Web Toastie

Mike McDonald of WebProNews today sat down with Matt Cutts at Search Marketing Expo (SMX) West 2010 to talk about some of the latest search marketing developments and what’s in store for us in 2010. The session was recorded live and can be viewed along with the other fantastic videos WebProNews have done, but in the mean time, here are the notes from the Matt Cutts session.

The following questions and answers have been paraphrased, and quoted where appropriate.

Nofollow – How much should you use it?

Don’t waste your time on PageRank sculpting. Link to content from your higher level pages, ensuring content is no more than one or two clicks away from your root page if possible. It’s best to think about untrusted 3rd party content when using nofollow, and not on your internal links.

When is Google Caffeine going live?

Caffeine still hasn’t been rolled out across all data centres – it is still currently only live on the single data centre that was mentioned back in November 2009.

Matt comments:

“It’s a nice thing to be cautious. You don’t want to roll out stuff willy-nilly when it’s a very large rewrite of your indexing infrastructure. There’s nothing that’s gone wrong, everything is still on track, we’re just trying to be very careful and make sure that we have high quality results.

We’re still live at one data centre. In the coming weeks and months we’ll probably roll out to every data centre.”

He also believes Europe will be the next location of a Google Caffeine rollout.

How important is site speed?

Contrary to popular belief, Caffeine will not introduce site speed as a ranking factor – site speed is a separate entity that Google are working on.

Matt goes on to say:

“People shouldn’t stress out too much about site speed. The reason is, is that we’re always going to care first and foremost about quality – how good is a page for users, how much does it help them find the information they need.”

The speed of website isn’t going to be an all-important ranking factor, but in cases where two websites are offering relatively similar content, then the load time may become the difference in determining the ranking.

Although website speed may not play a major role in the ranking of a website, it is still a very important aspect of the user experience.

Do people obsess about PageRank too much?

PageRank isn’t going to be re-branded just because some people believe there is too much emphasis put on it in certain sectors. Google understand webmasters can become a little too obsessed with the PageRank figure – and people have to understand that it is not the only factor that matters.

“It’s healthy not just to think about the reputation of your page, but the sheer quality, and the content you’ve got on it too.”

Are real-time results too prone to spam?

Matt believes there is clearly a need for users to get real-time updates, but it is just a case of finding the right balance between information and spam.

To determine whether certain updates should be shown in Google, he says:

“There are analogues, it’s almost like:

• How many people reply to you
• Or re-Tweet you
• Or How long have you been on Twitter

Those sorts of things are an analogous to how many links do you have to your site, or how many people participate with you. There are a lot of nice things that could stop spammers.”

In summary, it is always going to be a difficult job to prevent people exploiting real-time results, but Matt believes Google are doing a pretty good job.

Search Marketers = Social Marketers?

Matt Cutts doesn’t think social is going to replace SEO, but it’s another tool in the arsenal. It doesn’t have to be that you rank well in Google, as social networks such as Twitter and Facebook can send a huge amount of traffic to your website (with a viral campaign, for example).

What’s going to be big in 2010?

• SEO is not evil – people who are doing SEO are not bad
• Social – having a human presence on the web really does make a difference
• Trends – Increase in hacking – black hat techniques seems to migrate towards hacking

And now for some questions from Twitter…

What is the relationship between SEO and W3C?

There are too many people that code websites with invalid HTML that may still provide good content, so they need to be still able to rank that good content.

Having valid W3C code won’t help your rankings.

Can you pay for top 10 rankings?

Nobody can guarantee it, so be careful for scams. The people who guarantee top 10 rankings are more than likely referring to very long-tail phrases that won’t yield any significant traffic for your website.

If a page is visited a lot of times is it ranked higher?

No data from Google Analytics is used to influence the ranking of a website.

Will META tags at the bottom of the index page hurt?

They should ideally be in the head section, as people who contribute to your website could potentially insert META information into your page. It’s best practice to ensure your META data is in the head of your code.

How important are back links for SEO?

Good page content is most recommended for websites, but back links can certainly help your rankings.

Are Google Maps going to include service areas?

Matt is unsure of the latest situation with this.