JLH Design Blog

I promise no more RickRolling, and apologize to the 100+ people yesterday that were redirected…this is real.

The Google Webmaster Chat was a huge success as reported in many prominent places such as Search Engine Roundtable.

The online chat involved several multi-media avenues in which to communicate between the many Googlers who participated in the meeting and the 200+ webmasters.

1. A free-for-all chat room type interface, the transcript of which can be read here. [PDF]
2. A question and answer section where webmasters posted questions and Googlers answered, the transcript is located here. [PDF]
3. Webmasters called in, or were called, to listen into the presentation by a dozen or so Googlers in conference call with Googlers in Mountain View, Kirkland, and Zurich. The audio recording of that section was saved in this Brasil SEO site.

My Portuguese skills are little rusty don’t exist, but according to the Google Translation it appears as the author is recommending you download the files, which I did. To help save his bandwidth I’ve mirrored the files here, be sure to link to the original source in your own discussion.

Audio Chat Part 1 (mp3)

Audio Chat Part 2 (mp3)

Audio Chat Part 3 (mp3)

Note: The much debated PageRank sculpting discussion starts right at the beginning of part 3.

A transcribed version of the audio portion can be found here.

The Google Webmaster Help Group which I participate in has been inundated with spam lately from a certain spammer looking to push the 2008 Peking Olympic Games Souvenirs.

As seen below”

You will notice that the group’s CMS nofollows all links in a post which would make you wonder, “why would someone go to so much effort to bother spamming the groups?”

The answer is: Because it works. Well. Very well.

More and more people have been complaining lately that after discussing their site in GWHG that the thread will outrank their own site. Of course some of the sites discussed in the group are indeed penalized and just about anything will outrank it, but it has been noted the groups are getting more visible in the SERPS lately. The fact is that Groups material is indexed quickly and ranks quite well, irregardless regardless of content or value. Another aspect working for the Google Groups Spammer is the fact that Google has the groups in many languages all on their own TLD, in essence replicating their spam on many more URLs than just the one they planted it on.

The spammer may not be getting any link love from the Google Groups spam pointing to 200836.com but for his keyword phrase, “Peking 2008 Olympic Games”, he’s doing remarkably well in Google.

In the first 100 results Google Groups spam occupies 23 positions (screenshot). To be fair to Google, they aren’t the only target of this spammer as some Yahoo! groups and other forums are also spammed, for a total of 40 of the top results (screenshot). By any standard 40% of a search result being spam drops is not good.

With this Minty Fresh Spamdexing the spammers no longer have to worry about the links they generate but rather use the forums themselves as doorways to their spam site, which by the way is indexed.

There are million of various theories out there about how to find out if your site is penalized by Google. I thought I’d recap what Google officially says, and by officially I mean on their domain and bearing their brand. Their help system is a bit scattered so I may have missed some.

1. Verify that your site ranks for your domain name (reference)

Do a Google search for www.[yourdomain].com. If your site doesn’t appear in the results, or if it ranks poorly in the results, this is a sign that your site may be penalized for violations of the webmaster guidelines.

Brian White of Google notes that inside Google the nomenclature with the brackets used above indicates what is actually typed in the search box. So when they say to search for www.[yourdomain].com, they actually mean that you would search for yourdomain and not include the www, com, or the surrounding dots.

2. Message Center (reference 1, reference 2)

If we find certain problems with your site - for example, malware - we’ll let you know via the Message Center

we launched Message Center in our webmaster console, which allows us to send messages to verified site owners.

3. PageRank of Zero (reference 1, reference 2)

Google believes the site violates our Webmaster Quality Guidelines.

4. Removed from the index (reference 1 , reference 2 , there are more but you get the point)

If a site has been penalized, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google’s partner sites.

and

if our review indicated that you engaged in deceptive practices and your site has been removed from our search results

5. Noted on your Summary Page (reference)

Your page has been blocked from our index because it does not meet the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank. We cannot comment on the individual reasons your page was removed. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text in such a way that it can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index.

Note: Emails from Google were stopped in August 2007 due to spoofers and scammers.

I’ve seen quite a few people in Google’s webmaster help group ask how to verify their site for webmaster tools when using a Googlepages website. I took a cursory look and couldn’t find any online documentation so I tried it myself. The procedure I used is outlined below with screen shots. There may be a better way out there, but I know this one works.

1. First sign into Webmaster Tools and go to the dashboard where you will see a box to add your site. Type in your googlepages sites name here, just mysite.googlepages.com, with no ‘/home’ or any other subfolders or file names.

2. You’ll then be prompted with a link as the next step to verify your site, click that.

3. They will then ask you for a method to verify with a pull down that says, “choose verification method…” You’ll want to select the “Upload HTML File” Method.

4. After you’ve chosen your method, the next screen will show you a file name. This is the file you will need to create to upload to your Googlepages site. I just highlighted the file name, opened up my text editor application (in my case its notepad), then picked ’save as’, when prompted for the name I pasted the file name that Google gave me, and hit save. The file can be blank like that, as Google is only going to look for its existence, not what’s in it.

5. In another tab or another browser session open up your Googlepages account, and under your site manager, to the right you’ll see a box appropriately name “uploaded stuff.” Select the link [upload] (if you have files there already) or select the ‘browse’ button. You’ll then need to browse to the location of the file you saved in the previous step.

6. The final step is to go back to your Webmaster Tools account and click the ‘verify’ button. The response should be almost instant where you will see the verified screen. Now go and enjoy all the benefits that being a verified owner of a site offers you.

I’ve gone over adding a domain wide 301 redirects before in IIS to fix the www and non-www canonicalization issues, but the same issue also comes up for individual pages as well.

For an old page that is a .asp page adding the following code to the top of the page will perform the redirect. You can get rid of all other content on the page, as no browser or crawler will see it once they receive the 301 redirect.


<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", " http://www.example.com/newpage.asp"
Response.End
%>

That only works for pages with extensions set up to parse the asp code. A lot of times, specially on shared hosting environments, other pages with static extensions such as .html, .pdf, .txt, etc will not execute the code. With a little trickery we can accomplish that as well.

Let’s say you have the old file that you want to 301 redirect, for example:

www.example.com/old_directory/oldpage.html

Which you’d like to redirect to the new location:

www.example.com/new_directory/newpage.html

If you were to add the above code to newpage.html nothing would happen, or even the code would show up as text on the page, as more than likely your server is not set up to execute the code. Here’s what you can do:

1. Delete (or rename it to save it for a rollback) the oldpage.html file located in /old_directory/
2. Create a new sub-folder (note: it’s a folder not a file) under /old_directory/ with the same name as the file you just deleted, in this example you’d create a sub-folder named ‘oldpage.html’ like /old_directory/oldpage.html/.
3. In that folder you just created you will then create a default asp file to execute the redirect code, this can be different depending on how your site is set up, but generally it is default.asp, such as you now have a page located at /old_directory/oldpage.html/default.asp
4. in that default.asp you will want to add the following code:


<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", " http://www.example.com/new_directory/newpage.html"
Response.End
%>

That’s it you’re done. Now when someone or a crawler visits the old page, they will be 301 redirected to the new location. As stated before this also works for other static pages such as .PDF, .DOC, .TXT, .HTM , etc.

For example if you visit this page, which appears like it was a PDF:

www.hvac-direct.com/pdfs/oldfile.pdf

You should be automatically redirected to a new html file in a folder:

http://www.hvac-direct.com/html-version/

To see that is actually a 301 redirect view the response on the oyoy.eu tools. Note: that it’s a double redirect because of the lack of trailing slash on that server set-up, but it’s better than returning a 404!

I’ve been touting the virtues of Google’s Webmaster Help Group for some time now, real people with real sites get valuable help daily. Google has put forth some guidelines for using the group but I thought I’d amend them with some of my personal opinions. If you want to get as much out of the help group as possible the following ideas gripes (in no particular order) will help you to help us help you.

Read the FAQ - Google likes to hide the FAQ and group charter by only linking to it ten times [yes 10!] on the home page so they are sometimes tough to notice, but it’s really helpful if you read the frequently asked questions as since they are frequently asked that means that frequently you will find your answer right there. I’ve highlighted the links in the thumbnail as they are pretty well hidden on the page.

Apparently 10 links isn’t always enough so here’s ELEVEN.

1. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
2. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
3. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
4. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
5. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
6. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
7. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
8. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
9. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
10. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read
11. Group info, FAQs, and posting tips - please read

Post Site Name - this is stated in the in the group charter:

Please include all relevant details in your post, including your site URL, any error messages you see, etc.
Also, make sure to use descriptive subject lines for your posts. All of this will enable other group members to help you more quickly and it will also enable us to troubleshoot issues internally.

I cannot emphasize this enough. This is a practical place where real sites are looked at if you’d like to practice theoretical webmastering or SEO then I’d head over to Webmaster World where you can talk about “totally-white-hat-hand-written-red-widgets-authority-sites” all day and night. The regulars in the webmaster help group have looked at thousands of sites and are aware of most trends in sites’ performance problems in Google. Most can be deciphered in a few minutes but others take a lot of digging, which requires the site be physically examined.

If you are worried about the site being found in the search results on Groups there are a couple things you can do. The easiest is to post the URL in your profile, those don’t get indexed. The 2nd method is to obfuscate it a bit by breaking the link (don’t use http:// or www before it). The regulars in the group are quite willing to work with you as well, so stating that you don’t want links to the site placed within the thread will usually keep everyone in line.

Be patient - The help group is manned mostly by volunteers. Paid employees of Google do lurk the group and occasionally post but not nearly as much as the volunteers. If you’ve come expecting an answer in 10 minutes, well, it’s not that kind of party. Bumping threads is frowned upon and most likely will get the post ignored more than moved up. Also remember that this is an international forum with people from all corners of the earth posting, so while it may be 2:00 pm in your neck of the woods the foremost expert on subject may be in bed. Giving it at least a 24 hour cycle.

Spare us the Tales of Woe - We’ve seen it all, lost homes, laying off employees, starving babies, turning off the heat, etc. Granted your site is important to you, just like our sites are important to us. Trying to rally the troops by telling a sob story about how Google has ruined your marriage is not going to win the hearts and minds of the people who have devoted thousands of hours working to support Googles search quality.

Be prepared to back it up with facts - “I’ve been penalized”  or I’ve got the “-30/-950/-50/+6/Duplicate Content Penalty” may fly in some forums but as I said earlier GWHG is a practical place, we need real life examples. Explain how you came to the conclusion, what evidence you have, and what trends you see. “I’ve lost all my rankings” doesn’t help anyone help you as we don’t know what you used to rank for.

Be specific - Asking, “How can I improve my site in Google” isn’t going to get much response, it’s not the free SEO forum, but rather the Google Webmaster Help Group. Ask specific questions with regards to Google and you are likely receive some very specific answers.

Don’t start multiple threads - The regulars will be quick to point out that you are asking the same question over and over, thus souring other regulars from even bothering with your question.

Engage in discussion - Please come back and let us all know if you headed the advice, if it worked, didn’t work, or you just ignored it. Asking follow up questions to the follow ups is likely to get you more information, and threads with larger numbers of responses definitely get more attention.

Include History - So much of what happens in Google is not what you did yesterday but what you did three months ago, so if you recently bought the domain and 301 redirected it 7 times, changed hosts,  got rid of the malware downloads in hidden links, and removed the 17,000 hidden words before asking for assistance it would be good to bring that up.

There isn’t a way to contact Google - Again covered in the FAQ that nobody reads, but this is the simple truth.  There is not an email address for you to discuss why your site doesn’t rank for your keyword.

More than likely we are all you are going to get - Ranting and raving and demanding a 100% accurate answer from Larry Page is likely not to get you anywhere and even less likely to get an answer from 2nd or 3rd in command like Susan or JohnMu.

Be Honest - Nothing makes people angry quite as much as finding out we were deceived.  If you own a few hundred spam sites all interlinked and pointing to the cash cow that just took a tumble in the rankings you may want to mention that this isn’t your first rodeo, as someone will likely figure that out and the response will be a lot more brutal than if you pointed it out in the beginning.

Look for the Magic Phrase - Find the Easter Egg in the FAQs, more likely to attract Googlers.

Be polite, respectful, and keep it clean - While the group is pretty good at brutal honesty, brutality is not tolerated at any level.  Google’s response is swift and decisive and the regulars will swoop in and quickly surround abusive posters.

I need help from you programming geniuses out there. I’d love to use the New DoFollow Plugin but it doesn’t work in the latest version of wordpress. In the comments section the nofollow/follow link does not appear. Anyone have any luck getting it to work?

I’m not linking to them until they answer emails or comments….ironic isn’t it?

The Googlers were kind enough to give us some Frequently Asked Questions documentation in the Google Webmaster Help Group. Unfortunately you could not also call them the Frequently Read Questions as every new poster seems to miss the 7 or so links pointing to them when they write their first question. Annoying in the least and distracting from the real conversation that is trying to take place. We can all respond with the canned, “Read the FAQ”, response but even then people tend to not see the right stuff.

Using Google Notebook I’ve compiled a list of the FAQs with the question, answer, and the link. If you use the Google Notebook Firefox Extension all of the notes are sitting right down in the right side of your browser ready to cut-n-paste. [If only they could work drag-n-drop in! hint. hint.]

The contents of the notes are viewable here. However to receive the true value of the system I will need to add you as a collaborator so that you can have the notes available in your own Google Notebook application. Leave a comment here with your gmail address as the email address or send me a note in my contact form and I’ll add you. Once added you can add notes of your own so the whole community can benefit.

Based on a post I read by Graywolf titled Hey Network Solutions Sniffing Domain Searches By Chance I thought I’d check it out myself.

So I headed over to Network Solutions and entered “jlhstesttoseeifyouregister.com” [JLH's test to see if you register]. Waited about 2 minutes.

Then I visited the name in my browser, to see a parked page. Checking the whois data, you can see that it was indeed registered by Network Solutions. Heck even Aboutus.org has a page up already proudly serving Adsense, so their is a Google slant to this.

So bottom line is that if you are using Network Solutions to check for available domains, if you don’t buy it instantly they’ll double the price of the domain and sell it to you later at $19.95. Why anyone would pay $9.95 or more for a new domain is way beyond me as there are always plenty of cheaper options willing to pay Google Adwords for a click .

Now, I must wonder if Network Solutions has to at least pay the icann registration fee on these. If so, why wouldn’t somebody set up a script to check millions of goblety-gook domain names at Network Solutions? I’m just saying…

Today we were graced with another Googler joining in and contributing to the webmaster help group. I’ve updated my mostly accurate page listing all of the Google Employees posting on GWHG. Since it’s inception literally a dozen or so people have looked at it (t.i.c).

From Mariya’s initial post we learn:

yet another Googler from the Search Quality Team happy to join the discussion on webmastering here. My own web experience goes back to the late 90s when frames and animated gifs were all the rage and I cut my teeth making fan sites for my favourite bands on GeoCities. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to work on a number of more serious and complex projects for large corporate sites.

I am originally from Bulgaria - a land famous for roses, yoghurt, football (misnamed stateside as soccer (-: ), and recently, sumo wrestlers. Outside of Google, I enjoy sports, such as Wikipedia surfing and football watching, and on the more active side, mountain hiking and volleyball. I have a linguistics background, and grammar books are right at the top of my reading list with novels and blogs. I love learning new languages and I speak a few, so you may see me chatting with webmasters in the German or Russian groups, for instance.

I am really excited to be part of the group and look forward to learning a lot and hopefully adding to the helpful voices in an already lively discussion.

Today I’ve been inundated with “Best of 2007” SEO, SEM, and Search blogs and sites lists. Amazingly the only mention Google got was for their Webmaster Central Blog, a quality one at that, but there is so much more information out there that Google offers us lowly webmasters. One of the best kept secrets in the webmastering and SEO community is the Google Webmaster Help Group which is part of Google’s thriving and growing Google Webmaster Center. Unlike some much lesser but more popular forums site specific help is available and almost required to get the most information. The discussion on the group is not a matter of theoretical discussion but actual practical application. Almost daily (sometimes more, sometimes less) you will see input from actual Google employees and not mere speculation on all aspects of webmasters’ concerns and Google. Google employees can be easily spotted in the discussion by the little blue by their name.

With that being said, most people don’t have enough time to religiously follow the discussion group for the most important nuggets of knowledge and I could not find a central location that catalogued their contributions. The following is a list of the Googlers that regularly post on the help group, a link to their profile so you can find their latest posts. I’m sorry if I missed anyone, If I did please let me know.

• Adam Lasnik
• Amanda Camp
• Andrey Stroilov
• Berghausen “Bergy”
• Evan T
• Google Employee
• Jessica W.
• John Mueller
• Jonathan Simon
• Maile Ohye
• Mariya
• Matt Cutts
• Matt D
• Nathan Johns
• Nelson
• Patrick
• Rebecca
• Reid
• Riona MacNamara
• Sahala
• Susan Moskwa
• Thu Tu
• Vanessa Fox
• Wysz

Adam Lasnik started a contest to predict when Webado would go over 10,000 posts in the Google Webmaster Help Group. The following is the calendar tracking her progress and contestant’s entries.

This was found today on the Google Webmaster Help Group. A site which is selling it’s SEO services is banned/removed from Google’s indexed. When pushed the poster admits that he doesn’t really know any SEO and is just “outsourcing” the services. Apparently he’s got a few of these sites or at least has scraped some, all with the fine keyword stuffed bottom navigation (classic), clip art images, no external links, you name it.

I don’t want to out the guy as he’s got plenty of troubles all ready, but this is just classic. From the FAQ of the site:

Why is [site name] not ranked high on the search engines?

[site name] web site is intentionally not optimized for search engines because our services are for companies needing high traffic exposure and awareness. The less traffic we receive the better because we focus on qualified and selected clients that will actually benefit from High Rank optimization.

You just can’t make this stuff up.

For the month of October in Google Webmaster Help Group Susan Moskwa has really picked up the pace and helped webmasters at a clip I haven’t seen ever before.  She’s got over 60 posts already this month (though those numbers may be Google Groups Buggy) .  It’s very encouraging to see as world traveler and Susan’s fellow Googler John Mueller pointed out earlier that their participation was less than stellar in September.  (and people thought I was a paranoid nut! It’s nice to see some numbers to back up my concerns)

I haven’t really noticed any other appreciable increases from Googler’s other than perhaps Wysz who is up to 17 posts this month.   JohnMu is getting up to speed and posting more frequently.  Unfortunately for us, the small time webmaster, it will always be a net loss with the assimilation of John into the Google collective as he will never be able to help as many as before.  I get the feeling that Adam Lasnik has moved on to other projects within the Google organisation as his contributions publicly have feathered off to nearly nothing.

Their Popular Picks series was largely ignored by the blogging crowd because they don’t get to increase their reader numbers and ad revenue by pointing out official comments by Googlers.  The search engine bloggers are all about getting the big Googler scoop and that  will not change until Google starts to release important information through the official channels and not through some hidden back door unattributed anonymous Googler quotes on A-Lister blogs.  As a whole however the answers were excellent and very helpful, I have personally used the pages as references dozens if not hundreds of times since they were introduced.  Thankfully, Wysz added a link to the series in their FAQ section, including a very rare appearance by search engine rock star Matt Cutts.

The official Webmaster Blog is still averaging just about a post a week so no real development there at all to speak of.

All-in-all I’d say they are improving their communication lead mostly by the efforts of Susan Moskwa who has appeared to take the lead in this over-due effort.  If this continues, I may have to consider rejoining the group, with the one caveat that I will not do the job that an overly successful corporation should do with their own people.  Helping webmasters with site reviews and opinions should be left to the mere mortal members of the group however Googlers should be accountable for minding the store when it come to official declarations, clarifications on their cryptic guidelines, and those most annoying and benign too frequently asked questions.

Adam Lasnik took a bold step forward recently at GWHG and opened up the forum for suggestions for Googler’s to respond to. In his own words:

We invite you to ask questions in this thread that:

• don’t deal with a specific site or sites
• are likely to be of interest to a great many webmasters around the world
• aren’t already covered in one of our recent blog posts or in our Help Center

I thought I’d take a stab at identifying some questions from every day non-professional SEO’s and web developers standpoint. This is based on my experience in GWHG and just some of the many often repeated questions we see. I was trying to be cognisant of the limitations that Googler’s must impart on themselves when offering information as we don’t want to help any spammers inadvertently. None of these are too in depth, nor all too insightful but they are FAQ that I don’t see answered (at least clearly) in their documentation. So here goes my list of subjects I think should be addressed:

1. Paid links clarification – There are two areas that need clarification with this issue. The Help Center says, ” Buying links in order to improve a site’s ranking is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results” yet we’ve heard from people like Adam Lasnik that, “the more common penalty applied in the case of linking schemes is for the link seller to have their ability to pass PageRank stripped away” By more common, I’m GUESSING that both the seller and the buyer can be penalized. However, what scares me, and probably most people is not understanding how the buyer is penalized as those are links on other sites and we’ve been told all along that other sites cannot harm your ranking. The other area that I’d like to see addressed is the Paid Directories references. Google pushes the yahoo directory in their guidelines, and Matt Cutts has defended them and give some guidelines on deciding whether or not a paid directory will be penalized or not. One of those directives centers around the review process that Yahoo uses. Is there somewhere I can apply to be granted the status us a reviewer? Is charging for links that are not nofollowed fine if you don’t accept all applications and clearly state it on the site? Is this a privilege reserved for Yahoo or can others gain this status?
2. Bad neighborhood – Not linking to a bad-neighborhood is often the advice given when evaluating a site. How are we supposed to determine what is a bad neighborhood anymore? Banned sites no longer have their PageRank gray barred, sites often have a ranking penalty applied while still showing all of their pages indexed, with the expansion of the supplemental index most sites can get almost all of their pages at least indexed. Is there any signal to look for other than a site being completely removed from the index?
3. Nofollow funneling vs. robots.txt, or both - Matt Cutts said, “The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt’ed out)” I can see how using nofollow on some of the links on a page will increase the value passed to the remaining links as the density has change, but I don’t understand the use of the robots.txt. Does this mean that if I had a page with 100 links on it and 99 of those links went to a pages that were blocked by robots.txt when the PageRank distribution is calculated the one link to a page that is not blocked would receive 100% of credit? After finding the links on a page and then visiting them and seeing a robots.txt block, does Google go back and recalculate the link juice for that page?
4. Incremental penalties - Various webmaster forums have long heated debates over minus this and minus that penalties. Could you expand on the existence of such actions where a site is just across the board demoted for everything. If it doesn’t exist it would be nice to hear that as well.
5. Homepage missing - Many, many, people have found their homepage missing yet the other pages on the site are still there. Is this an indication of anything, a bug, a hiccup, something to worry about, going to fix itself? Anything you can say on that would be great, it’s just happened too often to be coincidence.
6. Not ranking for your domain - One of the great many indicators that people use to determine if a site has suffered some sort of penalty is the “doesn’t rank for the domain name” test. Is there any validity to this? Or is it just misguided?
7. Meta tags - Could you please make a statement on which Metatags Google considers useful for it’s system?
8. No Messages - The message box in Webmaster Tools is great, though as you’ve stated you don’t notify 100% of penalties. The problem is that I don’t think its clear to people that not having a message does not mean you don’t have a penalty,the same goes for sitemap errors, robots.txt errors etc. People have flipped it to believe that a lack of a notice means that everything is fine. A post stating clarifying that would be wonderful
9. Reconsideration Request– I’ve seen it stated elsewhere but not officially the time it usually takes and the fact that multiple reconsideration requests aren’t looked on as a negative, something official would help.
10. Procedure for cross domain and in domain redirecting, is there a spamming threshold - What is the official stance on how to implement a sitewide redirect to a new domain, slowly, in chunks, all at once? The same for an in-site reconstruction. Is there an element of spam detection if someone 301’s too much?
11. Mythbusters post - I’d love to see some sort of mythbusting, official, post debunking some of the common Myths that you can.
12. Spam, paid link reporting fallacies - Once of the biggest reasons some people believe they’ve dropped down in the index is because someone has reported them as spam or as a link seller. Adam on the other hand has said in a comment before that you could report a site 40 million times and it won’t hurt their ranking (of course they could be dumped if they were indeed spamming). A statement to the point that if you are a good site, other people can’t harm you by submitting reports.
13. Bad External Links - Often people come to the group wondering if a link to them on some crap site is hurting them, I’d like to see an official statement to point to.

Like I said, nothing to in depth, just some of the more common questions and misconception that I’d like to see expounded upon.