Matt Cutts is a Google employee who works on their anti-spam team. Recently he has started to publish a number of videos on Google Video (where else?) in which he attempts to answer questions on a number of different Google SEO and sometimes general Google questions. Earlier yesterday morning (August 3rd) he added his 9th and 10th videos.
I’ve seen blog posts all over the place about these videos but the source posts are of course from Matts own blog which is located at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ so to see what he has to say about them go there, well actually you’d be better going to http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/movies/ as his posts pertaining to the videos are conveniently one after another on his movies category page whereas his blogs homepage has others posts scattered in between. Anyhow in this post I will provide an overhead look at the first five of these videos. These are just rough summaries and are not transcripts as such. Although these summaries do cover all the important points from each video, I still recommend you see the videos for yourself and for this reason I have included direct links to them.
Video #1 - Qualities of a good site
Matt talks about some general guidelines and recommendations to increase visibility on Google…
He says that the #1 mistake people make with their sites is that they are not crawlable, Matt says try to go through your site using something like the Lynx text browser, if you can get through your site with Lynx your going to be in pretty good shape as far as crawlability is concerned. Also consider using Google Sitemaps.
The main thing which Matt advises is to make sure people relevant to your niche know about you, (ie. get links from them). Think also about a ‘hook’ for your site, something viral. For example really good content like newsletters, tutorials, videos etc. which have links back to your site. Matt gives the example of some tutorials he read about making his videos professional and then at the end of these tutorials the tutorial providers said something like ‘oh and by the way you can use our equipment to make these professional videos, visit www.alink.com’. Matt says content can be a great way to get links and mentions things like syndicating tutorials, digg and slashdot. Matt says fundamentally you need something different which sets you apart from the pack.
A question is asked about the dmoz snippet. Matt talks about why Google would use the dmoz snippet for your listing as opposed to your meta description tag. He says Google will pick whichever snippet is better for the query, so it is query dependent. He also mentions using the noodp tag which will disallow Google using the ODP tag for your listing snippet.
Does Google favour bold over strong tags? Matt says they favour bold, however it’s so slight that you need not worry about it.
Video #2 - SEO myths
Too many sites on same server? Too many sites with IPs too similiar? Too many sites which all use same Javascript?
99% webmasters are OK, but if you have something like 2000 sites, Matt poses the question do they/can they all have unique relevant content?
Launching millions of pages at same time? Matt says things have changed in Google, now he says it’s better to launch a few thousand pages now and then a few thousand pages later. Try a softer launch as otherwise your pages could be attracting unwanted scrutiny.
Video #3 - Optimize for Search Engines or Users?
Which is more important SEO or end user optimization. Matts says both - for initial attraction of visitors and then conversion of visitors to customers. The trick is to try and make sure your users interests and the search engines interests are aligned as possible (ie. good content is liked by both users and engines as too is good navigation)
Matt recommends sitemaps for checking your site is ‘clean’ as it should flag you about crawl and other errors which were found.
W3C - Matt says W3C validation does not help in the search engines as some figures estimate 40% of all HTML pages have syntax errors and there’s no way Google would remove or penilize all these. He mentions that in general it’s a good idea but for SEO purposes making compelling content is to go at the top of your priority list.
Video #4 - Static vs. Dynamic URLs
Does Google treat static and dynamic URLs differently? Matt says generally they are treated the same way in terms of ranking. He says pagerank flows to dynamic URLs in the same way as to static URLs. He refers specifically though to an example URL from the website of the person asking the question which has 5 parameters and in response to this he says you can use too many parameters. Matt says it’s best to stick with 2 or 3 parameters at most and to avoid long numbers as Google can think they are session IDs. He also mentions using mod_rewrite if you think you may have problem URLs.
Can Google inform webmasters if they were hacked from within sitemaps? Matts says good question but Google does not have the resources available yet.
Is it safe to use GEO targeting software without Google thinking we are cloaking to provide different discount and marketing messages to people from different countries? Matt talks about the way Google defines cloaking which is showing different content to users than you do to search engines. He says geo targeting software is not cloaking under Googles guidelines. Matt mentions that the thing which will get you in trouble is if you start treating Google differently. He says not to make a special country just for Google… such as Googlebotistan (his example, not mine). Treat Googlebot just like a regular user, so for example Googlebot comes from a United States IP so show it the page you would show normal human visitors from the United States and you will not have any problems.
Video #5 - How to structure a site?
Will acquiring related domain names and using a 301 redirect to the final website after the aquisition get a site banned or penilized? Matts says in this occasion no because the domain name was related, but if you run a music site for instance and then all of a sudden get a tonne of links from sites about debt consolidation, cheap online etc… that might raise a few eyebrows.
What’s the best way to theme a site using directories? Matt says to concentrate on a tree like architecture and to break things down by topic, so for example if your selling clothes you would have shoes as one directory and sweaters as another directory.
Is it OK to serve static pages to Googlebot instead if dynamic URLs are unindexable? Matts cautions the person who asked the question about getting into the realms of cloaking and tells them to see if there’s a way to unify what search engines and users see in terms of URLs. If you do decide to serve static pages to search engines, you have to be sure that if regular users do visit these pages that they are not redirected (ie. if Google can see it, users should see it too)
Will A/B split testing raise suspicions of cloaking? Matt says it’s best to split test in an area where search engines are not allowed to index. He mentions using robots.txt or .htaccess files to make sure Googlebot doesn’t index your split tests. He again cautions about doing anything special for Googlebot, treat it like a regular user and you should be fine.
Well folks as you can see from above Matt has already been quite helpful to the webmaster community with the these videos… and that was only the first five. The most interesting thing for me from the first five videos was the fact that he said using 301 redirects with aquired but related domains was OK, I was also too afraid to try this in the past but now it seems to me that it could be an excellent way to get a tonne of related backlinks for discount prices. Anyhow I hope this post helped, this wasn’t exactly a transcript but it wasn’t far off. I’ll go through videos 6-10 in a couple of days. Please let me know your comments on Matts first five videos, remember I did put together this post for you so let me know what you think.
