in Google is not ranked at all in Yahoo and msn. It sometimes is very frustrating that one strategy for one SE does not work well with another!
A: Every search engine has its own philosophy of how it ranks, so that means that every company will have different ranking algorithms.

Q: Why does Google say millions of results found, when only the first 1000 results are displayed?
A: We try to display the most relevant and important results for our users.

Q: I have read many times about the use to twitter or digg or many other social site to use garnering link by the virtue of some sort of clicks posting on those sites. isnt that artifical way of garnering ranking?
A: If you do something creative or news-worthy that generates a buzz, it would be quite natural that people start linking to you. That is what "creative link building" is about (-:

Q: Does page load time have any effect in organic rankings?
A: Page load time is important for user satisfaction (they may leave the site if it's too slow). For Google at this time, it's not considered a signal for ranking. We're always looking to improve the user experience, however, so if you keep your page load time down, users and search engines will continuously be happy!

Q: How does personalised search effect businesses who are naturally optimising their site?
A: If your website is optimised and being well-received by users, this will generally be mirrored in each user's search results.

Q: Is there any truth in the rumour that, to get around people buying links to boost PR, Google will start valuing links based on the number of people actually clicking on them, rather than the relevancy of the link and the PR of the page it's actually on?
A: I'm not aware of any such changes, but we are constantly working on improving search quality, using information that is relevant and important.

Q: I'm worried that we'll miss new visitors because personalised search will drive them to their frequently visited sites instead of those based on organic search relevance. Should I be concerned about this?
A: No :) -- we try to show variety in the search results and additionally smaller sites are generally quicker in adopting to new trends, allowing new sites to rank for new terms faster.

Q: One of my clients recently purchased a domain name where the previous site was in a very different business than my client's.  What would be the best way to notify Google of the change?  Resubmitting the URL?
A: File a reconsideration request via Webmaster Tools and let us know that the domain has changed hands.

Q: Why don't you include actual search numbers in trends or keyword selector tool?
A: I think we're worried that some people could scrape or abuse that information. Personally I think it would be cool to offer better/more numbers or stats though. We'll think about ways that we could offer crunchier numbers to people.

Q: Novice question - Does the googlebot read the page in a certain direction? I heard that it reads from the top left to bottom right?
A: Googlebot reads the page from beginning to end... since it doesn't render the page the same way browsers do, it reads the page in the order the bytes show up.

Q: There is a general view that having a lot of backlinks is a strong influence on PageRank.  Does Google have a response to this theory?
A: It's more about the quality of the links than just the raw number of links.

Q: Does Google track what I'm searching for on other sites if I'm logged in with my gmail account? If not, how come I see Google search results that seem to be related to my previous search elsewhere?
A: In general, your Google account is probably what you're using for gmail. If you're logged in, those searches may be tracked if you have search history turned on.

Q: If a site had sitelinks, then suddenly lost them, is that a sign of lost trust, links, or something else?
Sitelinks, the links shown below some sites in our natural search results, are automatically generated by our algorithm and meant to help users navigate your site.
A: While you can not opt into having these features shown, if your site does qualify sitelinks, you can block the ones that you do not want shown.
A: For more advice on optimising for sitelinks, I would suggest visiting the Webmaster Help Group at http://groups.google.com/group/GoogleˍWebmasterˍHelp. They have loads of experienced webmasters and Googlers providing answers and feedback.

Q: Does PPC influence organic, personalised search?
A: Not that I am aware of.

Q: If the site has good crawlable design is it still important to include a site map?
A: Submitting a sitemap for your site will help Googlebot find all the pages in your site that you think are important, so we would recommend submitting a sitemap.

Q: What's the best way to check to see if your content is duplicated (accidentally or by someone else).  Is there a tool you can input a URL and check for duplicate content?
A: Try taking a fairly long string of text from your website, and searching for it in quotes on Google. The longer the sentence is, the more likely it is to be unique to your site (so it's an easy way to see what other sites have that same content).

Q: I have a question: why does Google give an "estimated results" number that is different from the actual number of pages indexed from a site (ie using site:url.com)? How would one ensure that the numbers become the same?
A: When we have a high number of possibilities, it is generally not worth the effort to find the exact number of pages that would rank (especially since the user can only see the first 1000).

Q: Does the spider index dashes in words like self-employed? How is this treated in search results?
A: I would not worry about punctuation like that. Write your content naturally :)

Q: How do we change the sitelinks?
A: Sitelinks are generated automatically, and are only shown on queries for which we feel they may be useful to the user. If you do get these links, you can disallow specific pages from being used as sitelinks Webmaster Tools.

Q: Where can you go to learn how to build Google Gadgets?
A: Do a Google search for something like [build google gadgets] and you should find the developer documentation.

Q: If you don't have time to keep up with updating your sitemap, is it better to not have one?
A: I wouldn't worry about that. Ideally if you have something like a blog, that could update your sitemap for you though.

Q: As we take 301 I understand that retain the backlinks of the pages and therefore their PR, does the value in the Google toolbar not be visible on the bar to publicly update it?
A: It might take some time for changes to be reflected in the toolbar.

Q: If you are transferring millions of URLs to new subdomains, would using Google sitemaps help or are 301s enough?
A: It's not a bad idea to submit the new URLs to us via Sitemaps (but it's not absolutely necessary). I've also heard some people say they submit the old URLs via Sitemaps so that we pick up the redirects.

Q: If I click a PPC listing, will that visit influence organic, personalised search results?
A: I believe this is tracked only if you have the Toolbar, are logged in and have web history enabled.

Q: One of my keyword phrases brings up the Google map first - is it possible to change one's listing in this?
A: If you have a listing in Google Maps, you can update it via Google Local Business Centre.

Q: I've heard "SEO Gurus" say that Google considers www and non-www domains separately resulting to duplicate content if not taken care of properly.  Same goes with domain,com/ and domain.com/index.html
A: You can use the preferred domain setting in Webmaster Tools. I would recommend doing a redirect if possible. We try to figure it out ourselves, but sometimes it helps to push your preference.

Q: How does Google differentiate between UK and US spelling differences? Eg, Jewelry and Jewellery, colour and color?
A: We try to figure out what the user is looking for and bring the best results.

Q: I know that generally .edu and .gov sites rank better than if they were .com or .org; but is there a similar ranking boost that is given to nonprofits?
A: There’s no ".edu boost" that looks at the .edu alone and just boosts for that.

Q: Does using a CMS such as Drupal inhibit the ability of the googlebot to crawl the page?
A: No unless you restrict it, via .htaccess, meta-tags or robots.txt

Q: Guys, when you have a company site, say in travel and or vacation rentals - many affiliates use your content/pics/pricing etc… does this apply to the Google duplicate content rule? If so, suggestions on best handling it?
A: As long as your site has original content and images, you have no reason to be worried. Did you see our recent post on dupe content?  We also have a few words on syndicated content: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/duplicate-content-due-to-scrapers.html

Q: Does the location of your site hosting affect the local results your site shows up for?
A: Yes, it may. We look at server location and ccTLD among other factors.

Q: If you have dynamic search pages how do you ensure that the content is indexed? Eg, job search?
A: Using a logical site structure that leads down to individual entries is always a good idea. We need to be able to crawl a site to understand it optimally.

Q: For pages that are required to be on the site, but we don't necessary want the Googlebot indexing, like Privacy Policy, can we use a "no follow" on links pointing to it and disallow on robots.txt?
A: Nofollow may not prevent a specific page from being indexed, since you can only control the links on your own site. I'd recommend this article for blocking/removing content: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35301

Q: Is the incoming links list in Google Webmaster Tools an accurate estimator of all the incoming links that google thinks as a backlink?
A: It's a sampling of your incoming links that we know about, not always 100%.

Q: Does Google's knowledge of a site's web visitor activity (via Google Analytics) affect SERPs?
A: No it doesn't.

Q: Is there any difference to SEO between using heading tags vs. font size tags?
A: Heading tags can bring context to your content so they may help users to recognize sections & headings within your pages.

Q: Does Google rank blogs differently from websites?
A: We use the same algorithms, since blogs are websites.  However, using a content management system can sometimes cause other issues. If you've got specific concerns about your blog, feel free to stop by the Webmaster Help Group.

Q: Is it true that subdomains and directories are now treated the same way for PageRank purposes?
A: Page Rank is based on pages - that includes subdomains, subdirectories and file names (and URL parameters).

Q: Should I be concerned that content embedded from other rss services be considered duplicate content?
A: Syndicated content should be used sparingly, if you have a site just using syndicated content, most likely it will be seen as a duplicate of the original content.

Q: What about the .5 and 1 rating on sitemaps? What are they? Do they mean anything?
A: They tell us the relative priority of various pages on your site. This can help us prioritize our crawl of your site, among other things.

Q: Is there a benifit to adding my main target keyword to the filename(s) of my sitemap(s)?
A: Nope; Sitemaps are used for discovering URLs, it generally doesn't matter what they're named.

Q: Should I submit a sitemap once, or keep it up to date and resubmit it occasionally?
A: Yes. You should keep your sitemap up to date so we know what exists.

Q: I am using IIS for my Wordpress and aren’t able to rewrite the URL. Is there any way I can improve my blog ranking with default wordpress URLs (ugly urls)?
A: It's generally not absolutely necessary. Keep adding great content!

Q: Hi guys - how important is a correct last modified date?
A: If in a sitemap file, we may try to use it to recognize new and changed pages so that we can crawl them best.

Q: I submitted a spam report, a new competitor less than a year old - paid links blog posts etc... This site still remains on top three pages. This leaves me with less faith on Google finding paid links, anything you can say to help with my confidence?
A: Thank you for submitting a spam report, we do look at all of them. If you still suspect that the site might be engaging in spammy behavior, submit it through your Webmaster tools account. You may or may not see visible results from our reports - sometimes the reports goes towards larger-scale improvements to our search algorithms.

Q: If you click a result in Google results does that help your ranking for the keyword that was entered?
A: It might help with personalised results for YOU but it will not change much in general.

Q: If you have a domain that has a PR of 4 and I 301'd it to my new site, why hasn't any of the "link juice" passed off or the PR? It's been a few months now.
A: This can take more than a few months.

Q: What is the best way to handle indexing issues due to printable pages and image galleries from shopping carts ?
A: Put the canonical URL (your preferred version) in your Sitemap. We've done several blog posts on dealing with duplicate content, I'd recommend checking those out (just search our blog for [duplicate content]).

If you've made it to the end - congratulations! That was a marathon of Q+As from Google!