The myths and misconceptions about Google are very much prevalent among us webmasters and in an effort to debunk some of them, Google hosted its third Online Webmaster Chat even last Wednesday where Q&A session was held between Gooooooooglers and webmasters.

Below are some of the interesting questions and answers I’ve chosen in the best of interest of you — my beloved reader. It has indeed given me a different perspective on what SEO is all about.

For more comprehensive Q&A, you can read it further from Google Webmaster Help here.

Live Q&A Session from third Webmaster Chat

How often does your search algorithm change?

We change the algorithms all the time - last year we had over 450 changes.

Are .gov and .edu back links still considered more “link juice” than the common back link?

This is a common misconception. You don’t get any PageRank boost from having an .edu link or .gov link automatically. If you get an .edu link and no one is linking to that .edu page, you’re not going to get any PageRank at all because that .edu page doesn’t have any PageRank

Also, we generally treat all links the same - be it from .gov or .edu or .info sites.

Can my site be penalized if I use rel=”nofollow” too much?

No, you run no risk of an impact on your site’s rankings if you use the attribute.

How many times a year do you update a site PageRanking?

is re-computed all the time (different PageRanks every day). But we update the toolbar PageRank 3-4 times/year.

In Webmaster Tools, you’ve recently started listing the sites that 404s are coming from. Many of our 404s are from sites that ceased to exist months (sometimes years) ago. How long does Google hold onto 404 errors?

If the crawl error sources do not exist any more, I wouldn’t worry about them — they’ll generally go away on their own over time. Having them there does not negatively impact your site’s crawling, indexing and ranking.

Duplicate content is always penalized by search engines. Then what is the reason that duplicate news content spread across many sub-domains from yahoo.com and many other popular sites does not gets penalized ?

As far as I know, none of the search engines penalize duplicate content — they just ignore the duplicates.

* An online buddy of mine, Brian made an interesting analysis on why Google says I love duplicate content PR9 for digg.com.

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

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?

Does having the domain name for a long period e.g. 5 or 10 years really affects SEO and give high rankings?

A site’s reputation can be a indicator to search engines, but of course, it’s not everything. Having a site for a long period of time can establish credibility with users, and as a search engine we also want to reflect this type of credibility.

Of course, newer domains can also gain users and credibility. It seems like running a good site is a bit like running a reputable business. So yes, if your domain has been credible for years it can help.

If you buy an old domain and put all your content on it in hopes of getting instant rankings, that’s not the best idea.

Does link: gives exactly the number of back links to a site?

The link: operator only shows a sampling of links to a site, so it may not show all of the links that Google knows about.

Does getting a lot of comments in a blog help in being well indexed/ranked by Google?

Having a lot of enthusiastic users commenting on your posts and doing so generating content on your site, certainly does not harm your rankings :-) Furthermore, a large fan base gives the webmaster a bit of independence from search engine traffic, which is the reason why generating original and compelling content in order to nurture a group of committed users is something I would highly recommend to any blogger :-)

Do the verification codes for Webmaster Tools, Analytics, Apps for Domain have to remain intact after the first verification or can you just remove them once it’s done?

I can only speak for Webmaster Tools, but we do recheck for those codes periodically to make sure you are still the site owner. So you’ll want to leave that code in place as long as you want to use Webmaster Tools.

If my website “A”, linking to website “B”, and “B” linking back to “A” - am I going to be penalized? Does linking strategies still work?

Participating in linking schemes to impact ranking is not advised it’s against the webmaster guidelines. The best linking strategy is to create a site with unique content or services that people want to link to. Then publicize it.

Should I be using hyphens instead of underscores in my URLs to improve a page’s rank?

For the time being, I would recommend still using hyphens instead of underscores. If you’re already using underscores and that’s working fine for you and your rankings, it’s not worth switching. But if you’re doing a new site, then I would go with hyphens.

If I have backlinks from porn sites do this affect my PR or anything else ?

Those links might be positively affecting your PageRank (PageRank does not go down from “bad” links like those from adult sites). In general, you don’t have to worry about bad links like that which point to your site which aren’t under your control.

What have you learned today?

Happy Halloween, My Friends!

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