Good interview with Matt Cutts from Phillip Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped. I particularly liked this bit about valid HTML and rewarding it in the rankings:
People sometimes ask whether Google should boost (or penalize) for valid (or invalid) HTML. There are plenty of clean, perfectly validating sites, but also lots of good information on sloppy, hand-coded pages that don’t validate. Google’s home page doesn’t validate and that’s mostly by design to save precious bytes. Will the world end because Google doesn’t put quotes around color attributes? No, and it makes the page load faster. 🙂 Eric Brewer wrote a page while at Inktomi that claimed 40% of HTML pages had syntax errors. We can’t throw out 40% of the web on the principle that sites should validate; we have to take the web as it is and try to make it useful to searchers, so Google’s index parsing is pretty forgiving.
As much as folks in SEO distrust what Matt has to say, I think this quote is worthy of respecting. I think when you combine healthy skepticism with common sense and an understanding of motivation, you can glean useful information from Matt’s works. I still applaud the guy for having the chutzpah to get out there and take all the flak for writing a blog on the company and their search ranking practices. I don’t envy him that position.
