Quentin Muhlert - 5:03 pm

Q: I’ve got a question about internationalization: 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?

Susan Moskwa - 5:16 pm

A: Geographic targeting doesn’t affect the fact that we only want to show one version of a piece of content in search results; we will still try to filter out duplicates when we serve search results.

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Oliver Gonzalez - 5:10 pm

Q: Is there any limit on the number of redirections 301, a Web site?. In a large site, if you change the URL structure, is the optimum time to do it with 301? or is best done gradually

Matt Cutts - 5:17 pm

A: There’s no per-page limit on the number of 301s you can do, so you could move 100K pages to 100K new location. However, if we see a really long chain of redirects, eventually we will decide to stop following the chain.

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Abhijeet Mukherjee - 5:18 pm

Q: Whats the average time after which the PR of a site gets updated?

Matt Cutts - 5:22 pm

A: We typically do pushes to the toolbar every 3-4 months, so it can take that long between toolbar data pushes.

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Andrew Evans - 5:11 pm

Q: Do 301 redirects send PR to its destination? I have several domains that 301 to 1 domain, and a couple have PR. Will it now send that PR to the 1 domain now that it is 301 redirected? Thank you.

Susan Moskwa - 5:27 pm

A: 301 redirects are the best way to let us know that you’d like a particular URL to get “credit” for factors from another URL; we’ll pass those signals across a 301 redirect as appropriate.

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Antony Johnson - 5:23 pm

Q: Hi Matt, Are there any guidelines available on keyword density we have pages that are about 1 single subject and the keyword density is quite high

Matt Cutts - 5:27 pm

A: Antony, 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, …

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Quentin Muhlert - 5:29 pm

Q: Does GoogleBot tend to have a preference for long or short filenames/directory names?

Pedro Dias - 5:36 pm

A: Hi Quentin. No Googlebot doesn’t have preference on short or long filenames/directory names, usualy short names are preferred by users for usability purposes.

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Alan Rothstein - 5:31 pm

Q: When you use the robots.txt tool in Webmaster Tools does it abide by this case sensitive rule?

Maile Ohye - 5:36 pm

A: Hi Alan, 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.

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Rabin Acharya - 5:37 pm

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?

Matt Cutts - 5:40 pm

A: Rabin, 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.

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Michael Nguyen - 5:42 pm

Q: Does removing your site’s low value pages from the index help the other pages rank better?

Matt Cutts - 5:45 pm

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.

How long before a new platform weakens Google’s virtual monopoly? O’Reilly frequently sites the Internet as the dark horse that blind-sided Microsoft. What, if any, will do it for Google? True, nothing lasts forever, but even a few years is a long time, and damage may have already be done by the lack of real competition. The phrase “absolute power corrupts absolutely” has been thrown around a lot, but it’s true. I do love using a lot of Google’s services, but it needs something to keep it honest and on its toes.

What’s gonna stop Google from gobbling (buying out) the “next big thing”? They bought YouTube relatively early and gained dominance in online video distribution. Blog syndication became popular and they acquired the most widely used RSS publishing service, FeedBurner. They understand how important the mobile market, and now they’re launching Android. Google always seem to be one step ahead of the pack. I’m wondering if perhaps it’s not a new product or platform that will take the thunder away from Google. Maybe it will just become too big that it will collapse under its own weight.

How much more brain drain can Yahoo! take? While technology is important, it’s people that run a company, and employees are still its best asset. The alarming number of executives leaving just shows the continued loss of confidence of its own people. Unless drastic measures are taken by the top management to address this, I’m not sure how they can recover. For their sake, I hope Jerry Yang can come out of his shell and address the employees’ concern and give them a clear direction. In short, be a leader.

Yahoo! has let Google win this battle, hoping to regroup and win the war. That’s a tall order, and we can only speculate on their next move.

Well, if I want to write a sort introduction to OpenID, then I must tell you one thing. People are getting tired of creating a new account on every website they use. They are getting tired of keeping track of the password they are using in different sites. Well, OpenID is an open technology standard that solves problems like these. The OpenID technology will allow users to use one account to sign in to hundreds of websites! And this list is growing every day!

Once you get and OpenID, you can simply tell any OpenID enabled website that you are a OpenID user. You will be sent to OpenID provider to verify your ID and password and then signed in to the website.

Yahoo joined the OpenID project long ago and Yahoo users can use Yahoo IDs as their OpenID. Now Google starts offering an (automatic) OpenID URL for each existing google account, thus allowing the google accounts to be used on any OpenId-enabled web site.

After launching it, some users are saying that Google realized that allowing the google users to use their same (google) ID on other (non google-affiliated, independent or rival) sites, (while maintaining the single google logon) is something that the users want.

Visit OpenID homepage.

Well, Google is Idea Giant, because users likes the ideas they brought to us so far and hopefully it will happen for Google’s future ideas too. So Image Ranking idea is the latest brainchild of Google. Recently two Google scientists presented a paper at the international World Wide Web Conference in Beijing describing what the researchers call VisualRank, an algorithm for blending image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighting and ranking images that look most similar.

Honestly I like the idea, because when people look for common image titles, most of the time any image with that title comes as a result and I believe this new technology by Google will change that.