Mike McDonald took some time during SMX West to talk to Matt Cutts to get a recap on the session he contributed to, as well as to give us an update on relevant search questions
Matt Recaps “Ask the Search Engines” session
- Google Caffine: Rolled it out to only one data center and soon to roll out to most or all data centers.
- Blocking Javascript or Let Search Engines Crawl It: The answer is to let search engines crawl it.
- No-Follow Links: Only worry about no-following outbound links that you are not sure if they can be trusted.
- Page Rank Sculpting: Don’t really use it. Try doing better internal linking and make it easier to get to from the homepage.
- Site Speed: It is more important for the end users to have fast loading pages. However if you have faster loading pages it can help your rankings, but it will not give you a huge boost if you cut your speed in half.
- PageRank: They will not re-brand PageRank, just remember that it is only 1 factor our of 100s
Matt talks about instead of having your RSS reader checking all of the blogs your subscribe to every hour, they have come up with a new protocol. Pubsubhubbub is a service that whenever you add a new blog post, it pings a hub and that hub will then notify anyone that has subscribed to that feed instantly. This helps with getting content faster to your RSS reader. WordPress just announced that all of their 10.5 million blogs will have this “Push” capability.
Matt and Mike start talking about spam and how with new types of content (images, video, feeds, etc..) there is going to be new spam. Matt says that if the quality of the content is good 90% of the time and they only have to clean it up 10% of the time, they would be happy with that. He also said that Google will help webmasters with best practices of how to prevent spam. They are very mindful of all of the real-time spam that is out there and that is something they are working to improve. There are a lot of metrics that can help find spammers, including # of followers, links, originating source of the content, etc…
They then started talking about Google Buzz. Matt said that he likes Buzz for having rich media inline, as well as being able to Buzz more than 160 characters. Buzz is really good because of the sharing capabilities all within the enterprise.
Q: Is it better to call Search Marketing, Social Marketers or just Marketers?
A: Matt always thought of SEO as a part of marketing. He doesn’t believe that social it is going to replace SEO, but believes that search and social will be working together to drive traffic.
They start talking about all of the different social platforms out there and how we can get everyone on the same page. Matt talks about how usage and being able to export data will help dictate what people are going to use for the future of web services.
