Matt Cutts Videos Transcription
With a Helpful Flowchart of Matt’s Thinking 
A few weeks ago we decided to transcribe Matt Cutts answering webmaster questions from all around the world because we felt that this information should not remain exclusively in video.
Because there are more than a 100 questions (we will keep adding new ones as they come out), only questions and brief excerpts of Matt’s answers will be on this page. For the complete transcriptions click on “Read more”.
Questions and answers are not in any particular order.
Enjoy:
- Does the position of keywords in the URL affect ranking? Example:
example.com/keyword/London is better than
Truthfully, I wouldn’t really obsess with it at that level of detail. It does help a little bit to have keywords in the URL. It doesn’t help so much that you should go stuffing a ton of keywords into your URL. Read more
2. When permanently redirecting (301) a large number of domains (read: more than 10) to one domain, does Google flag this as suspicious? What considerations does Google look at? For the purposes of this question, let’s assume this is a consolidation move.
I think there are plenty of valid reasons why somebody might do that. For example, if you have Google, there are a lot of people who registered Google typos. Read more
3. Does anchor text carry through all 301 redirects? Will there be a penalty for sites that do this as their sole way of link building?
Typically, anchor text does flow through 301 redirect. But, we don’t promise that would always happen. So the question if it carries through all 301 redirects; not necessarily. Read more
4. Is Google planning to create read-only “Guest Accounts” for Webmaster Tools? Many clients (particularly in heavily regulated industries e.g. banks) are very reluctant to provide access to a third party.
Great feature suggestion. I have no idea, because Webmaster Tool’s team have to plan out their resources and what they work on, just like any other team. I can see a valid use for this.
At the same time, there are other things that the Webmaster Tools folks are working on, that are really, really useful. Read more
- 5. Do you feel that the widespread and blanket use of nofollow tags is devaluing Google’s search algorithms? Examples such as Wikipedia, where ALL external links are nofollow. Does Wikipedia mean nothing to Google’s algorithms? Do Google take into account quality factors from nofollowed links when the links come from the well established authority websites, such as Wikipedia?
Even though SEOs may feel like that nofollow is everywhere on the web, if you look at the percentage of links that have nofollow, it’s actually a pretty miniscule percentage. Nofollows are not that common on the web compared to how perception of it might be. Read more
6. When will Google create software similar to Web Position so that SEOs, spam fighters and regular webmasters can check rankings etc. without violating the guidelines? Why not make a better product instead of going to war against these products?
Well, I wouldn’t call it going to war. Our guidelines have said the same thing they’ve been saying for 5, 6, 7 years, which is essentially ‘Please don’t hit us with automated queries’. The reason we’ve said that is that people do it us with automated queries and that takes up some server capacity. Read more
7. Can you verify that Google is putting more weight on “brands” in search engine rankings? If the answer is “yes” – what’s Google’s definition of a brand? Inspired by Aaron Wall’s post www.seobook.com/google-branding
I’ll try to give a pretty complete answer to this. I was planning on talking about it a little bit more at PubCon in Austin, in just a couple of weeks. But, inside Google, at least within search ranking team, we don’t really think about brands. We think about words like trust, authority, reputation, PageRank, high quality. Google philosophy on search results has been the same pretty much forever. Read more
8. Can you confirm if the Google SERPs are moving to Ajax, http://tinyurl.com/be5shp, if so how do you think it will affect analytics which rely on the keyword information being in the URL?
Google did roll out a change a few weeks ago, for a very small percentage of users, under 1% of users, and are doing almost what you might call a Java script enhanced search results. You show up on Google’s page and as you typing, you can do neat things with Java script. Read more
9. More than one H1 on the page; good or bad?
Well, if there’s a logical reason to have multiple sections, it’s not so bad to have multiple H1s. I would pay attention to overdoing it. If your entire page is H1, that looks pretty cruddy. Don’t do all H1 and then CSS to make it look like regular text. Read more
10. Do you think web search will ever make use of references (web site mentions that are not links) as a ranking signal?
There are two answers.
The first one is: I never want to take the ranking signal off the table. I’ve joked that if the phase of the moon can help us rank search results better, I’m willing to use the phase of the moon. Read more
11. A client has a leading competitor who has created 100 or so blog sites with little depth – Google gives them a top ranking on every related term in the industry. Why does this tactic still win? I thought this was crap hat tactics.
Crap hat tactics is a term Danny Sullivan used at a recent conference, where he’s just annoyed when people do spammy, junky staff that doesn’t really help anybody on the web. Read more
12. There seems to be little impact on visitors where in the site’s structure a given page is, so: Is it better to keep key content pages close to root, or have them deep within a topical funnel-structure, e.g. food/fast-food/burgers/hamburgers.php?
This is not SEO advice, this is just behavioral advice. If you can have stuff fewer number of clicks from the root page, visitors are more likely to find it. If somebody has to click 8 times to find the page to register for your conference, compared to REGISTERED right on the main root page, fewer people are going to find it, if it’s all that many clicks away. Read more
13. How does Google calculate site load times in the data it exposes in Google’s Webmaster statistics? Is the calculation simply average time to get and receive the HTML content for a page?
I think the answer is yes. That’s pretty much it. You know, Google bot sends out the request, and then starting from there we time how long it takes for us to see the request back. Read more
14. When a site is penalized by Google, why isn’t a message sent to the owner via Webmaster Tools telling them how/why it was penalized? Currently, site owners are left grasping in the dark trying to figure out what they did to cause a penalty.
The fact is, we do. We don’t do it for all penalties, because there are some bad guys, some spammers and some black-hats who you don’t want to clue in. But for things like hidden text, if we think your site is hacked, or vulnerable to hacking, we’ve even talked about sending messages to people who we think have old Google Analytics packages. Read more
15. If you have a lot of blog content for a new section of a site (100+ pages), is it best to release it over a period of time or is it fine to just unleash 100 pages?
I think in most cases, especially if it’s high quality content, I would just unleash the 100 pages. Now, if you’re talking about 10,000 or 100,000 or a million pages, you might be a just a little more cautious. Read more
16. How much weight does the number of years a domain is registered for have on your ranking?
My short answer is not to worry about that too much, not very much at all, in fact.
Danny Sullivan had asked about this recently because there were some registrants sending out emails that said something like ‘Oh, did you know that Google gives you a bonus in ranking if you register you domain for 3 or more years’. Read more
17. When did “Did You Mean” search results begin to be displayed? And what is the criteria for presenting “Did You Mean” search results above the normal search results?
The short answer is, it happened relatively recently. I want to say November-ish of 2008, so relatively recently. And when do we show it? Well, when we’re even more sure that it’s something useful.
Not everyone clicks on “Did You Mean”. Read more
18. I’m using a template website (I’m an amateur!). The H1 tag appears below the H2 tag in the code. Does the spider still know what’s going on?
Yes. I wouldn’t worry about it, we handle H1s and H2s very well. Don’t make your entire page H1 or H2. You wouldn’t believe the sort of stuff people put up on the web. Read more
19. Seeing as the “link:” search query is hardly ever accurate, what would your favorite/preferred way to check for inbound links be if you were a webmaster?
Well, I’ve explained this before, but “link:” operator is accurate, but it only shows a subsample of your links. My preferred way would be to log into Google’s Webmaster Tools and we would show you a very exhaustive list of your backlinks, pretty much all of the backlinks that we know of in Google’s Webmaster console. Read more
20. If you have a company logo on your site, what is the best way to include the text of the logo for the SEO purposes? ALT tag, CSS hiding, or does it matter?
Yes, it does matter! It’s much better to use ALT tag than hiding, like I’m hiding some CSS, like 9000 pixels over to the left of the page, or something like that. That’s what the ALT tag was more or less built for. Read more
21. What impact does “page bloat” have on Google rankings? Most of the winners in SEO seem to have very simple pages (very few images, HTML-only design), sometimes to the detriment to the user in a poorly designed page.
I wouldn’t jump to conclusions. Back in the early days of Google, we used to truncate at about 100 kilobytes. So if you had a “page bloat” back then, I could imagine that your content might get snipped off halfway through, or you wouldn’t see any of it. Read more
22. What are your views on “PageRank” sculpting? Useful and recommended if implemented right, or unethical?
Well, I wouldn’t say it’s unethical, because it’s stuff on your website. You’re allowed to control how the PageRank flows around within your site. I would say that it’s not the first thing I would work on. I would work on getting more links, having higher quality content, those are always the sorts of things that you want to do first. Read more
23. How much time is Google taking to index a new webpage, and how can we accelerate the process besides using Google Webmaster Tools?
Well, the simple answer is to get more links. We can index a page within seconds, certainly within minutes, if we find, for example, CNN is linking to you. We’ll crawl that very, very quickly. Read more
24. How can I make sure that Google reaches and indexes pages that are on a lower (deeper) level of a website?
Well, it’s unclear if you’re asking how many levels deep it is in terms of directories, or far it is from the root page. One way that you can make sure that Google reaches those pages is link from your root page, your main page directly to the deep page that you wanted to be crawled. Read more
25. What impact does server location have on Google rankings?
Well, way, way, way back in the dawn of Google, you know it was funny because people would rank in different countries based only on the TLD. So, FR meant that you’re French. But, that’s all that they knew.
Back in 2000/2001 type timeframe, we started to look at where the servers were located, its IP address. Read more
26. Is there are limit to the number of pages that Google will index from one site?
Good question. Not that I’m aware of, Chris (name of the person that asked the question). We will index millions of pages if we think a site is sufficiently good and has a sufficient amount of content. You are very unlikely to bump up against a limit in our index. Read more
27. Are product description pages on an e-commerce site termed as duplicate content, if the same product description appears on other sites? It does happen for many branded products.
You are absolutely right, it does happen and most of the time when it happens, it’s because that’s not original content. So, if you get an affiliate feed and it might have images, it might not have images, and you have the same content on your page, your e-commerce product page as 400 other sites, it’s hard to distinguish yourself. Read more
28. “Query deserves freshness.” Fact or fiction?
It’s a fact. Amit Singhal has talked about it in the New York Times that we believe that there are some queries that deserve freshness. QDF was how he talked about it and that is fact, not fiction.
29. In the search results, Google will often display a snippet appropriate to the specific search query – often disregarding the meta description. Is Google doing away with meta description use like they did with meta keywords?
Alright, Quentin (person who asked the question). Let me lay a little bit of schooling on you. It actually turns out that we used to not use the meta description at all. We would only use the snippet appropriate to the specific search query. Read more
30. Will Google find text in images someday?
Boy, that would be a really big undertaking! I think it would be fun. Read more
31. Why does Google crawl/index blogs (specifically sites notified by “WordPress XMLRPC pings”) so much faster than a “normal” site submitting a revised Sitemap? What is the impact of that on the overall “quality” of the index?
Well, we always try to maximize the quality, the relevance, the accuracy of our index. You want to make a distinction between crawling and indexing.
Sitemap submission does not guarantee that we will crawl the URLs on that list. It is very helpful to help us discover new URLs, or to make canonicalization decisions. Read more
32. As Google’s algorithms evolve, is it better to have exceptional links and mediocre content, or exceptional content and mediocre links? By links I mean inbound link quality/quantity. Can you sites with awesome content outrank mediocre/established sites?
Google always have to trade off the balance between authority and topicality, for the lack of the better word. If somebody types in ‘viagra’, which is one of the most spammed terms in the world, you want something that’s about Viagra, not just something that has a lot of authority, like Newsweek, Times that is talking about writing an article with one mention of Viagra, where they say ‘Oh, this is something like Viagra’, you know, just a throw off phrase. Read more
33. “Excessive white space” in the HTML source is bad. Fact, myth or somewhere in between?
We really don’t care that much. We’re pretty good, anytime we see a white space, we’ll separate stuff. We can ignore white space – it does cause us a lot of harm, either way.
The only thing to pay attention to is, I have seen some sneaky people who will try to do hidden text or whatever, and they’ll start their HTML with 60 new lines. Read more
34. Recently, Google has been more proactive in providing results that featured “corrected” spellings. In what way will smart guesses be employed in search results in the future? Can we expect more synonyms in search results, for example?
I think, as we look forward, you get more and more users, and some of those users are not savvy, and some of those users don’t always spell well. One figure that I heard is, if you look random queries, about 10% of them might be misspelled. Read more
35. Has Google changed the relevancy it awards to Social Media sites in the last six months?
We tend not to think about ‘Oh, just links from Social Media sites’, or just like we tend not to think about so much ‘Oh, brands’, or things like that.
We tend to think about links; whether they’re useful, whether they’re not useful, so we use that as our litmus test. We try to give more credit, more trust to links we think are really valuable. Read more
36. Does Google Analytics have plans to start adding specific tools around Web 2.0 or social media websites?
Analytics is a tool for your website. The question is, if I have Web 2.0 website, can Google help me?
I think that the answer is yes, because as I recall, and I’m not the expert of Google Analytics, I love those guys but I don’t talk to them that often, I think that we do provide analytics solutions for Flash these days, and also for Ajax. Read more
37. Is Google aggregating SearchWiki data with Analytics for rankings?
No.
I’ve said before that my team, web spam team, will not go over and ask Analytics team for data. We don’t get any feed from Analytics team and we’ve said we’re not currently using SearchWiki data.
Is it possible that in the future we might? Read more
38. Underscores or hyphens in the URL, does it make a difference? my-page vs my_page?
It does make a difference, I would go with dashes/hyphens, if you can. If you have underscores and things are working fine with you, I wouldn’t worry about changing your architecture. Read more
39. Hi Matt, I have the same sandwich for lunch every day. Will I be punished by Google for duplicate content? Can the canonical tag help me here? I just can’t get enough Reuben sandwiches!
Not really, it doesn’t work in meat space/sandwich space yet! It only works in web space! He says, he can’t get enough of Reuben sandwiches. Power to you! Read more
40. Are titles and description tags helpful to increase the organic CTR – clicks generated from organic (unpaid) search – which in turn will help in better ranking with a personalized search perspective?
Great question! So many people think about rankings, and stop right there. That’s not the right way to think about things. You want to think about your rankings and then you want to think about maximizing your click through, which means making your title and your snippet very, very compelling, not deceptive, but something that invites the users to click on it because they know they’ll find what they want. Read more
41. Which search media does return the more reliable information: Google or Twitter?
Now, don’t go hatin’ on Twitter and try people to bust heads. Twitter has many, many great uses, it’s great for breaking real-time sort of news, it’s fantastic for asking your friends.
Google, on the other hand, tries to return really reliable, really reputable information. If you’re sorting by date, Twitter’s fantastic. Read more
42. I keep a “blogroll” page with link to all my friends’ blogs on my blog. Will that affect my blog’s reputation in Google? Recently my friend lost a PR5 to 0 for such a page.
Certainly, who you link to can affect your reputation. So, if you’re linking to spammy sites, sites we consider junky, spammy, whatever, that can affect your site’s reputation. Read more
43. How does someone begin to SEO their site on a small budget in an overwhelmed industry such as real estate?
Well, I’ll give you the same answer regardless whether it’s a real estate or any other industry. I think that there are a couple of things to bear in mind. Read more
44. We sell a software product, and there are 100s of software download directories on the web of varying quality. Could submitting our product to all of them hurt our rankings or domain trust/authority?
OK, so we’re talking only about the software product, a .exe, not about a website. If it’s only a software product, then I wouldn’t really worry about it. Some of those directories are not of high quality, and we might end up taking out or scoring differently those directories, but it wouldn’t hurt your website to have a link from those software directories. Read more
45. Does stripping file extensions from URLs (site.com/folder/page.html versus site.com/folder/page) have demonstrable benefit in the SERPs?
I don’t really think it does, and personally, I would not do that. People like to know that it’s an HTML page that they’re hitting. If you have a directory, then sure, have the directory. Read more
46. Hi Matt, what are your opinions on optimizing an Ecommerce website where the main pages/products may not necessarily be rich in content?
That’s a tough question! Essentially, you’re saying ‘Here’s a place where you can buy products’ and there’s not a lot of content, or maybe content is duplicated from bunch of places. My short answer is, put on your user hat. Read more
47. If I externalize all CSS style definitions and JavaScript scripts and disallow all user agents from accessing these external files (via robot.txt), would this cause problems for Googlebot? Does Googlebot need access to these files?
I personally would recommend not blocking that. For example, the White House recently rolled out new robot.txt and I think they blocked the images, directory or CSS or JavaScript, something like that. Read more
48. I have a client who was hacked. The SEO consultant said things were cleaned up, but they weren’t correctly. All 30,000 Viagra/Cialis type and paid links have been removed, but no improvement in SERPs. We sent reconsideration. What do we do now?
I would send another reconsideration request. I would also do a “site: search” and look for Viagra, Cialis, porn, free sex etc. any nasty, spammy terms you can think of; just to make sure all pages are gone. Read more
49. If I’m looking to hire an SEO agency, which one do you recommend?
I’m not going to say which SEO agency I personally recommend because you never know; things can change, people change their policy, you never know exactly what different agencies might be doing.
I’ll give you a general answer to the question. Read more
50. When you move a domain from one registrar to another, or your registrar information changes very slightly (e.g. new phone number), will Google ding you for instability at the registrar?
My answer is no, probably not. Certainly, people need to change their information; sometimes they change registrars – that’s completely normal. That’s completely expected behavior. Read more
51. Can you talk abut the change is Google’s referrer string?
The short answer is that there is a change on the horizon, and it’s only a small percentage of users right now, but I think that it probably will grow, and will grow over time; where Google’s referrer, that is, whenever you do a Google search and you click on a result, you go to another website and your browser passes around value called referrer. Read more
52. What are the factors that go into determining of a PageRank of a Twitter page, e.g. it is the followers, backlinks?
I gave an answer about Twitter where I said that we treat Twitter pages just like regular pages. It’s the exact same thing; we don’t look at the number of followers you have on Twitter; we look at the number of links that you have to your profile, or to your specific tweets. Read more
53. Is it possible to exclude Experts Exchange from search results? Why are they ranked so high, with such a spammy interface?
There are a lot of different nuances to answer this question. We’re not going to move Experts Exchange because they don’t violate our quality guidelines, or at least they currently don’t. They don’t cloak; some people think that they do cloak, but if you go and look at the cache page and try and get an answer, click on the cached page and go down to the very bottom, the content is there. Read more
54. Any reason why Google search does not treat the @ symbol differently given the rise of Twitter? For example, @mattcutts and mattcutts give me the same results.
Well, historically, that was a deliberate choice because we didn’t want to index the email addresses. At least I think it was the deliberate choice. You don’t want somebody scraping Google to find bunch of email addresses. Read more
55. When I do a Google search for my business name, Google suggests ‘Did you mean:’ with some other company name. Is there anything we can do to keep that from happening?
Not that I know of, at least not right now. There’s nothing where we have a form that you can fill out and say ‘This is bad’.
You can try finding our various help or web forums and reporting it there. The hope is that over time we learn that sort of thing automatically. Read more
56. Is it good to put a ‘coming soon’ page for new domains? Google seems to prioritize new domains in SERPs. Will a ‘coming soon’ page stand as negative for it?
No, I think a coming soon page can be pretty smart. I think it’s good for users so they don’t just end up on a black hole page that doesn’t resolve or something like that. Read more
57. Is over-optimization bad for a website? Ex – excessive use of nofollow.
Very good question! First off, if it’s your website, you can use nofollow all you want, you don’t need to worry about that – there’s no penalty for excessive use of nofollow. You’re not going to get into trouble because of that. Read more
58. Will I be penalized for having every file in my XML Sitemap listed with the same priority? Google Webmaster Tools gives me a warning on that, but at the same time, priority field is optional.
Well, I definitely don’t think you’ll be penalized. If you give all of those files the same priority, we’ll just try to sort out which ones we think are the most important on our own. Read more
59. If a page is disallowed in the robots.txt, will a link to this page transfer/leak link juice?
Essentially, suppose that EBay.com is disallowed in robots.txt. Will a link to EBay.com, even though it’s roboted out, still collect link juice? The answer is yes. Read more
60. In regards to new canonicalization tag, does it make sense for large corporations to consider placing that tag on every page due to marketing tracking codes and large levels of duplicate URLs like faceted pages and load balancing servers?
This is a great question. Should you put canonicalization tag on every single page?
Well, there’s a short-term and long-term answer. Read more
61. Does using a class or an id in a header tag: <h1 id=”whatever”=>text</h1>
instead of using plain headers: <h1>text</h1>
interfere with the way search engines see and understand headings?
I believe the answer is no because you still have, for example, h1 you just have <h1 id=”whatever”> so I don’t think that interferes in any way. We are pretty good about saying “here is a hyperlink or an image tag and here extra attribute width or height, we can parse those”. Read more
62. In some queries I can see the date of the post/article in the description snippet (at Google search). Why? Can I tell Google not to use it? If yes, how?
Right now, I don’t think there’s a way to say it ‘Please don’t do this’. Our snippet team is always thinking about how to show really helpful descriptions, or what we call snippets of our search results. Read more
63. Star Wars or Star Trek?
Star Wars… Sorry, Star Trek folks, but there’s like 50,000 movies admittingly Clone Wars. OK, I can see both sides. I’ve always been a bit of a Star Wars fan, and I don’t even know all the Star Trek trivia, but there are good points to both sides.
64. What are Google’s plans for indexing the deep web? Are there best practices for form construction to optimize for this?
Great question! We recently published a paper in VLDB which, I believe, stands for ‘Very Large Databases’, that talks exactly about our criteria, all the ways we try to do it safely so that if people don’t want their forms to be crawled, we won’t crawl them. Read more
65. Will SEO still exist in 5 years?
Four people liked that question, 45 didn’t like that question! I’m still going to answer it.
Yes, I think SEO will still exist in 5 years. Google tries to make it so that you don’t need to be an SEO expert, but SEO in some sense is almost like a resume. In the same way that you polish a resume, you figure out how to put your best foot forward. Read more
66. Is Google doing anything different when it comes to serving up Twitter results?
The answer is no, we’re not doing anything different. We have our web search results and if a lot of people link to a particular ‘tweet’, or a particular message that someone did on Twitter, then we think that’s really relevant and we see the content of that page or that status message and we’ll just return it with our normal scoring. Read more
67. Is it a good thing to put’ nofollow’ in links to a disclaimer, privacy statements and other pages like that with the internal PageRank in mind? I hear different stories about this.
Good question. The reason that I would use ‘nofollow’ is if you truly don’t want a page to be indexed at all. For example, a login page; Googlebot doesn’t know how to login, and that’s not of any value for users to have. Read more
68. Will DiggBar create duplicate content issues? For example, my site is www.example.com and now when you add digg.com before my site’s address (digg.com/example.com), it is showing a page from Digg.com with my content (exactly the same).
The short answer is no. As Digg originally launched it, it could have caused duplicate content issues, and in fact, it could have resulted in pages from Digg being removed from Google. Read more
69. Will you ever switch to a Mac?
Will see, Barry (person who asked the question). Right now, I love Google Chrome, and Google Chrome keeps me tied to Windows. But, if Google Chrome is available for a Mac or for a Linux, I could definitely see myself trying a different operating system. Read more
70. Does Google crawl and treat TinyURLs using a 301 redirect the same as other links?
Well, let me take a mention of TinyURL.com and substitute URL shorteners in general. The answer is, whenever we crawl one of these links, if they do a 301, yes, we do follow those and flow the PageRank, just as we normally would with a 301 from any other site. Read more
71. Is a website designed with a CSS-based layout more SEO friendly than a table-based layout?
Frankly, I wouldn’t worry about it. We see tables, we see CSS – we have to handle both. We try to score them well, no matter what kind of layout mechanism you use. Frankly, I would use what’s best for you. Read more
72. How do meta geo tags influence the search results?
The answer is that it‘s not something that we look at very closely at all, not meta geo tags. We tend to look at the IP address, we tend to look at the GTLD or the CCLD, that’s the country code TLD; to level domains, so .fr or .de etc. Read more
73. How accurate is Google’s backlink check (link:…)? Are all nofollow backlinks filtered out or why does Yahoo/MSN show quite more backlink results?
The short answer is, historically, we only had room for only a small percentage of links because web search was the main part, and we didn’t have a ton of servers for ‘link:’ queries. We have doubled or increased the amount of links we showed over time, but it is still a subsample, it’s still a relatively small percentage. Read more
74. If you have inbound links from reputable sites, but those sites do not show up in a link:webname.com search, does this mean you are not getting any “credit” in Google’s eyes for having inbound links?
No, it doesn’t. ‘Link:’ only shows a sample, a subsample of backlinks that we know about. It’s a random sample; it’s not like we only show the high PageRank backlinks. That’s what we used to do, and then anyone who had PageRank 4 or below, wasn’t able to see their backlinks; because they weren’t in a high PageRank, they weren’t getting high PageRank links. Read more
75. Does the new canonicalization tag make it safe to add tracking arguments to some of my internal links without fear that Google will split the quality signals between the two addresses?
I believe you can do this. I would try it out on a small directory or a small set of URLs at first, to make sure it’s completely safe. If you can fix it upstream, like if you can do something with your cookies, or your Analytics package and say ‘Oh, I’m getting to this point of my page so I’ll track that event’. Read more
76. Will the new canonical tag help with issues where you by accident (stupid editors linking to wrong addresses) have indexed sites by the IP address rather than hostname?
I’ll have to double check, but that is the sort of thing that you would like to be able to do; you’d like to take your IP address and put that over to your hostname. Read more
77. What impact do site load times have on Google’s ranking?
The short answer is, none right now. Now, let’s give it a little more color. Of course, if a site takes so long to load that Googlebot can’t get a copy of that, then that will have an effect on your rankings because your site is essentially timing out. Read more
78. As far as big brands go, why is it that they seem to do well irregardless of relevance, content or links when analyzing keyword placement in search engine result pages?
Believe it or not, we have a lot of big brands that say ‘We don’t show up as often as we should show up’ so it’s safe to assume that Mom and Pops yell at us for saying that big brands rank higher than they should, and the big brands yell at us, saying ‘Well, we’re really, really important in the real world, we should show up more in the search results than the Mom and Pops’. Read more
79. Do dates in the URLs of blogs or websites help determine freshness of the content or is it largely ignored?
I think dates in the URL or in the content can be very useful, but people can also try to optimize that and say they’re always 10 minutes old. Read more
80. Hi Matt, could you confirm whether the geographic location of the web host has any significant ranking factors for organic SEO?
Yes, it does because we look at the IP address of your web server. So if your web server is based in Germany, we’re more likely to think that it’s useful for German users. Read more
81. When will you commence work on improving the information provided in Google (Webmaster Tools) as per the suggestion you would at the start of the year?
The answer is that the webmaster team up in the Kirkland has been working very hard to try and make sure that the information is both more reliable and updated more often. Read more
82. Will Google consider Yahoo! Directory and BOTW as sources of paid links? If no, why is this different from another site that sell link ?
Well, I answered this question in the past, but since enough people are curious to as I’ll do the spiel again. Whenever we look whether a directory is useful to users we ask “Ok what is the value ad of that directory”. Read more
83. We are changing a fairly large HTML site to CMS. What are the essentials to keep in mind so that we do not lose our search rankings?
Very good question. I have seen a lot of people, a lot of websites go through like a 2 year re-design only to launch with a completely new software underlying package, you know, platform, CMS underneath it and completely new HTML and suddenly the rankings are not what they have hoped they would be and they are stuck. Read more
84. Does Google treat links in footers differently than links surrounded by text (e. g. in a paragraph)?
If you go back and read the original PageRank paper, they said that links were distributed completely uniformly; PageRank was distributed without regard to whether the link was at the top of the page, the bottom of the page, in the footer, in the text, all that sort of stuff. Read more
85. When do you reckon Rich Snippets will be made widely available? Can I suggest a tool in Google Webmaster Tools that lets you view (or preview) Rich Snippets from your site?
It’s a good suggestion. The fact is, we’re going to take it slowly at first, to sort of make sure that people are doing good things with Rich Snippets. For example, you can imagine going crazy with your snippets, and it might actually cause the click through to go down, if users didn’t like those Rich Snippets. Read more
86.Why are the UK SERPs still really poor with irrelevant non UK sites (US/AUS/NZ) ranking very high Google.co.uk since early June? Why do .com sites rank highly in UK SERPs?
It’s absolutely true. If you do a search for ‘car insurance’ on Google.co.uk, you are more likely to see, for example, TescoFinance.Com, or Churchill.Com, some sites that are definitely UK focused, that even mention UK in the title, but are not necessarily .co.uk. Read more
87. What factors influence a video universal result in Google? I have the same video, one on YouTube with high views, comments and ratings, yet the other one with low views and no comments is the one that ranks – why is this?
My first guess, without knowing any specifics, is that maybe this video got links from very reputable sites or has more PageRank; we still do look at links, we still do look at PageRank whenever we’re trying to rank things. Read more
88. Does Google value its own links for PR/Linkjuice? Google Bookmarks, Google Profiles, etc. Reason – Google links never appear in Webmaster Tools.
I don’t know about they ‘never appear in Webmaster Tools’. I think I have, that Google blog has me on its blogroll or something. So, I’ve seen some links from Google. But in general, people hold Google to a very high standard. Read more
89. Are different sites treated differently? E.G. are blogs treated differently than e-commerce sites? Does Google attempt to figure out the context of a site or are all websites equal?
If you go back to the original formulation of PageRank, we would tend to treat all types of websites sort of equally. But Google has gotten more sophisticated over time, and we do reserve the right to treat different types of sites differently. Read more
90. Okay, Matt. It’s time to get serious. Can you show us something that you have programmed yourself?
Well, the first version of SafeSearch would be the best example of that and I’m pretty proud that it worked very well in my opinion. The nice thing is there are very smart people at Google, and they took SafeSearch and made it even better. Read more
91. I have a server-side script that automatically redirects visitors to a mobile version of a site if they are using a mobile browser. My question is: What are some things to watch out for (if any) when serving different content based on the visitor?
Great question! A lot of people think, just because they change the mobile browser, that they might be cloaking. Let’s just go back and review the definitions. Read more
92. Is there a minimum number of spam complaints about a domain and/or SERP before Google reviews the complaint? Presumably you get thousands of spam complaints daily, are these sorted into any order to be reviewed? The most popular first?
We do order the complaints. Typically, we think about what’s the impact on the user. We definitely do say “If you have a spam complaint, and it’s about a site that a lot of users are going to see” that might get more attention than a site that almost never gets seen. Read more
93. Does Googlebot use inference when spidering – having crawled site.com/article/page1.htm and /page2.htm, can it guess at the existence of a /page3.htm and crawl it? Or does it stick entirely to what it finds via the link graph and/or Sitemaps/feeds?
Well, we also take submitted URLs, that’s another way we can crawl things. But we do use some inference. For example, suppose you have an URL with 3 or 4 different parameters. Read more
94. Whenever Google detects a violation of its Webmaster Guidelines, can we expect a feature to be added in Google Webmaster Central where it could help the webmasters learn what the issue was?
First off, let’s take a step back and talk about the scale of the web and how many people Google has. There are tens of millions of domains and billions of pages on the web. Read more
95. Does Google have any suggestions (or data) on the impact of pipes versus dashes in the title tag?
I think they’re both viewed as separators, so I think either one should be fine. Dashes are a lot more common and we definitely handle dashes well, I would expect that we handle pipes well. Read more
96. Why doesn’t Google.com validate (according to W3C)?
Long story, but the historical answer is this: Google looks at the number of bytes that we actually return to the users. We want that to be as smallest as possible, because every byte matters when you’re serving up hundreds of millions of search requests to users. Read more
97. Now that Google can crawl JavaScript links, what is going to happen to all those paid links that were behind JavaScript code? Will Google start penalizing them?
I answered this at SMX Advanced in Seattle, but let me answer it again. Google has gotten better and better at crawling JavaScript, to the point that URLs that you might have put in JavaScript and you thought weren’t going to be crawled, could possibly be crawled and indexed now. Read more
98. Is there a way to benefit from content scraped from your site?
Well, if you make sure that pages on the site link to you or articles have links to you, then if someone scrapes you, they might end up linking to you. To the extent that that’s a successful scraper, or a successful spammer, those links will help you along. Read more
99. Are you ever going to do “weather reports” like Yahoo! does for algorithm updates? Simply a confirmation that one has happened would please many SEOs, as clients might think they’ve been penalized. Your algo update reports years ago were wonderful.
Well, thank you for the years ago praise, but it’s sort of interesting. We used to update our index once a month and in 2003 we moved to updating our index once daily. We’ve only gotten more fresh since then, so we’re sort of always indexing. Read more
100. What is the best way to serve different content according to user country IP (legal reasons)?
A lot of people misunderstand the difference between cloaking and geo or IP based delivery. IP based delivery is delivering content based on IP address. Makes sense, right? Cloaking is showing different content to users than it’s showing to Googlebot. Read more
101. A question to non-intended duplicate content: If an online shop can be reached through several TLDs (like .de, .at, .ch) and the only difference is the currency, (and necessarily the checkout process) does Google consider this duplicate content? What can be done?
Most of the time, you don’t need to worry about that. For example, if you have content on .de and .com, it would normally be German in .de and English in .com; that’s certainly not going to be viewed as duplicate content if you’ve handwritten some good text here and handwritten some good text there. Read more
102. Can the “Change of Address” feature in Google Webmaster Tools be used to merge two websites (site B becomes a part of site A), or is its use limited to moving a site from one domain to another? Do you have any advice on successfully merging sites?
Well, the “Change of Address” is intended to be moving from one site to another site. I wouldn’t recommend you try to merge a bunch of sites, or taking that sort of approach. Read more
