Since I have to go through the effort of scrounging through these
Moderator questions and finding those that may actually have answers (I'm not partial to Google Moderator), I'll go ahead and transcribe all questions and answers....

"you say links dont count, but why is there such an emphasis on them and why does it seem that they DO make a difference?"

Links are one of the ways users and search engines find your site. So if visitors are important to you then links should also be important to you. - Jonathan, Simon

"About IP addresses, you always used to hear that you don't want to share because you could get punished if you share with a bad site. I'm guessing that's not a concern anymore -- true or false?"

Hey SEO Betty, you're right, I wouldn't worry about that anymore. The situations where it would matter are when the server is overloaded (can't respond to your visitors) and when it's incorrectly configured (not returning your site to your visitors). - JohnMu, Switzerland

"When checking out your links to not found pages, what would you do about links from spammy sites? In fact, what to do about links from spammy sites in general?"

In general, it's not something that you should worry about. We understand that you can't control all links to your site, and work hard to make our algorithms robust enough to prevent this type of activity from harming your site's ranking.

If you do notice any spam sites that are affecting Google's search results, please let us know by submitting a spam report:
http://www.google.com/support/webmaster ... swer=35265 - Wysz, Mountain View, CA

"Does using W3C standards make a difference in ranking on Google? If yes, when will HTML5 be supported?"

Indirectly adhering to standards always makes sense -- it helps to make sure that your site is accessible to a larger group of users, which could in turn result in more recommendations for your site, leading us to want to send more users there as well. I'm not sure how HTML5 fits into the whole thing though -- we'll have to wait and see what they come up with. - JohnMu, Switzerland

"Regarding sharedip, if another site that is hosted along with my site is banned by google - will it affect my website ranking??"

In general, no it won't affect your site's ranking. However, if your site is doing the same sneaky things as the site that got banned, then I think it would be a good idea to just clean things up instead of waiting . - JohnMu, Switzerland

"Thoughts on SE Rank Checking software? Are you against them? Would you purposely disable them?"

Hi Vince, I generally believe that rank checking software doesn't make much sense anymore (not to mention that they're against our Terms of Service and could result in us blocking your IP address). We use a lot of personalization and geotargeting in our search results - so what ranks high for one user might not rank high for others. It doesn't really help you much to know a "ranking number" if you can't tell how far this ranking is actually something that the majority of your users are likely to see. - JohnMu, Switzerland

"John, regarding duplicated content on the site. Lets say i have a description of my website is about on all pages. Will that be fine, even if that paragrapgh is duplicated?"

Sure, that's not a problem for us . Whether or not it would confuse users depends more on the layout that you choose, so I'd say it's up to you. - JohnMu, Switzerland

"Can one good unknown google secret so far - be revealed?"

We release secrets all the time -- such as the source code of Android just yesterday! - JohnMu, Switzerland

"Are you going to focus more on personalised search? If so, these results we currently look at won't really matter, as different sites will be at #1 for different people, right? - thank you "

Hi Misscj, that's right -- with personalized search it's possible that each user sees slightly different search results. We try to make those search results unique and compelling enough to make the user go visit and stay on the sites listed -- so if your site is really awesome, chances are high that we'd be recommending it to users as well . - JohnMu, Switzerland

"We had a great site that was very popular with lots of original content, but we had to switch to a new CMS (new shared IP) AND new domain - traffic tanked! I need help!!! Any suggestions?"

I'd recomemend making sure that all old URLs 301 redirect to the new ones. Also, it can take a bit of time for a change like this to be completely processed, so sometimes you just need to be a bit patient (and continue working on your new site). If it absolutely doesn't come back, it might be that we're just ranking the new site where we'd be ranking the old one as well. Alternately, you might want to start a thread in the Google Webmaster Help groups, where the folks there can take a look at your site in particular, since these kinds of changes involve steps that are unique to your site. - JohnMu, Switzerland

OK. I'm just getting a chance to see this now, and I feel like kicking myself!

For two reasons (well, more than that, but only two that pertain directly to search):

*I wish I'd seen this sooner, which would have saved tooons of time trying to sift through the actual Google info.

*I wish I'd thought to do this myself and give it to my boss to put on her blog!

You've provided a wonderful, useful service by doing this -- I'm looking forward to reading and learning even more on Search Geeks.

Thanks!!

Our pleasure Betty -- but beware that there is always a deeper dive into every statement that comes from a search engine.

If you found something that shed some light on what you are attempting to accomplish, I recommend reviewing it here so we can break it down further.