Mattcutts Video Transcript

MATT CUTTS ON LONG VACATION

Matt cutts going on vacation is good news for SEO companies 

 

MATT-CUTTS

How can we create unique meta details for each product pages?

Today’s question is ,”we have an e-commerce site Around a thousand products in pages on that site so how can we create unique minute details for those pages”

 Matt cut answers,

The question should not be i have been pages how can i make the unique the question is how many pages can make the quality that provide user. if you can’t managed to have thousand pages and have something unique something different than just an affiliate theater whatever on each page of that site then why should your thousand pages which are again baby Jessica reward content of an affiliate feed rent compared to someone else’s thousand pages of that same affiliate.

Anderson what you’re asking i think i would ask yourself what makes your site unify what is the value add where what what’s the compelling proposition that makes people want to go visit your e-commerce site .if you can have unique content if you can come up with some unique Angola reason even if it’s again it’s something that makes it fun something that makes it better easier for people that makes them like your site then that that’s a really tough proposition and and so i wouldn’t say yourself a bowl of having a thousand pages and then how can i have a little bit of value each one it sometimes is better to think about okay how much value can add and that determines the number of pages on my site rather than the other way around so it des Moines sound a little bit harsh but on the other hand if everybody on the entire internet all wanted to have  thousand page site and weren’t able to come up with unique content or some other way or differentiating factor for their website you’re only left with a a lot of pages which are not that different she did not that high quality and and dot that unique and that’s not good for the web it’s not good for the ecosystem the web it’s not good for uses the way we’re just trying to find good stuff and don’t necessarily want to find  a copy of the same content they want to find you know something with unique value add so that might sound a little bit harsh but you know give it some thought because we do see a lot of people who are like okay i can make this mini sites now how do i make them useful and sometimes by the time you reach that point where you have in number of sites and you try to make them useful you’ve already made some summit in my opinion errors and how you’re trying to think about how to create your site just some food for thought whatever you’d.

 

What is Google’s current thinking about getting links from article marketing, widgets, footers, themes, etcetera?

Yeah, I’m really glad to talk about our current thinking which is about the same as our past thinking but let’s be a little more explicit about it. Whenever you get a link from just a word press footer or just a random footer or, when someone installs a widget or they installsome theme on their content management system, it’s often the case that they’re not editorially choosing to link with that anchor text. So, you sometimes see a lot of links all with the exact same anchor text because, that’s what the widget happened to have embedded in it or something like that. And even if it’s not the exact same anchor text it’s like relatively inorganic in the sense that the person who made the widget is deciding what the anchor text should be rather than the person who’s actually doing the link by including the widget. And it’s the same sort of thing with article marketing, if you write a relatively low quality article, and just a few hundred words and then at the bottom is two or three links of, specifically high keyword density anchor text, then the sort of guy who just sort of wants some content and doesn’t really care about the quality might grab that article from an article bank or something and, he’s not really editorially choosing to give that anchor text. So, as opposed to something that’s really compelling, when you really like something, when you’re linking to it organically, that’s the sort of links that we really want to count more. So, it’s always been the case that these sorts of links that are almost like boiler plate, it’s like not really a person’s real choice to really endorse what that particular link, or that particular anchor text, those are links that typically we would not want to count as much. So, either our algorithms or we do have manual ways of saying, “Okay, at a very granular level, this is the sort of link that we don’t want to trust.”So, there are some people who say, “Okay, I just want links. I’m just going to take shortcuts. I’m lazy, I want to do the bare minimum I can to get the links that I want to get “and they’ll fall back on some ways where, I’ve mentioned the example before, but if you’re a K through 12 school teacher in Pennsylvania and you’re trying to get a web counter and you don’t realize that it has mesothelioma hidden in the text of the web counter, that’s not a link that we necessarily want to trust at all let alone give that much weight to. So the sorts of links where people are really choosing to editorially link to you, and not just because they’re paid but because they think your site is good, those are the links that we’re more likely to want to count more.

Are links in footers treated differently than paragraph links?

Andres from Boston, MA asks, “Does Google treat links in footers differently than links surrounded by text (e.g. in a paragraph)?”

Well if you go back and read the original page rank paper they said that the links were distributed completely uniformly, page rank was distributed without any regard, whether the link was at the top of the page, the bottom of the page, in the footer, in the text all that sort of stuff. In general our link analysis continues to get more and more sophisticated to the point where, what we compute today is still called page rank and still bears resemblance to the original page rank but it’s much more sophisticated than the original page rank used to be. So we do reserve the right to treat links and footers a little differently. For example if something is in the footer, it might not carry the same editorial weight so someone might have setup a single link and that might be something across the entire site, whereas something that is in actual paragraph of text is a little more likely to be in the editorial link. So we do reserve the right to treat those links differently in terms of how we consider them for relevance how we consider them for reputation, how much we trust them and all those sorts of things.

When will Rich Snippets become widely available?

Adeel from Manchester, UK asks, “When do you reckon Rich Snippets will be made widely available? Can I suggest a tool in Google Webmaster Tools that lets you view (or preview) Rich Snippets from your site?”

It is a good suggestion. The fact is we are going to take it slowly at first to sort of make sure that people are doing good things for rich snippets for example, you can imagine going crazy with rich snippets but it actually costs a click to go down if user didn’t like those sort of rich snippets. So we’ve been relatively cautious my expectation is that we are going to check out sites and sort of white list them like, this site is the next one to receive rich snippets and this is the next one. But as we grow more confident that it doesn’t hurt the user experience and that the users like it and they expect us to continue to roll that out one more broadly. So there is documentation, you can go ahead and read up on it and a lot of rich snippets are pretty understandable type for example the number of stars on our review and things like that you can usually get a pretty good idea of what your snippets are going to look like. Just for looking at snippets from other sites already look like and that’ll give you an idea what it will look like when it goes live for your site.

Why are the UK SERPS still really poor with irrelevant non UK sites (US/Aus/NZ) ranking very high Google.co.uk since early June?

Guavarian from the UK asks, “Why are the UK SERPS still really poor with irrelevant non UK sites (US/Aus/NZ) ranking very high Google.co.uk since early June?”

And it’s absolutely true, if you do a search for car insurance on google.co.uk. You are more likely to see for example, tescofinance.com or churchil.com some sites that are definitely UK focused; they have even mentioned UK in the title but are not necessarily .co.uk. Well the short answer is that as we get better or more willing to show .coms if we think it is relevant to giving countries. So I think everybody kind of got used to the idea that if you search on google.co.uk you are only going to get .uk’s and that’s not really the right attitude because if the best result for the British searcher is something that ends in .com we still want to show that to the British searcher. So that is probably a change that we are not going to revert if you see things where it’s in relevant.com or .com that has nothing at all to do with the UK or Australia or New Zealand or whatever it is your country market is, then we’d definitely be interested in hearing about that. But as we continue to know more about which websites are associated with which countries I do expect that well startassure.com comes a little bit more often in some different countries. So that’s just something we are getting a little bit better on detecting. Tescofinance.com is still about the UK market and is still really useful to a British surfer and we are willing to show .coms a little more to people over time.

Which search media does return the more reliable information: Google or Twitter?

Martino in Trento, Italy asks, “Which search media does return the more reliable information: Google or Twitter?”

Now don’t go hating on Twitter, trying to make people bust heads. Twitter has many many great uses. It’s great for breaking real time sort of news, it’s fantastic in asking your friends. And Google on the other hand, we try to return really reliable, really reputable information. So if you are sorting by date Twitter is fantastic, if you want an answer to a question that’s been around for a while Google looks great for that. So try both for different situations. If you don’t have as many friends then you may not be able to get the questions that you want answered on Twitter. And I wouldn’t be surprised if spammers are eventually see traffic on Twitter and they are like muhahahaha because if you are only sorting by date then any new fad that comes along or spam will try to jump on to that. So they are different, they are good for different things. They use whatever works best for you.

Query deserves freshness.Fact or Fiction?

Tom from Seattle asks, “”Query deserves freshness.” Fact or fiction?”

It’s a fact! They have talked it in the New York Times that we believe that there are some queries that deserve freshness. So QDF was that he talked about it in the New York Times and that is fact not fiction.

Is Google doing away with use of the meta description?

Quentin from Vancouver asks, “In the search results, Google will often display a snippet appropriate to the specific search query – often disregarding the meta description. Is Google doing away with meta description use like they did with meta keywords?”

Alright Quentin let me lay a little bit of schooling on you. It actually turns out that we used to not use that meta description at all. We would only use the snippet appropriate to the specific search query. And only in recent years have we added it where if you have a meta description we would sometimes chose that meta description over the snippet within some page. So in fact it’s moving the other direction, we started out as only having stuff from within the page and now we are little more likely to sometimes use the meta description. But we don’t use it all the time. If you think it’s useful for the query, don’t make the same meta description on every single page just as a cookie cutter because we sort of think that’s not a very useful meta description. So it’s not that we are getting away with the meta description we use it more now than we did say 7 or 8 years ago. But at the same time we think it has to be useful before we use the meta description the best thing to do is make a really useful meta description and then you are more likely to see that instead the snippet from the page. Now if you don’t want to bother that’s completely fine too. We’ll just try to do whatever we think is the smartest and the best for the users and hopefully users will click through and find your content.

Will Google find text in images someday?

Pigatto from Erechim, Brazil asks, “Will Google find text in images someday?”

Well that would be a really big undertaking. I think it would be fun, we’ve joked around the pool table about wouldn’t it be great if we crawl the web and found out all the images and ran OCR on all the images on the web, that really would be a lot of work. I think it would be a fun idea but I don’t think you should count on that for the short term from Google

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