Google & Microsoft Share Advice For Webmasters, SEOs

The ever-helpful teams writing for Google’s Webmaster Central blog and Microsoft Live Search’s Webmaster Center blog have published a variety of videos and presentations this week in the name of helping webmasters and search engine optimizers.

On the Live Search blog, Nathan Buggia recaps his SMX East presentation on Webmaster Guidelines, shares the slides from his talk, and expands on topics such as paid links, cloaking, and website penalties. He shares some detail on how Live Search handles paid links:

Essentially we look at each link individually to understand the degree to which the site is really endorsing the link. So, while we most likely will not ban your site for buying or selling a few links, it is also likely that they may not actually end up providing any value either.

In a separate post, Nathan also shares his presentation on URLs and Domains. A third post recapping Live Search’s SMX East talks is promised, but hasn’t been published yet.

Meanwhile, over at the Google Webmaster Central blog, the team has created a presentation called “Google for Webmasters.” It’s geared more toward beginner webmasters and covers Discoverability, Accessibility, Ranking, Webmaster Central, and Other Resources. The presentation dedicates an entire slide to emphasizing — or, more accurately, de-emphasizing — the importance of PageRank, and another slide answers the common question, Why do rankings change?

You can see the full slide presentation, or watch a handful of separate videos on the Webmaster Central blog.

(Pssst. Yahoo, where are your slides from SMX East?)