Google recently hosted their third webmaster chat event allowed some question time between webmasters and Google employees.

Below are a couple of the presentations from the event:

John’s slides on “Frightening Webmastering Myths”:

Jonathan’s slides on “Using the Not Found errors report in Webmaster Tools”:

Maile’s slides on “Where We’re Coming From”:

Much of the documents, in particular the frightening webmaster myths are pretty common sense, with only the following point standing out.

• Duplicate Content will penalise your site - Google say this is a myth. However I would add this is a very generalised way of looking at it. Whilst Google are good at establising internal content duplication - people aren’t - and when many people talk about duplicate content (well me anyhow) - it is the human factor that is important. After all Google isn’t potentially giving me valuable linkage back - a human is - and if he links to the wrong site, I stand the chance of getting no significant benefit at all. Secondly, if I have hundreds of duplicated pages (or even four or five), which one is authoratitive. Providing one copy to a user reduces the chance of that link going somewhere irrelevant - surely good for both users and search engines?

  Duplicate content still doesn’t matter?