Google's Matt Cutts SEO Videos

Background Information

Keep in mind the business objectives of search engines when viewing information from search engineers. Many of their comments come from the perspective of in an ideal world, however the world is not ideal, and search engines offer self serving webmaster guidelines that may hurt your business. If you are in doubt of that fact please also read about how Google deceives webmasters with broken competitive research stats.

To be clear, I think Matt Cutts is a great guy, but he has a hard job which forces him to be hypocritical and act naive from time to time.

Matt Cutts Videos

Matt Cutts is Google's head of search quality. Keep in mind Google's bias and perspective when watching Matt's videos. They want relevant search results and will not openly disclose some of the bigger holes in their current relevancy algorithms.

• Google Sitemaps Questions, DMOZ Snippet Usage & Qualities of a Good Site
  • make your site crawlable & have a citation worthy marketing hook
  • DMOZ snippet usage is query dependant, but you can use the meta NoODP tag to prevent them from using that as your description
• Some SEO Myths
  • most people do not need to worry about footprints (IP address, hostname, Javascript trackers) unless they are bulk spammers
  • when launching a site you may want to soft launch (ie: do not publish hundreds of thousands or millions of pages right out of the gate)
• Should You Optimize for Search Engines or Users & Code Validation
  • Both are important, but they are not mutually exclusive. SEO brings visitors. User optimization ensures conversion.
  • Validation is not necessary. Compelling content is more important than validation. But having valid code may be another reason some other webmasters may be willing to link at your site.
• Geotargeting SEO, Static vs Dynamic URLs
  • PageRank flows the same to static and dynamic URLs. You probably want to use shorter numbers and limit the number of URL parameters to 2-3 max. Mod Rewrite is your friend :)
  • If you are geotargeting by country treat GoogleBot as a US user, do not make a country just for Google.
• 301 Redirecting a Domain, Information Architecture, Split Testing
  • Most redirects from related sites are fine. If the topics are different then you can run into problems.
  • Organize your site folders based on information architecture more than on keywords.
  • It is best to A/B split test pages which are not cached for Google.
• Supplemental Results
  • Result estimates are highly inaccurate.
  • Supplemental results are trusted less than regular results and are crawled less frequently.
• Duplicate Content
  • There are many stages of duplicate content analysis, from crawl, indexing, to scoring. There is no exact limit to duplication detection.
• Google Terminology
  • Major noticeable index updates are rare since the search index is constantly updated. In the past on old architecture monthly updates were called Google Dances.
  • PageRank is constantly updated. Data refreshes are quite frequent. Large algorithmic updates are quite rare.
• Google Data Centers
  • On one C block IP address most of the results will typically be the same unless one of the data centers is down and you are being switched over due to load balancing.
  • Many new algorithms or data refreshes are rolled out on one data center at a time for testing purposes.
• Lightning Round
  • just random...not lots of stuff
• Reinclusion Requests
  • Sign up at Google Webmaster Central for Google Sitemaps and file for a reinclusion request giving specific information. Also try to convince Google that the quality guideline violations will not occur again.
• SES Tips
• Google Webmaster Tools
• Data Center Comments
  • A fraction of the web is updated every day.
  • Data pushes seem to come out roughly once a month.
  • BigDaddy was a refresh to how they crawl the web and a partially and update to how they index it (as Matt said before here).
• Crawling Patterns
  • Matt Cutts talks about how Googlebot crawls the web and updates page cache dates.
• [AUDIO] Mike Grehan interviews Matt Cutts. Part 1 and part 2.
  • Matt Cutts confirms the Google Sandbox effect as being an accidental side effect which occurred as an artifact of another part of the relevancy scoring algorithm.
• [AUDIO] Matt Cutts with Emarketing Talk Show
• [AUDIO] Vanessa Fox interviews Matt Cutts
  • talks about how results change from searcher to searcher and a couple advanced searching things (like personalized search, and accents vs non-accents)
  • talks about Google webmaster central
  • talks about hacking and link dumping, and catching cloaking by doing an English to English translation of a page

Hundreds of Q&A Videos

Over the years Matt has provided hundreds of short question and answer videos on the official Google Webmaster Help video achive hosted on Youtube here.

Gain a Competitive Advantage Today

Your top competitors have been investing into their marketing strategy for years.

Now you can know exactly where they rank, pick off their best keywords, and track new opportunities as they emerge.

Explore the ranking profile of your competitors in Google and Bing today using SEMrush.

Enter a competing URL below to quickly gain access to their organic & paid search performance history - for free.

See where they rank & beat them!