By the way, we had our second webmaster live chat yesterday. I think almost everyone had a good time. It was free for anyone to dial in, and hundreds of people showed up. Thanks to the Google presenters and everyone that asked questions or talked in the chat. I got a chance to answer lots of questions in the written Q&A, and then after the official presentations were over we did a “lightning round” and answered a bunch more questions via audio for 20-25 minutes.
I think we’ll try to get an official recording up soon with answers from the Q&A, but Barry Schwartz has been working hard the last couple days. He was smart and recorded the chat audio as an MP3. He also copy/pasted a raw dump of the Q&A. You can hear/read both over on his post.
If we get a cleaned up version of the Q&A where we have a chance to correct any typos or similar stuff, I’ll add a pointer here. In the mean time though, there’s a huge amount of good information in the Q&A section. It was wild because we had maybe 15 people in one room in Mountain View (and more in Kirkland and Zurich), and a bunch of Googlers were just answering questions as fast as they could.
I thought the chat went really well, so I’ll probably press for us to continue this tradition. 
In the mean time, lots of people have been talking in Google’s webmaster discussion group.
{ 22 comments… read them below or add one }
They seem to be running smoother and smoother every time. Great presentations with real good information and the Q&A helped a lot of people. Looking forward to the next one.
Sweeeeet. Thanks to Barry Schwartz (and heads up by you Matt, ta), I now know how I’m going to spend the first part of my Saturday morning.
Can’t wait to catch up!
This is great. Thanks Matt!
Thank you Matt.
I had one of my question answered, it was a really easy one. Thanks to all the Googlers!
I am looking forward to the next chat!
regards,
Zafar Ahmed
Has google made any effort to classify user queries into Jansen’s “informational”, “navigational” and “transactional” intent categories? Even if this isn’t robust, users could be offered the option to characterize their query in such a way. The way the query is interpreted could also be reported (with the user given the option to switch to an alternate “view”), and queries could be handled in different ways depending on intent. This might end up pleasing web marketers, as a randomized draw could be use to rank pages that compete for placing.
Matt I loved it
Although I was too late, only 10 mins were left when I got in,
But still I loved it, I got answers to 2-3 questions.
I would love if Google Actually puts the time in EST format as well.
I was confused with the PST and that is the reason I couldn’t be there on time..
I thought it was very good as well. Can’t wait for the next one!
……and the only questions that couldb’t be answered by applying common sense, was “Q: whats matts cats name?”
In all honesty, I believe Google would do better spending the time and money on the Webmaster guidlines.
Matt, you link to Barry Schwartz page, again make it looks like Google condones paid link for ranking.
I read the recap on Barry’s website, a few good tidbits in there.
Matt,
I’m having a real tough problem with a /subdirctory/ on a website of mine. We spent tons of hours (numerous months) creating our own unique content and these pages where starting to get good traffic but then over a year ago now only these pages in this subdirectory seemed to vanish from the organic results. The main website still ranks well for various keywords but this one /subdirectory/ gets no traffic from Google.
We haven’t done anything spammy, just great orignial content. It really bugs me that the entire website gets traffic except all the pages in this subdirectory, what can I do??? We have some links from people linking to our content but I know this /subdirectory/ must be penalized but have no idea why??? What can I do???
I’ve tried reinclusion request but don’t know what I did wrong. I’ve had several SEO’s look at the website and pages and they have no idea why. More than anything I would just like to know why, what can I do???
-funnyman
Dave (Original)
“Q: whats matts cats name?”
In all honesty, I believe Google would do better spending the time and money on the Webmaster guidlines.”
Just don’t talk like that about our good friends Emmy and Oz who have been part of Matt’s blog community since the beginning
I think Matt’s blog would be very serious and boring without Emmy & Oz
Harith u were there ?
Ankit
Yes I was there when Matt told us the sad news about Frank and then later the good news about Oz.
H, re-read my post. I’m praising the question as the only question that cannot be answered by common sense, not condemning it.
Unfortunately, I was only able to log in the audio chat, which was not of very good quality. I had to put volume at max to understand half of the voices. If most of the people didn’t complain, I guess it comes from my computer…
To be honest, I prefered the first edition of Google Webmaster Chat. Withing the first edition, I found that site audits were very interesting. Why didn’t you do it this time ?
Furthermore, I think that the advices given in case a site dropped from SERPS were useless. The right question is how to get rid of penalties ?
Hi Matt,
Unfortunately, I was only able to log in the audio chat, which was not of very good quality. I had to put volume at max to understand half of the voices. If most of the people didn’t complain, I guess it comes from my computer…
To be honest, I prefered the first edition of Google Webmaster Chat. Withing the first edition, I found that site audits were very interesting. Why didn’t you do it this time ?
Furthermore, I think that the advices given in case a site dropped from SERPS were useless. The right question is how to get rid of penalties ?
Au revoir
Matt I was wondering if you would agree to giving me a small comment on what I believe to be the future mission and vision of Google. This is for my Bachelor’s Degree project, where I’m discussing the business model of Google. Please reply to me via email if you’re ok with that and I’ll make sure to give you and your blog readers a free copy of the paper once it’s done and has been presented.
thanks for reading
adrian
Now it works… I think you should pay attention to 1 + 4 combination.
Now, seriously, I thought there may have been some JS messing underneath so I tried it in IE7, FF3, Opera 9.5 (too tired to look beneath).
Anyway, Matt, the point is – I think this post will make me visit your blog more often.
Damn it…
Yes, I missed it, I missed Google webmaster chat. To be more precise, I didn’t know about it until know. Of course, there’s always the bright side – now I do know about it. And if I knew about it just a few days ago, I’d probably have tried to talk with any of you guys from Google about nofollow microformat.
Here’s the problem I see with it… At this moment, not many people know about nofollow. Some people are paying for links assuming they are actually buying a portion of their future PR. I know Google discourages this type of purchases but people do that, nevertheless. To make this short – the word in my mind is fraud.
If you continue ignoring anchors with rel=”nofollow” in it, in a couple of years time, many people will learn about this microformat and we’ll have another horde of webmasters obsessed with covering all the links that lead out somewhere – anywhere away from their precious websites.
I thought robots.txt was just fine. Webmasters, in most cases, needed to damage the content if they really wanted to remove all such links.
Sorry for any typos and weird phrases or sentences. English is not my mother tongue and I haven’t slept for more than thirty hours.
Cheers!
Thanks for spending the time to answer everyone’s questions in the Chat. It was really helpful to hear best practice ideas directly from Google.
Love the range of topics going from PR sculpting to sitemap optimisation.
Looking forward to the next one!
Good lord the sound quality is a bit sub par loads of mic noise and banging and some AGC keeps choping in and out making it hard to listen.
Did Google record it at your end with better kit to get a cleaned up version ?
has anyone complained about the “re-include URL” function not working in google webmaster tools? holy pain in the buttox, batman. is this tool a trick? i know it isn’t, but c’mon. if there is one place i need trust in webmaster central, it’s in the remove/re-include tools area. i removed a URL because google had spidered and indexed all sorts of unnecessary and soon to be non-existent URLs for a domain of mine. in doing so, i had faith in the description of the tool. now, i’m stuck a month later with the “Oops! We couldn’t do that because of an error.” message and a site that won’t be indexed for 6 months, as that is when the removal request will expire. this is not cool. i guess my only hope is that one of these days, when i click the re-include button, i won’t get the oops message. do i have another option?
I can’t get enough of the Google Live Chats, and really enjoy the real answers to tough questions. Can you guys do it every month instead of every quarter? Even if you didn’t have everyone participating in the panel? Either way love them, keep it up!
Oh my god Ryan, that’s exactly what happend to me, and i am going CRAZY. Why can’t we reinclude our sites? I’m sorry to say it but Webmaster Tools sucks!