SEO BLOG

Jill whalen and the nitty gritty of copywriting cartoon

2008-05-09T09:10:00.000-07:00

Jill Whalen, most of the people in SEO industry will know Jill and her in-famous High Rankings forum. Jill is famous for her good copywriting skills and SEO skills. She has written lot of Newsletters and some of them are very famous ones.

Here is Jill Whalen ready to Teach copywriting in her class.

Microsoft's Lost Love with Yahoo - A Contemporary version

2008-05-09T08:53:00.000-07:00

We all know Microsoft has walked away from Yahoo's bid for 43 Billion dollars. Our Graphics team has beautifully portrayed on this recent issue. Enjoy the images.

Kamesh is a dedicated graphics designer for Search Engine Genie and has completed lot of projects for us.

Random text / Rotating text is it good for Search Engines?

2008-05-07T08:52:00.000-07:00

I am sure you would have wondered whether showing random text to search engines are a good index and whether it helps in search engine benefit.

As fas as i know i don't see any special search engine benefit for this i have seen many blogs that are updated few times a day so mostly the search engines don't see the content they saw today the next day. Ofcourse this page can also be considered showing random text but search engines love those blogs since they are constantly updated.

So random contents as long as it is done for Good reasons will be good for search engines. I recommend not to abuse it since there are people who use methods like Cloaking where one type of content is showed to the search engines and an other type of content is showed to the users. Also remember the random contents are unique contents instead of contents syndicated through feeds. When you are using feeds to show random contents i am sure the same content is already shown up in a different site so there won't be any benefit from it.

What will you ask a SEO firm

2008-05-05T11:14:00.000-07:00

There is a discussion going on highrankings forum about questions that needs to be asked to a SEO firm . People keep asking this questions and i have already covered about this in my previous postings here. The SEO thread starter asks what is the best question to be asked.

Well there are 1000s of SEOs who call them companies, 1000s of SEO teams who call them companies. So what makes a good SEO company well first research what is the expertise of the company how many employees they have, how many work full time in SEO etc.

Here are some valid questions you can ask.

What is the most competitive keyword your company has ranked and how long it has stayed or is staying in Google top 10 rankings?

Can you explain some of the methods you use to gain ranking for our sites, is there something against search engine guidelines?

Give us some of your clients who are doing great in search engines, getting maximum traffic with good ROI and is with you for more than 2 years?

What is your client retention rate and success rate in search engine rankings?

What is success when it comes to search rankings?

I can imagine more but these will be on my top priority list

subdomain or own domain blogs which one is better?

2008-05-05T09:12:00.000-07:00

Many have questions whether sub domain blogs on blog service providers or blogs hosted on www yourdomain com is better.

As an expert in this first for more than 5 years ill tell you both don't have any difference. whether its *.blogspot.com , *.blogsome.com or *.wordpress.com there are no visible differences. As long as your blog has good back links and the feed URLs are facilitated to ping regularly your blog will be indexed regularly. Use some blog software like feedburner which helps in automated pinging from Google blog search and other blog searches. If you are into Google blog search you can be sure of that you will be included into Google search results too. Search Engines love fresh contents make sure you provide the crawlers as much fresh contents as possible.

I recommend you submit your feed URL to Google Blog ping service http://blogsearch.google.com/ping I am sure it will help,

Matt cutts on web spam in recent web 2.0 Conference Oreilly

2008-05-04T12:43:00.000-07:00

Here you can find some tips about combating spam from Google's Matt Cutts head of Google's Webspam team and an engineer who's been working on the problem for eight years. During a speech at the Web 2.0 Expo Matt Cutts expalained about countering Web spam as-

"Spammers are human," Cutts said. "You have the power to raise their blood
pressure. Make them spend more time and effort...If spammer gets frustrated,
he's more likely to look for someone easier." How? Forthwith, some tips for
those who manage their own or others' Web sites. • Use captcha systems to make
sure real people, not bots, are commenting on your site. He uses a simple math
puzzle--what's 2 + 2?--but he also likes KittenAuth, which makes people identify
kitten photos. One blogger merely requires people to type the word "orange" into
a field. "The vast majority of bots will never do that," Cutts said. •
Reconfigure software settings after you've installed it. A little modification
of various settings will throw bots off the scent. "If you can off the beaten
path, away from default software installations, you'll save yourself a ton of
grief," he said. • Employ systems that rank people by trust and reputation. For
example, eBay shows how long a person has been a member and how satisfied others
are with transactions with that person. • Don't be afraid of legitimate
purveyors of search-engine optimization services. "SEO is not spam. Google does
not hate SEO," Cutts said. "There are plenty of white-hat SEO (companies) who
can help you out." Registering your Web site at Google's Webmaster Central site
can help find bogus search-engine optimization tricks others may use on your
site, such as keywords written in white text on white backgrounds, he added.

Speech by Matt Cutts was very information he did say white hat SEO companies are definetely recommended and its not difficult to find a good SEO company. He recommends comment authentication since there are a lot of blog spam lurking out there. Mattcutts has been a major link between webmasters and Google.

Higher traffic from Yahoo after latest yahoo update.

2008-05-02T13:18:00.000-07:00

We are experiencing quite a significant amount of increase in traffic from yahoo search engine after yahoo made an update before 10 days. Yahoo Search Engine recently updated their algorithm and this made lot of sites shuffle in their rankings. Some sites lost rankings some gained we gained very good ranking for our site and now yahoo accounts for about 15% compared to Google. We probably got good boost in Yahoo Search Rankings. We used to get only 3 or 4% of traffic from Yahoo now it has increased significantly

We are happy that yahoo still have a good market share in search

Slow Crawling experienced by few webmasterworld members

2008-05-01T10:05:00.000-07:00

Some webmasterworld members have reported slow crawling from Googlebot on their sites. When you check this thread you can see that many have posted data showing slow browsing from Googlebot. From the sites we monitor we don't see much changes to Googlebot crawling some of the sites which are actively updated Googlebot is regular in gobbling up pages. Some sites which are not updated often see a bit lesser browsing other than that things look very normal to me.
I probably feel this could be caused by drop in backlinks to sites or Google devaluing some links. Google is very active in devaluing links recently. I recommend webmasters to keep a check on their backlinks and see if they are devalued.

SEOmoz can i have an optout / Unsubscribe link please

2008-04-30T12:44:00.000-07:00

Sorry to say i am not happy about commercial emails from SEOmoz, When i joined i never found any option where i opt-in for their commercial emails. This is the recent email I got from them

"You may have seen our launch of our new SEO Video Training Series on the
blog last week. Dozens of people took advantage of our special
introductory pricing and the feedback on the series has been fantastic. We want
to make sure everybody who wants to learn sound SEO fundamentals can get their
hands on this awesome training product, so we've got a special offer for
you.
We promised we wouldn't offer the ridiculous Introductory Price of
nearly 40% off again, but here's what we can do: make it more affordable than
ever for you to get the SEO Video Training Series at the PRO Member price of
$199 ($200 off of the Retail Price of $399)...
Until Saturday, May 3rd, you
can get the complete SEO Video Training Series AND 1-Year of SEOmoz PRO
Membership for only $499! Purchased Separately, these items would
cost $798. Even with the PRO discount on the Video Series, you'd still pay $648
for both. Look at it either way you want, you're saving a minimum of $99!
To
take advantage of this awesome, limited-time offer, simply go to the SEOmoz
Store and add a 1-Year SEOmoz PRO Membership and The SEO Video Training Series
to your shopping cart, then use the Coupon Code COMBO50 during checkout to
receive your special price on this great package.
Cheers,The SEOmoz
Team
PS-Remember, this offer is only available for Three Days, until
Saturday, May 3rd!
PPS-If you're thinking of attending SMX Advanced in our
hometown of Seattle, PRO Membership will get you 10% off (early bird rates still
apply!) as well as an invite to our incredible party (check out what happened
last year)!
This email was sent by: SEOmoz4314 Roosevelt Way NE Seattle, WA,
98105, USA"
Update profile:

Ok i dont see an opt out link in this email. When i click on update profile i am taken to the login page where i have to find the email settings and then i need to remove tick to opt out. Why do i need to do this? . I think SEOmoz should ask whether i opt in for commercial emails from them when i register.

i don't want to recieve couple of commercial emails and then run and find a way to opt-out,

Thanks for understanding
Search Engine Genie.

Digitalpoint Forums Down due to overactivity

2008-04-30T12:29:00.000-07:00

Today when I visited Digitalpoint forums I got the following Error,

"
Database error
The database has encountered a problem.
Please try the following:
Load the page again by clicking the Refresh button in your web browser.
Open the forums.digitalpoint.com home page, then try to open another page.
The forums.digitalpoint.com forum technical staff have been notified of the error, though you may contact them if the problem persists.
We apologise for any inconvenience."

Its very rare to see such popular forum go down. I feel its mostly due to over activity recently Google made a Pagerank update. Most of the visitors in Digital point forum are very addictive and passionate about Pagerank updates. I feel this pagerank update made a crazy impact on their server and it let to database crash.

I think we should be hearing from soon about this,

Search Engine Genie,

Pagerank Update April 2008 Happening now,

2008-04-29T11:43:00.000-07:00

After a lot wait Google is updating its Toolbar Pagerank data, You can check your Pagerank updated using our future page rank tool http://www.searchenginegenie.com/future-pagerank-checking.html . Remember Pagerank is updated internally before being like in Toolbar. First Pagerank was live on Google directory. Google updated its directory pagerank before 5 days now slowly some all the datacenters are getting updated with New Toolbar pagerank data.

Enjoy the pagerank update, Hope everyone are doing fine in this update.

SEO Tools to be upgraded with Ajax Technologies

2008-04-28T13:09:00.000-07:00

We have the best , most comprehensive list of SEO tools for FREE here http://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-tools.htm , All tools are provided Adfree to give the best experience for our users. Right now we are in process of upgrading all our SEO tools to the latest Ajax Technologies. Remember we will continue to provide all our tools Adfree which has always been our policy.
lyfavor we ask from our loyal tools users is please link to the tools , that brings attention to the tools which will result in backlinks which will result in increased traffic and search engine rankings. We are more than happy to live with it. Currently we have around 50 tools. We will be expanding the number of tools to around 75 with an investment of 8,000$. We are happy to do it as long as our users are happy. Again though we invest we will not make the tools paid tools like our competitors. We are in a opensource world and we love to give our stuff free.

Text link brokering companies and other Search engine related sites please dont contact us for paid text link or banner advertising on our site we will never now or infuture sell links. We do get lot of requests and all requests go into Trash without any consideration so don't waste your time asking us to selling links.

Search Engine Genie Team

launching inhouse team SEO challenge

2008-04-28T12:51:00.000-07:00

We have about 8 teams working on SEO, Currently we are organizing a small inhouse SEO challenge. The team that comes up with the best tactics that brings maximum attention to the client site/sites they work on will get a treat in one of the best local Star Hotel and one day outing to a favourite play they choose. We are running this challenge for a month and results to be announced around May 25th. May the best team win.

Tactics like Controversial articles, top level quality attractive articles, amazing tools, new innovative ideas are all allowed. We are waiting to see who is the best SEO team in our company. All teams have already started working hard and are doing lot trial and error ideas to come up with the best strategies.

Wish our teams good luck

SEG

Most recent SEO related Informative Thread in Google Groups.

2008-04-28T12:08:00.000-07:00

I have already read this thread in detail but i keep reading it again and again. Just one single thread and it has ton of information from some of the best Search Engine Experts. Especially I enjoy the SEO expert's friendliness with Search Engines. Most of the forums i see there will be a huge crowd ready to bash Google. But this thread is so much fun to read just because it has real valuable information from experts like Matt Cutts, John Muller, Aaron Pratt, JLH, SEO101 etc.

I recommend everyone to read this thread and understand how a webmaster was able to over come his penalty and get back his ranking in Google. Accept you are wrong and Google is always ready to forgive. We had a client who came to us with a penalized site. They bought links from TLA and Google has detected those links and imposed some sort of penalty. We reviewed the site and recommended client to remove all paid links and file a re inclusion. You know what his answer was?
"Google is the looser since it has banned his site. Google is unlucky because it doesn't have his company site in their index" . Come on client if not your site Google has millions of sites to index and they are not worried if one aggressive site is not in their index even though it might be world's best. It took us lot of time to convince him to clean up paid BLs. Finally he did but still he was not ready to give up his Ego and submit re inclusion. We on behalf of him filed a re inclusion and finally the site came back to Good top rankings. He was all praises for us but the truth we didn't do anything all we did was explain in detail mistakes that was previously done on site and said that it will never be repeated again. Google accepted our words and included the site so lesson learnt if you want Google to send free traffic for your site play by their guidelines if you going to spam them face the consequences.

Read that thread again its better than my voice

Yahoo Search Index rankings algorithm update

2008-04-27T01:48:00.000-07:00

Yahoo recently updates their algorithm and search engine rankings. They made major changes as reported in their blog http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000533.html . Update was reported on April 21st and it should be rolled out by now. We did notify some significant changes from our client sites as well as our sites so did you see it?

How was your site performance?

Effect of Stumbleupon

2008-04-27T01:41:00.000-07:00

Stumbleupon has been a great hit in recent days. Some of our sites get huge number of referrals from stumble upon. I went through a webmaster world thread which showed a similiar experience with Stumbleupon

Pageoneresults explains here how to get started with stumble upon

Getting Started with StumbleUpon http://www.stumbleupon.com/guide.html
After you've read the Guide and fully understand the terms and conditions of being a Stumbler, then there are 3 Steps you'll go through to become a Stumbler...
Step 1: Join StumbleUpon and become a Stumbler... http://www.stumbleupon.com/sign_up.php
Step 2: Connect with friends if you have them in that network.
Step 3: Install the StumbleUpon Toolbar... http://www.stumbleupon.com/download.php
Step 4: Start Stumbling.
As with any "social network", you will need to develop a reputation within the StumbleUpon Communities and there are many. With 4.99 million Stumblers, there are all sorts of "arms and legs" inside the community.
Your goal is to of course become a Top Stumbler and that only comes with tenure. Don't expect things to happen overnight. Think of StumbleUpon like a Digg or Sphinn...
Top Stumblers http://www.stumbleupon.com/community.html

Forum discussion in webmaster world, http://www.webmasterworld.com/link_development/3629897.htm

what Google says about Most important People in the world

2008-04-25T13:24:00.000-07:00

Who is the nicest guy in the world
http://www.laurashumaker.com/?p=55

Worst person in the world
http://gawker.com/news/douchebags/nightmare-online-dater-john-fitzgerald-page-is-the-worst-person-in-the-world-309684.php
John Fitzgerald Page Is The Worst Person In The World

Sexiest Men in the world
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=sexiest+guy+in+the+world
http://www.relaxorium.com/mindspringbs/hmention.html

Smartest Man in the world
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=smartest+man+in+the+world
http://www.thesmartestman.com/

Most intelligent Man in the world currently living
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060929163358AAlfXKr
A good discussion on that here,

Toughest Man in the world:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=toughest+man+in+the+world
Mr T:
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Set/9540/mrt.html

Greatest Man in the world
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=greatest+man+in+the+world
http://www.visi.com/~tomcat/poetry/GreatestMan.shtml

World's Sweetest Man
Gary David Goldberg
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-david-goldberg/worlds-sweetest-man_b_51860.html

Most caring Man in the world:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=Most+caring+man+in+the+world
Saddam Hussian
http://www.news24.com/News24/World/Iraq/0,,2-10-1460_2050313,00.html

Most Dangerous Man in the world:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=Most+dangerous+man+in+the+world
A.Q Khan
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6827441/

Most wanted man in the world
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,175116-1,00.html
Osama bin Laden

Most talked man in the world
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=Most+talked+man+in+the+world
http://www.imeem.com/angelo/playlist/EobpP8Le/edison_chen_worlds_most_talked_about_man_video_playlist/

Most adventurous man in the world
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=Most+adventurous+man+in+the+world
http://www.zestforadventure.com/zest_adventure_man.html

Most Clever Man in the world:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=Most+clever+man+in+the+world
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060717052610AA5R5aY

I hope you enjoyed the list as I enjoyed it.

SEO for Beginners download powerpoint slideshow

2008-04-24T12:09:00.000-07:00

A Very simple slide show on SEO for beginners, Download and enjoy the slide demonstration i am sure its good for beginners and Newbies into SEO.

Please make sure to give appropriate credit if you like the slide show.

Leave a comment if you have questions about the slide,

Pagerank Grey bar for pages of a website - why do we see it

2008-04-24T11:27:00.000-07:00

I have seen Greybar display in Google toolbar for quite sometime, I am sure people are wondering what causes it. Personally I can speculate some reasons though i don't have any evidence it. Here are some reasons I see what causes Grey bar display,

1. New pages: When ever a new page is created i don't see a white PR bar anymore. Its grey PageRank display when ever there is a new page created. So as we know if Google has not assigned a PageRank it used to show white bar now its not the case any more we see Grey PageRank display for all new pages which is definitely new with Google.

2. Abandoned Pages: Pages which are not updated for a long time without any update are showing Grey bar i am seeing it across couple of our pages / websites. So probably it has something to do with abandoned pages.

3. Duplicate Pages: When a competitor or some spammer copies contents of that page and duplicates in his site pages the main page might loose its existing value and can display Grey bar. Seeing this substantially duplicate pages do have some reason for Grey Toolbar PageRank display.

4. Potentially penalty to those pages especially link exchange pages since I see more and more grey display in link exchange pages. This is just a speculation though penalty is the least reason I can imagine of since I see lot of grey PageRank pages rank in search engines.

5. A standard reason which has always been is that the communication between your toolbar and Google data center which delivers PageRank to toolbar is some how interrupted. Though this has been a reason given directly by Google employees still i wonder how one page can fetch PageRank from Google data center and other page cannot at the same time. This is a reason but very rare unless you see grey bar for all sites and pages you browse it cannot be justified.

6. Some people speculate Grey bar display has something to do with supplemental index. Google has been into controversy for a long time on supplemental pages debate. Pages in supplemental index never rank and some have seen grey PageRank pages also never rank so it could be a by product of supplemental results. Just an idea only.

7. Bad PR distribution for those pages from internal pages of your site. If those pages don't have good PR distribution then it could cause grey PageRank but for many sites i monitor those pages have ton of internal links. For Example our blog homepage has link from all over our site but shows grey PageRank display. We see this page is crawled regularly, contents from this page is indexed regularly but still it shows Grey PageRank very difficult to say this as a reason.

8. Lack of Good external links or consistent external links to a page: I seriously wonder whether this could be a reason. Most of the inner pages I have seen that shows grey bar has very less or zero external links from other sites coming into it. So i wonder whether this could be a reason for grey bar. PageRank algorithm probably sees that this page is important only for this site and is not a good page for Internet. I do have controversy over this too. Again our blog URL have good links coming to it from external sites but it displays grey bar don't know why. But recently our blog never got Good back links we seriously abandoned our blog for about a year and never posted any new information. So lack of consistent back links could be a reason for Grey PageRank display.

9. TPR ( Toolbar PageRank Reduction ) : Another reason i can speculate is the infamous Toolbar PageRank Reduction penalty which Google applied to sites which buy and sell text links. Is Grey PageRank bar a side effect of it?

My final opinion is if a page is more than a year indexed in Google and has a PR grey bar it could simply be that the page is not of best value for its users. So they dont assign pagerank for that page which might result in that page not passing pagerank to other pages in other words not contributing any link juice to the pages it links to.

Search Engine Genie

Google Update reverts back - Dewey update no more visible

2008-04-22T12:40:00.000-07:00

Google recently made an update to their index and matt cutts commented on that here http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3615693-3-30.htm . From checking different datacenters I dont see much changes now and the small changes that was visible in the datacenters mentioned in that webmaster world thread is not visible any more.

Most of the changes have reverted back and there are no visible signs of changes that happened on those datacenters propogating to othr DCs.

Other cool thing is updates are not the hot topic anymore. People used to discuss 100s of pages for any major updates. When I see this dewey update thread i hardly see it go beyond 30 pages which is a good sign. People are becoming more and more aware of the changes and the communication between search engines and users have improved which has resulted in lesser worries for people.
While Google update mania is no more Pagerank Mania still continues.

False Pagerank update alarm has triggered 10 pages of posting in digital point forums

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=808970&page=2

Pending Spammers - Aggressive affiliate Marketers

2008-04-22T11:58:00.000-07:00

Google and other search engines have weeded out most of the spam out of their search engines. But still one industry that keeps Spamming the search engines using very innovative methods. is the ever aggressive affiliate marketing industry. I know many affiliates still depend on Search Engines for traffic to their spam site will affiliate links all over the place. So how many of us like affiliate.

Personally affiliate sites are a No-No for me. When I click on Search engine results and end up an a affiliate page first thing I do is to close the browser and find an other result. I hate to buy from someone who is reselling the product than buying directly from the dealer.
Affiliates still spam the search engines using methods search engines are never aware of before. Its very difficult to tackle this industry since lot of money is involved in this industry and many affiliate marketers are not willing to find better ways to do online business. I don't blame all affiliate sites there are some rare sites which do provide Good information while have random affiliate links mixed on their site but most of the affiliate sites don't add any value for any visitor. Also MFA ( Made For Adsense ) sites are an other disgrace to search engine users. When i click on a result and see a page full of adsense ads, affiliate links i never enjoy the site nor will i want to visit the site again.
i hope search engines completely get rid of all sites that have affiliate links and dont add any value for users this is the last type of death to spam I am looking for in Search engines.

Dont teach how to run business for Search Engines.

2008-04-22T11:25:00.000-07:00

So what's up with the paid text link debate. I have seen enough places where people complain Google is teaching them how to run their website and Business. Is that considered Joke of 2008. SEOs are here because Google and other search engines are here. There is no special technological industry named SEO. This whole industry is here because of flourishing Search engines so why complain them.
Text link advertising is not the traditional way you advertise? You do it for Search Engines. Everything you do for search engines be ready to face the consequences. Want to ride behind the back of a Search Engine make sure you play by the rules. Search engines have the rights to penalize text link publishers/advertisers manually, algorithimically by editorial review anyway they want way as long as it improves the quality of their results. Why complain that Search engine's are teaching you to run a business while actually you are the one who is teaching Search engines how to run a business. As the Search Engine experts have stated you are free to do anything on your website and the same way Search engines have every right to do anything with their algorithm as long as its for the best for their users. I am part of a SEO company too and I always Bow to any changes Google make if there is a ranking change for our sites or our client sites we try to see what mistake was done and find a solution. We never put the blame on any Search Engine. As long as we are in Search Engine Optimization industry lets be close to Search Engines and play by their rules. If we move a bit away from their guidelines lets face the consequences.

I humbly request Search Quality engineers like Adam Lasnik, Matt Cutts not to try and defend what you are doing, keep doing what's best for your users and don't worry when somebody tries to curse Google for something they do with their algorithm. If 1000 SEOs join together and curse Google for penalizing paid links what does it show? They want Google to stop penalizing paid links so that they can keep buying links and keep manipulating results its as simple as that. I cannot find an alternate reason for it i am sure its not the reason you are looking for that is best for your users. So keep doing what's best for your algorithm and users and please dont justify and try to defend your ideas. People who love Search Engines will know how to appreciate it.

Search Engine Genie.

Using nofollow on internal pages - Not a spam

2008-04-21T13:17:00.000-07:00

Google has clearly stated using nofollow to prevent pagerank flow to your pages like the copyright, TOS etc is not considered spam. But in the recent webmaster chat Google guys did state its not worth preventing links from passing pagerank. Pagerank flows naturally across pages and just preventing some pagerank from passing to any of your pages is not worth the effort.

Crawl Date in Google’s Cache: Matt Cutts Video Transcript

2008-04-20T11:47:00.000-07:00

Ok everybody we have a new illustration today. Vanessa Fox of Google webmaster central blog talked about this some people like to learn visually , some people like to learn screen shots, so I thought ill make a little movie so this is going to be a multi media presentation the 2 media we are buying today are skill and peanut butter red ones. So lets talk about Googlebot and how it crawls the web. First off what are the red imminent represent, well everyone knows red is bad so these are going to be 404s. The Googlebot is crawling around the web and it sees a 404 sucks it down and then later on it will come back to try to check it again.

So what are the purples mean well everybody knows purple means a http status code of 200 OK, That's the only thing that it could possibly represent. So in other words Googlebot comes along and it sucks up the page and we got the page just fine. So we got a 404 we got couple http 200s so life is pretty good next, now lets talk about the cache crawl date and what they represent. So we are not able to tell that easily but this is purple we got two greens , purple and the rest greens. So what do you think the green imminent represent? Everybody knows the green imminent are great we know it's the good ones so green represent a status code of 304. So in a browser Googlebot comes to a page they say hey I want to copy this page or you can just tell me if the page has been modified since I indexed and that the page if the page has not been modified since a certain date you can get 304 status back saying that this page hasn't changed and all that Googlebot has to do is to ignore that page. SO this is what Googlebot does , this is going forward in time so in other words we crawl a page we get 200, the next 2 times Googlebot crawl the page it gets a 304 which is the If Modified Since that said that the page hasn't really changed. And later on then here the webmaster actually changed the page and we see this purple that again means the page has been changed since the last crawl and now we get a 200 since the page is actually fetched.

Now going forward the page didn't change so the web server is smart enough to return a 304 status code for each one of the visits by Googlebot. Now the thing that is interesting is if you want to check whether Googlebot cached the page it will show the last date that the page was last retrieved. But the interesting thing is that until recently the post that we checked on this date and this date it will still give us the very first time that we fetched that page. Now you fetch the page again and it would show this cache crawl date and this would continue and may be for 6 months if the page and the page hasn't change we would still show the old cache crawl date. So the change in policy in what we are doing is if we check on this date and on this date to see if the page has changed we will now show that date in the cache crawl date. So in other words as Googlebot comes along , slipping stuff along it might used to a page which might look pretty old we update that so as we know about even if the page is changed or not we update the crawl date in the cached page so the pages look more fresh in the cache crawl date even for the fact we are showing the date to reflect in the fact that we have actually recently checked the pages has changed.

Lightning Round matt cutts video transcript

2008-04-20T11:14:00.000-07:00

Alright this is Matt Cutts Coming to you on July 31st Monday 2006 this is probably the last one ill do tonight so lets see if I can kind of do a lightning round. Alright Peer rights in and says

Is it possible to search just for homepages? I tried doing minus in URL html and in URL htm , so and so URL php , ASP but that doesn't filter out enough. That's a really good suggestion peter having thought about that, fast used to offer something like that I think all they did was look for a tilde in the URL I would file that as a feature request and see if people are willing to prioritize that if we are willing to offer that. My guess is it will be relatively low on the priority list because the syntax you mentioned subtracting a bunch of extensions would probably work pretty well.

I got to clarify something about strong Vs Bold, Emphasis Vs Italic. There is a previous question where somebody asks whether it is better to use bold or it is better to use strong because bold is where it was used in olden days when the dinosaurs were roaming the earth and strong is what the w3c recommends. And that time last night I thought that we barely , barely like we prefer bold over strong and I said its not the most part that you would worry about it and the next thing is that a engineer really took me to a code and showed me in live and I can see that Google treats bold and strong exactly the same weight. So thank you for that paul I really appreciate it. And also I saw an other part of the code where the M ( emphasis ) and italics are exactly treated the same. So there you have it so mark it like W3C wants to do it, do it semantically well , do it and don’t worry about just small tags because Google will treat just the same way of both the versions.

Ok next in Lightning round Amanda Asks “ Do we have more kiddy posts in the future”?
I think we will, I tried to bring my cats here around me but they are afraid of lights and just jumped off. Ill see if I can bring them in future.

Tom Html asks, Where is Google SST, Google guest , google weaver, google market place, google RS 2.0 and other services discovered by tony rescow?

I think its very clear for tony to do a dictionary tag again, services check-in but I am not going to talk about what all those services are.

A preview Joseph Hunkins asks what many topics will be there in duplicate contents as yet, a little bit of a preview on one of the other sessions is on video but I think what I basically want to talk about is it will be there lot of people will be there it will be shingling
What I want to say is Google detects duplicate contents all the way from crawl to all the way people see things when searching. We do stuff that's exact duplicate detection and we do stuff that's near duplicate detection so we do a pretty good job all the along the line like detecting dupes and stuff like that.

And so the best advice I give is to make sure your duplicate contents like the page that has contents as much similar as possible to make it look as much different as possible if they are truly different content. A lot of people talked about word versions or .doc compared to html files typically no need to worry about that if it has similar contents on different domains may be French and an other version in English you really don't need to worry about that, again if you do have the exact same content may be for a Canadian site and for a .com site so probably we will roll the dice and see which ever one looks better to us and just show that but it wouldn’t necessarily trigger any sort of penalty or anything like that if you want to avoid you can make sure your templates are very, very different but better if the contents are similar its better to show us which ever is the most ideal for representation and guess the best anyway. And Thomas writes in and says does Google index and rank blog sites different than regular sites?

That's a good question not really, somebody asked me whether links from gov, edu's , and links from two level deep govs and edus like gov.pl or gov.in are the same as .gov?

The fact is really we don’t have much of a difference in a way to say hey this is a link from ODP or .gov or .edu and so on. There is no some sort of special boost its just that those sites have higher Pagerank because more people tend to link to them and reputable people link to them so blog sites there aren't anything distinct unless if you go off to blog search ofcourse and its blogs and totally restrained to blogs. SO in theory we could rank them differently but most part its just a general search the way it falls out.

Alright thanks.