Via Threadwatch, I came across some Google videos of Matt Cutts fielding questions that he had received through his blog comments. I was initially quite interested in seeing the videos, as I thought he would be including demonstrations or visuals to aid in answering the questions; however, upon watching the first three installments, I was disappointed to see that the videos all consist of Matt standing in front of a blank wall talking to the camera Blair Witch style. Not that what he was saying wasn’t interesting or relevant; it’s just that I don’t see a need to answer the questions via video if all you’re doing is simply answering the questions.
Having said that, I took the liberty of transcribing the questions and answers to the best of my abilities and have posted them below, as I feel that it’s easier to read Q and A’s rather than listen to them and even have to rewind or pause the video in order to catch what was said.
1. Do updates in Sitemaps depend on the page views of a site?
No; page views are not a factor on when things are updated. There are different pieces of data in Sitemaps. Matt Cutts gives an example of 5 different little pieces of data that can all be updated at different times and frequencies (typically within days, but in a worst-case scenario within weeks), but page views are not one of the factors.
2. What are some general guidelines and recommendations to increase a site’s visibility on Google?
- Make sites crawlable. Look at the site through the search engine’s eyes. Matt says to “Go back to 1994 and use lynx“, and he also says to make a text browser. He adds, “If you can get through the entire site using only a text browser, you’re gonna be in pretty good shape.” It’s also good to have a site map on your site.
- Market/promote/optimize your site. Include good and interesting content. Think of a reason as to why someone would want to link to you. Think also about people who are really relevant to your niche, and target them accordingly.
- Have a “hook” (ahem, linkbait?). Offer something viral such as a newsletter, tutorials, etc. Think of something interesting that sets you apart from other sites and submit it to social networking sites.
3. What conditions cause Google to use the DMOZ snippet when there’s already a valid meta description tag on the page?
Matt had to ask the Snippets Team (I’m serious) about this question. Basically, it boils down to which snippet is a better match for what the user typed in. The snippet selected and displayed is query-dependent. If the DMOZ snippet is more appropriate for the typed query, then that one will be displayed. If you don’t like the open directory snippet, use a meta=”NOODP” tag and your page’s meta description tag will be displayed instead.
4. Does Google favor bold over strong tags?
In general, Google probably favors bold tags just a little bit more, but it’s so slight that you shouldn’t worry about it. The effect is relatively small, so Matt recommends just using what’s best for your site and for your users.
5. Can you put an end to some myths about having too many sites on the same server/having sites with IPs too similar to each other/having them all include the same javascript off a different site?
- If you’re an average webmaster, don’t worry about any of those issues.
- If you have a small number of sites (2-5) and they’re all different themes, you don’t need to worry that much. If, on the other hand, you have around 2,000 sites, you need to ask yourself if you really have enough value-add content to support that many sites (and Matt added that you probably don’t).
- Many people use javascript trackers, and Google AdSense is javascript included off another site. It’s something a lot of sites do on the web, so you shouldn’t worry about it. You may need to worry, however, if you have about 5,000 sites and include the javascript that does the sneaky redirect.
6. I’m having trouble understanding the problems that we face every time we launch a new country…we launch a new country with millions of new pages at the same time…[this was a long-winded question; basically the last time the guy did this his site didn’t do very well]
- Matt’s answer changed somewhat since the last time he fielded this question. When asked this at SES NY he said, “Go ahead and launch stuff and don’t worry about it. It might bring more scrutiny, but generally you should be fine.”
- Now he thinks that if you’re launching sites with millions of new pages, you want to be a little more cautious if you can. Generally, if you’re launching with that many pages, it’s probably better to launch a little more softly (e.g. launch with a few thousand pages, then gradually add a few thousand more).
7. I’m wondering what the status is on Google Images and if we can expect to see an update on the indexing technology in the future.
Matt mentions that WebmasterWorld recently had a thread about the same topic. He acknowledges that there was an index update last weekend, and that a lot of the stuff you may not see may be as simple as bringing in a new infrastructure that the main web index has. They are always working on making Google Images better.
8. Which do you find more important in developing and maintaining a website: SEO or end user optimization?
- Both are very important. If you don’t have both, you won’t do as well. If you don’t have SEO it’s harder to be found, and if you don’t have end user optimization you won’t get conversion, you won’t get people to stay and enjoy your site, post on your forums, buy your products, etc.
- The trick is to try and make both the exact same; that is, make it so user interest and the search engine’s interests are as aligned as much as possible. If you can do that your site will be in good shape because you’ll balance both. Ideally, what’s good for one should be good for the other. Your site will be easy for both users and search engines to navigate.
9. Can you point us to some spam detection tools? I would like to monitor my sites to make sure they come up clean and have a valid way to rat out my no-good spamming competitors.
- Google has a lot of tools that flag and detect spam, but most of them aren’t available outside of Google.
- The Yahoo! site explorer shows backlinks on a per page or a per domain basis.
- There are tools available that shows you everything that’s on one IP address. If you’re on a shared virtual host, you’ll get a ton of perfectly normal sites, but sometimes someone might leave a lot of his sites on one IP address. If one of them is spam you could find more of that person’s sites that way. Be careful, though: don’t automatically assume that they all belong to one person.
- Sitemaps can tell you if you’re having any crawl errors and will show you other problems they’ve found in case you want to check your site to make sure it’s coming up clean.
10. What about the cleanliness of code (ex. W3C)? Any chance that the accessible work will leak into the main algorithm?
- Normal people write code with errors. Matt cited a statistic from Eric Brewer that stated 40% of all HTML pages have syntax errors. Obviously, there’s no way a search engine can remove 40% of the content from its index just because someone didn’t validate or something. There’s a lot of high-quality content out there (especially content that’s handmade) that probably doesn’t validate.
- Matt said that if you asked him this question a while ago, he would have said, “We don’t have a signal like that in our algorithms, and it’s probably for a good reason.” However, now that work has been done to do this accessible search, someone might look at it using an impossible signal; however, any signal used to improve the quality would have to pass rigorous evaluation.
- He recommends that in general it’s a good idea to have your site validated, but he wouldn’t prioritize it as the most important thing to do to your site. Matt suggests that first you make a great site with compelling content, and then go back and “dot the i’s and cross the t’s” (and, as indicated in Wayne’s World 2, dot the lower case j’s) so you have good accessibility as well. He says that validation and closing off the last little things usually don’t matter as much to the search engines.
There you have it, folks! Read them and study them to your heart’s content, because now you won’t have to watch Matt Cutts’ videos over and over again in your office and be accused of having a mad crush on him because you’ve been staring at his head for the past hour transcribing what he’s been saying. Not that I was accused of anything like that…heh heh…I hate you, Matt Inman…
