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Google: We are, of course, only taking action against paid links that pass PageRank (also read our blog-post on the matter). We ask all webmasters to remember that the PageRank is a statement from Google with which we show how much we trust their websites and that we count on the links they provide. It would be a shame if this trust were abused. It would be a fair gesture to users and searchengines to label paid links as such and tag them with the nofollow-attribute.

I recommend the Webmaster Tools if a webmaster thinks that their website violated the Webmaster Guidelines – in some cases they will be able to find more information there. In any case they should make sure that their websites do not violate our guidelines and then the can fill out a request for reconsideration.

Even though we are strictly against commenting on future measures and plans, I would think that we will not stop at PageRank depreciations to prevent the sale of links.

We believe that this “negative SEO” is not only unethical but also not lucrative in the long run. In the future, we will keep taking actions against those who sell links.

We recommend to all webmasters to find a niche for their website. For example, they can become locally relevant or specialized. They should ask themselves: “What is the unique use that my site has to offer?” and they should not only focus on the SEO-card – there are many ways to promote a site: public relations, offline-advertisement, newsletters... It is extremely important to be active in the corresponding community. This can be done through commenting in theme-relevant forums and blogs. Last but not least webmasters can always try out AdWords.

A link should be a statement with which a webmaster shows that they trust a site and find them useful (see this article in the webmaster-help). The mentioned methods might work in the short run but they should not be part of a long time link-building strategy.

Matt Cutts once said that this method can affect the Google-Ranking but that it is a second degree effect, as if you ponder how to best spend you money instead of thinking about ways to make more money.

If, for example, a tag-cloud is a reasonable way to reach content without producing too much duplicated content then it can be useful to let it be indexed. If it is only meaningful for the user-interaction on the webpage itself then the webmaster should not have it indexed.

Google is usually very good at filtering duplicated content and only displaying the relevant version. If a domain holds duplicate-content, then usually the “worst” that will happen is that only one version will show up in the search results. Only when a large number of duplicate URLs are generated can our crawler become “confused”. You can make it very clear for the Googlebot which version to index through the robots.txt file. Webmasters can find more on this subject on our blog-postings about duplicate content.

This should not make a difference as far as the ranking is concerned. As a user I personally find it very annoying to have to click my way through an article too much. If a users finds an article through a searchengine and ends up in the middle of it, he will probably not want to have to click all the way back to the beginning. My advice would be to experiment with different solutions and then then take a look at how this relates to the number of readers.

Of course it is always difficult to make a general prediction. Personally I think that the universal search and the mobile search will gain importance in Germany. For the Search Quality Team I can only say that we will continue to look for ways to increase the search quality for the users. Additionally we have a few ideas how we can improve the communication with webmasters.