The Google Webmaster Central blog has two excellent write ups on mobile SEO concerns and techniques. One is named Help Google index your mobile site and the other is named Running desktop and mobile versions of your site.

The reason for the two different articles is that often webmasters consider smart phone enabled sites as strictly mobile sites, but there are many mobile phones that have web browsers that don’t provide the rich experience that an iPhone or Android device do. If a webmaster wants to optimize their site for those devices and submit this type of content to Google, they can by learning how to create mobile friendly web pages for those devices and submitting a mobile sitemap.

At the same time, many webmasters prefer to not have a new URL for the same page based on accessing it on a desktop, iPhone or old-style mobile browser. Google’s second blog post explains how you can use the useragent to display a different stylesheet for showing the same content, in a different layout, for mobile devices and desktop devices. Google offered a diagram explaining how to do this without being considered cloaking:

To be honest, the best practices in this area are not 100% clear to me and I don’t think it is 100% clear to Google either. There are just too many ways to handle mobile devices, with so many different mobile browsers to use, plus handling printer friendly pages, desktop based pages, Internet Explorer versus Firefox or Safari and Chrome. Building out web sites that also comply with Google’s guidelines is complex, especially in the mobile front. These mobile blog posts from Google are useful but I, as do many, still have questions about handling this properly from a search spider perspective.

I actually have a clear write up on how I handled this for my corporate site on the Search Engine Roundtable, but like I said, there are multiple ways to achieve a mobile friendly site and comply with Google’s guidelines.

At PubCon, Matt Cutts from Google said there is strong lobbying in Google to introduce a new ranking factor into the algorithm. The new ranking factor has to do with how fast a site or page loads. Matt described this as one of his ‘what to expect in 2010′ bullet points in his presentation yesterday evening in Las Vegas.

He explained that Google’s co-founders want searching to be real fast, as if you are flipping through a magazine. Part of this is making sure faster web pages rank better than slower ones. Matt explained that page speed is a factor in the search ad AdWords quality score and there is currently a strong push to make it a factor in the organic ranking algorithm. Matt basically implied that in 2010, it will be one additional factor.

Let’s keep in mind two things:

(1) There are over 200 ranking factors in the algorithm and each are weighted differently. If I had to guess, page speed would not be a tremendously weighed factor, unless the site takes 90 seconds to load.

(2) I monitor complaints from the AdWords (and organic) side of webmasters and virtually no one complains that their quality score is low because of having a slow site. I would have to assume the same speed criteria would be applied from the quality score page speed requirements to the organic side of things. So if advertisers rarely, if never, complain about it – one would assume non-advertisers would also not complain much about that as a reason for their site’s poor ranking.

To hear more from Matt on this topic, see the second half of this WebProNews video with Mike McDonald:

Google’s got a present for searchers and site owners. The long anticipated new Google Caffeine search index will go live soon, just after the holidays.

The Google Caffeine Sandbox, where people have been invited since the summer to test Google’s next generation search infrastructure, has been closed, replaced with this “it’s coming” message:

We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.

Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.

Soon? And what’s one data center mean in terms of how widely the new search index might appear?

To answer — and help calm the nerves of site owners with bad memories of the famed “Florida Update” of 2003 — Google spam fighting chief Matt Cutts posted that Google would show Caffeine to only a small number of people until after the holidays:

This means that a small percentage of Google’s users will benefit from the technology behind Caffeine in their regular searches.

I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays. Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over. Most searchers wouldn’t immediately notice any changes with Caffeine, but going slowly not only gives us time to collect feedback and improve, but will also minimize the stress on webmasters during the holidays.

In the Florida Update, a major change to Google’s search algorithm caused many sites to lose traffic just before the 2003 holiday shopping season (and many gained, but they didn’t complain). The huge concern effectively caused Google to swear off making major changes to rankings during this heavy sales period.

A year or two ago, Google hosted a webmaster chat even every few months. They were designed to allow webmasters to see presentations from Googlers on web search and SEO topics and then ask questions to Googlers, who would answer those questions in real time.

The Google Webmaster Central blog announced the first new live chat event in over a year. This event is named the “Holiday Webmaster Webinar” and takes place a week from Friday, November 13th at 10:00 am, Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco). Again, this is the first one since October 2008.

This meeting is hosted by Senior Search Quality Engineer Greg Grothaus, and AdWords Evangelist Fred Vallaeys. They’ll be discussing a range of webmaster best practices and useful Google tools followed by a Q&A session to make sure you and your site are well primed for the holiday rush.

The meeting number is 574 659 815 and the password is webmaster. To access the event:

1. Go to https://googleonline.webex.com/googleonline/j.php?ED=133402392&UID=0&PW=db339c4e641e0f525412171e5646
2. Enter your name and email address.
3. Enter the meeting password: webmaster
4. Click “Join Now”.

To join the teleconference only call-in toll-free number (US/Canada): 866-469-3239 or call-in toll number (US/Canada): 1-650-429-3300.

Fifteen-days ago, Google dropped PageRank values from Webmaster Tools and the search community took that as a bold statement. The statement was clear, webmasters “shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much,” said Google.

Last night, Google pushed out a Google Toolbar PageRank update, despite making that bold statement just a couple weeks ago. As Danny explained clearly in his What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters, “Toolbar PageRank — is a snapshot of internal PageRank taken every few months.” Yes, months ago and it is far from current.

Despite all of this, Google has updated the PageRank values in the Google Toolbar sending a mixed message to webmasters and SEOs.

For years, Google’s discovery of web pages was solely based on links. If a page had no links to it, Googlebot had no way of knowing about it and therefore, would never index it. Along the way, Google provided an option for submitting individual pages, but that wasn’t really a viable option for site owners with large sites. In 2005, Google launched XML Sitemaps, which was a much more scalable way for site owners to let Google know about pages of their site that Googlebot may not otherwise discover through links. Today, a Google Webmaster Central blog post discusses another way Googlebot may discover pages: feeds. They say that using RSS and Atom feeds to discover pages helps them learn about new content quickly.

New content is key for Google since freshness is a vital component of relevance for some queries. Convention wisdom is that it’s not all that useful to ensure Google knows about pages of your site if they don’t have links to them, because without links, Google won’t see them as valuable. But current ranking is much more complicated than the original PageRank formula describes. And new content with no links may very well trump content with an abundance of links if it makes sense for the query.

Of course, site owners have always been able to to submit RSS and Atom feeds as Sitemaps, but this post describes using these feeds even if the site owner hasn’t submitted them via the Sitemap system. Instead, they are scanning other feed submission systems, such as Google Reader and ping services for the feeds.

It’s unclear from the post if the feeds are being used solely for discovery or if the content from the feeds are being used in place of crawling as well. The title of the post references “discovery” but the post itself notes that they are able to “get these new pages into our index more quickly than traditional crawling methods” and to directly crawl feeds. If Google is using the feeds in place of crawling, this would be another argument in favor of full rather than partial feeds — you’d get more of a page’s content indexed more quickly. Google Blogsearch initially crawled feed content rather than the actual pages, which led to partial indexing in Blogsearch, but this changed late last year.

The post notes that in order for Google to use a feed as a discovery method, the feed must not be blocked by robots.txt.

The Google Webmaster Central blog has a post on “dealing” with low quality backlinks. In that post, Google basically explains that incoming links is “just one of many” ranking factors. That being the case, Google says if you have bad quality incoming links, “don’t fret” it and focus on things you can control, like your content.

Google does offer advice, such as asking the source of the link to remove your site from their page. If that doesn’t work, there is not much you can do. There is currently no tool in Webmaster Tools to communicate to Google to ignore certain links from sources on the Internet.

Google explains that over time they remove low quality sources from their index, so these links should not hurt you over time. Google recommends you report low quality sites in their spam report tool or paid link report.

Google already offers PPC advice and SEO advice. And now, with “Googling yourself” becoming a common part of the language, Google’s now offering reputation managament advice, too.

The actual advice is basic, to say the least: Create a Google Profile. Ask happy customers to review your business online. Publish positive content about yourself.

But it’s interesting to see Google offering tips about how to “get stuff that you want people to see to outperform the stuff you don’t want them to see.” Reputation management can sometimes be a hot-button issue — some people believe it’s unethical to create and optimize content for the express purpose of pushing negative content out of sight. Google’s endorsing it in today’s blog post, and offering suggestions for how to make it happen.

I also suspect, from reading the blog post, that Google is trying to do some pre-emptive customer service here. You can imagine the amount of emails (and perhaps phone calls) Google gets from people who are upset about what they see when they Google themselves. The blog post basically says, Would you stop asking us to clean up the search results mess you don’t like?

“Rather than immediately contacting Google, it’s important to first remove it from the site where it’s being published. Google doesn’t own the Internet; our search results simply reflect what’s already out there on the web.”

It’s probably not just emails and calls Google wants to stop. You may recall that they’ve been sued over “bad” listings appearing in the search results, too.

My piece this morning, Google Removes PageRank Data From Webmaster Tools from the Search Engine Roundtable has sparked a lot of discussion on Twitter. Google had indeed removed the PageRank statistics from Google Webmaster Tools. I believe it was removed when Google released the Webmaster Tools Labs features earlier this week. PageRank being pulled from the crawl stats, has gone mostly unnoticed until I wrote about it this morning.

Susan Moskwa from the Google Webmaster Central team explained it was removed because Google keeps telling webmasters “that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much.” They felt it was “silly” to keep telling webmasters that, and at the same time show it in Webmaster Tools. So Google removed it from Webmaster Tools. I think this is a good thing, since I agree it is obsessed over too much, plus what Google showed in Webmaster Tools was not very useful to webmasters.

But I really think Google has to take a stronger stance, if they indeed want webmasters to not obsess over the score. At one point back in 2007, Google asked webmasters about removing PageRank from the Google Toolbar for this exact reason. The conversation and discussion ultimately died with no recourse from Google. I personally would like to see Google remove the PageRank score from the Toolbar as well. Yes, the Toolbar shows page by page PageRank score, but we all know that Google shows out dated PageRank data in the Toolbar, plus it is often buggy.

I think, Google should either make the data accurate or remove it – just like they did in Webmaster Tools.

For more about PageRank, see our article named What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters.

It’s one of the most common pieces of SEO advice you’ll find: Don’t build your web site with AJAX if you want it to be crawled and indexed by search engines. AJAX-based web sites are essentially a locked and bolted door when a spider comes crawling.

At our SMX East conference today, Google has announced a proposal to change that, a new standard that would make AJAX crawlable. If it comes to pass, and if the other major search engines go along with the idea, the proposal could serve as a green light for developers wanting to enjoy the rich features of using AJAX while not sacrificing search engine visibility.

The details of Google’s proposal are, to this non-developer, highly technical and more than I care to recap here. (Read Google’s blog post, linked above, for the details.) Google’s goals in creating the new standard are summed up in less technical language:

• Minimal changes are required as the website grows
• Users and search engines see the same content (no cloaking)
• Search engines can send users directly to the AJAX URL (not to a static copy)
• Site owners have a way of verifying that their AJAX website is rendered correctly and thus that the crawler has access to all the content

Google estimates that about 70% of all web content is created dynamically, and that figure is likely to grow. “This hurts search,” Google says. “Not solving AJAX crawlabilty holds back progress on the web.” Those quotes are from a Google Docs presentation deck about the proposal, embedded below.

Google is asking for feedback on the proposal in the Google Webmaster Central help forum.