Google interview with Marissa Mayer

Over at Search Engine Strategies-Chicago, Garrett French managed to get an exclusive interview with Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web Products at Google.

Looking for ways to boost your Google ranking? Speaker Marissa Mayer, the Director of Consumer Web Products at Google, said during one of her speeches, "Have unique useful content. Have sitemaps. Make your site easy to reach with a text-based browser. Give your site a hierarchal structure. Have a single domain with mini-sites within, rather than having lots of sites."

Usability is a Must! Marissa says, "It's a good idea to design sites that are usable from any browser. That's something that Google may be taking into consideration - your cross-browser compatibility." Check out our Accessibility and Usability forum for more tips!

Googlebot Still Isn’t Perfect. Some of the problems Googlebot has, according to Marissa, are JavaScript, session IDs, too many parameters, dynamic URLs, Splash pages, and frames. Also, if your site requires cookies to deliver content to browsers, then that's a serious problem because the Googlebot can't accept cookies and therefore won’t be able to reach the content.

Froogle. Many of you have probably noticed Froogle results are now appearing at the top of listings in Google. Marissa also mentioned this - which to me says, “If you are selling, get yourself into Froogle now!” Froogle is becoming increasingly important.

An Exclusive Interview. Yesterday, I caught up with Marissa after her presentation. We walked through the hallway together and had a short but exclusive interview as she carried her suitcase outside to catch a taxi to the airport.

Be careful to whom you link to
I asked, “What should people do if their sites were totally dumped from Google?” She replied, “If you dropped in rankings, go back and look at who you linked to and who’s linking to you. If any of these people are using spam techniques, they're the reason your site no longer appears on Google.”

“Does this mean that new algorithm somehow measures the ‘neighborhood’ you're linked into more highly?” Smiling, Marissa told me she couldn’t answer that question, because it’s a direct statement about the new Google algorithm. We'll take that as a yes. :)

I asked the same question to Derrick Wheeler of Marketleap, and his response was, “Measure who's linking to you and see who you're linking to. Check keyword density. Check for duplicate content. Check for accidental spam. Don't try so hard to rank well. If you're taking a serious hit and losing money every day consider doing paid inclusion.”