On day one of SES London I was able to catch up with Google Search Evangelist Adam Lasnik to do a short (10 min) video on several topics important to web masters looking for better results on Google. Adam starts with a descrption of his responsibilities at Google and then answers questions about Google compliant Flash and JavaScript, duplicate content – especially with press releases and suggested uses of internal site nofollow other than for “PageRank sculpting”.
[googlevideo]http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=1830519162896248638&hl=en[/googlevideo]
(20 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)
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About Lee Odden
Great responses to some common questions, but I really love Adam’s balanced response on the “sculpting PageRank” issue. My only concern is that if Google isn’t going to provide tools to help people manage PageRank then it should be much more firm in discouraging attempts to sculpt PageRank.
Since Webmasters don’t know what their PageRank actually is and have no way of determining how their linkage affects it, it would be insane for anyone to try to sculpt PageRank.
That was a fantastic interview! Really great answers from Adam–and thanks for asking the important questions.
Great interview, Lee. That’s good insight from Adam on the duplicate content issue. I run into it all the time with press releases and other features I write that are eventually syndicated.
BTW, I listened to your 12/12 interview with Jon Jantsch on the Duct Tape Marketing podcasting…one of the most useful podcasts I’ve ever heard!
Quality interview and, for my money, priceless information. Especially since I didn’t pay anything for it! Ha!
Seriously, always awesome to get info like that straight from a source In The Know, and you got a pretty slick interview style Lee, nice job.
Great insight Michael. I think there’s a lot of SEO tactics that sound logical but are difficult to prove consistently. If done right, there’s no harm in testing either.
@Lisa, thanks. I actually asked Adam prior if there were things he wanted to discuss and give him a chance to draw attention to common questions he is confronted with.
@Scott, thanks. The press release dupe content issue is one close to home since we send about 25-30 optimized releases per month. Glad it was helpful.
@Judd yes the price is right and thanks. Adam made it easy – he’s a very nice fellow and obviously both highly intelligent and diplomatic.
Great interview Lee! What I especially loved was Adam’s response on the “sculpting PageRank” issue.
Thanks for sharing.
Great interview. I was particularly interested in Adam’s comments on sculpting internal pagerank. It’s something I have been experimenting with, but after this interview and monitoring my serps/traffic over the past couple of months I am having second thoughts.
Thank you for posting this interview! I found it really helpful that Adam tied together Google’s consideration for the presence of pages such as “Privacy Policy” and a penalty for nofollowing them. Also, I think that his “locale and hosting” comment just answered all of my current SEO problems (all of my sites are hosted in an unrelated country to my audience).
Adam’s comments on Flash are really interesting, I had stopped adding Flash NoScript to my web-sites, I didn’t realise that Google actually look for this code to counter your flash movie.
I was thinking of using the “no follow” command on About, Privacy, etc., so I don’t have to rewrite those “housekeeping” type pages everything I venture into a new website. Sounds like that’s not a smart strategy.
I wish he’d gone into more detail about press releases. Along those lines, I submitted an article to an article site after it first appeared on my blog. They rejected it as duplicate content, because my blog said something stupid like “submitted by Expert.” I had also set up the blog name as a “user” so when other blogs picked up feeds, the blog name would get some branding. Again, that won’t work submitting to the best article sites, because they’ll check for dupes.
I found Adams comments really helpful. Although I am already doing much of what he talked about, it really is nice to hear his validation. I think the video was interesting and entertaining and I would look forward to any more Adam Lasnik videos. I think that Webmaster forums are indeed a good source of information, but contain some misinformation, as well. Adam is articulate and I look forward to viewing anymore of his work.
Great interview and great answers! Thanks!
The best thing about Adam is how well he communicates and how helpful he is. Everytime I meet him its a pleasure. By the way, for all the people who are anti sculpting, note that he said that Google WILL NOT frown upon the practice. So if it takes 5 minutes to add a couple no follows to your double click adds or your secure server banner that exists in your global footer, its probably worth doing. If you start getting crazy and doing one offs page by page, that’s where the amount of energy required is more than the payoff.
This video really helps not only to webmasters but also to beginners in web developing. The insights are great like “PageRank Sculpting”, “Flash NoScript”, “Anti Sculpting”, and “Duplicate Content”.
This is very helpful to me as Novice Blogger.
I guess I worried about PageRank Sculpting (did not know it was called this way) too much. We are just finishing a project on our website to nofollow secondary links. Not much effort, but anyway…
I guess I should focus more on how deep content is on our website.
Hm, it’s interesting how much one video can change your SEO strategy.
I did find the duplicate content and Press Releases info. very informative and will take some quality reasoning from it…. However = Albeit I always enjoy following-up on what Adam has to say and what the newer “Whispers” and SEO rumors are at any given time, unless you know for sure & can actually gauge what importance Google places on internal page linking… I still find it somewhat hard to beleive all Rel-Nofollow attribute/tag – page sculpting verbiage at this juncture…..
Perpahs I’m wrong, but I personally beleive that the entire “Rel-Nofollow” tags situation shouldn’t penalize the honest guy/company who’s goal is simply trying to offer up fresh content and generate readers/visitors to their venues.
My 2 cents.
Michael S.