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If You Had 30 Minutes With Google, What Would You Ask?
Went Hot: August 10, 2007 - 5:34 pm
Posted By: AmyGreer 334 days ago
Topic Type: Discussion
Category: Google SEO
She's not sure if it's all bunk and she'll get the runaround or if this is really a chance to ask some pointed questions.
On the good faith chance this is on the up-and-up, I told my friend I'd ask the folks at Sphinn what they would ask if they were her.
So, if you had 30 minutes with Google, what would you like to know?
15 Comments
Comments
Q: How do you justify allowing large companies (including Google itself) to break Google guidelines, yet the little guys are punished for the same deeds?
Good point, Donna. Curious to see what kind of response that would garner ...
I've asked this question recently of Matt Cutts in a relevant comment on his blog but he chose not to respond.
It's a very simple question. Are both the RSS news feed for a blog and the actual blog contents both held in the regular web index (which was the term used by Matt Cutts)? Here I'm assuming that the RSS news feed has not been blocked by a robots.txt file.
Good question, Barry. I remember a previous Sphinn discussion about this same topic. Let's see if Google would answer this one in a one-on-one session ...
"So, if you had 30 minutes with Google, what would you like to know?"
Why?
I'm interested in finding out what types of questions SEOs would ask Google if given the chance. I'm compiling a list along with my colleague who has the meeting with Google.
I'd love to know what they consider the top five most important and time effective points for a small business to concentrate on to get noticed in Google, how they would advise a company of any size to strategize in the era of universal search, what impact social media is having on their company in the PPC area if any, at what point a business should start consulting SEO companies and what they think one should ask before hiring.
I'd love to know if their questions match up with the answers I have come up with through research, or if they believe/intend something else in theory than we see in practice.
Solid questions, Tinu! I'll be passing those along ...
Five new technologies and where they are going with them could be mobile, voip, cellular, television, radio don't waste precious time griping get as much new information as you can in the alloted time!
hahaha that's easy. Dear Google: please show me your file for SEO John Andrews in Seattle. What sites do you think he manages? What redirects are you actively blocking? What pages have blocked page rank flow?
Why the hell doesn't xxxxxxxxxxxxx.com rank????!!!
Can the Google "earbot" really extract reliable keyword information from audio and video?
Thanks Amy, glad I could help. I like the five technologies question too - never would have thought of that.
Agreed, Tinu - the five new technologies is one worth asking. Thanks, southwestseo.
twdeeter - I've also been wondering when Google is going to heavily work that technology into its algos.
johnandrews, patrickaltoft - those questions were already on my list. :)
I was invited to one of these "SEO chat" sessions with Google at my former job while they were in town to talk Adwords with my PPC colleagues. They brought an engineer to point out some aspects of our website that are not optimized per the webmaster guidelines. Stuff we already knew about but didn't have time to address yet. Try as I might, I could not get them to answer anything outside of the published guidelines. I tried asking questions several different ways, but they were very protective and could not (would not) answer a lot of my questions. They're very good under pressure!
They also suggested participating in and optimizing for many other Google services such as YouTube, Blog Search, Base, Product Search and the Local Business Center. We were already using all of them, but their well rehearsed best practices were still helpful. Little did we know they would announce Universal Search a few short weeks later.
I say go for it. Ask the tough questions. I guarantee you they've heard them before. Good for you if you break through the armor, but don't expect any insight into the black box that you can't get elsewhere.