Mattcutts Video Transcript
How can I make sure Google reaches my deeper pages?
Pai from Portugal writes and asks “How can I make sure that Google reaches and indexes pages that are on a lower (deeper) level of a website?”
Well it’s unclear whether you are asking about how many levels deep it is in terms of directory or how far it is from the root page. One way that you can make sure that Google reaches those pages is the link from your root page, your main page directed to the deep page that you wanted to crawl. So we tend not to think about how many directories deep a page is, but we do look at how much page rank a page has. So if a lot of people link to your root page then you can link to the sub pages and then those sub pages can link to other sub pages. And then at some point we’ll stop crawling. So one thing that you can do is try to make sure that as many pages as possible are within just a few clicks from your root page. A good way to do is to prioritize which pages that you think are the most important. Either they convert the way that you want, they have really good ROI. So don’t treat all of your pages the same if you got a few that are real just like money makers, try to surface those and get them linked to from your root page and then you can make the most out of that.
Are shortened URLs treated differently than other redirects?
We have a question from Brain, Atlanta, Gerogia who asks “Does Google crawl and treat TinyURLs using a 301 redirect the same as other links?”
Well, let me take the mention of tinyurl.com and substitute to url shortness in general. And the answer is whenever we crawl one of these links and if they do a 301, yes we do follow those and flow the page rank just as we normally would with a 301 from any other site. So Danny Sullivan did a really great piece about urls shortening services, where he took the top url shortening services like Tinyurl.com, bitly and sort of said do they do a 301 redirect or do they do some other sort of redirect. And so if their service does a 301 redirect we should flow on the page rank just as we do with any other sort of 301 redirect. So url shortening services that do that correctly, we should be able to follow that and find the destination url with no problem what so ever.
How can new pages get indexed quickly?
Vladigdea from Romania asks, “How much time is Google taking to index a new webpage, and how can we accelerate the process besides using Google Webmaster Tools?”
Well, the simple answer is get more links. We can index the page within seconds certainly within minutes if we find CNN is linked into you, we’ll crawl that very very quickly. So we can find new content quite quickly if you’ve got a blog or something like that, we come often and check for it. But the best way is to make sure that you have enough links so that we think that you are a really useful site and that we come back pretty often
Can product descriptions be considered duplicate content?
Mani from Delhi asks, “Are product description pages on an e-commerce site termed as duplicate content, if the same product description appears on other sites? It does happen for many branded products.”
Mani, you are absolutely right, it does happen. Most of the time it happens because that’s not the original content. So if you got an affiliate feed that might have images that might not have images, the same content on your page, your e-commerce product page as 400 other sites. It is really hard to distinguish yourself; you have to ask, where is my value ad? What is my affiliate site or my site that doesn’t have original content? And compare it to these other 100 of sites. So whenever possible, I urge you to try to have original content, try to have a really unique value ad don’t just take an affiliate feed create a site that’ll fly by night and now there is no reason why anybody wants to assemble on your site. So typically it’s best if it’s possible to find some kind of unique angle and not just the exact same stuff that everybody else has in their webpage as well.
Can I publish 100+ pages at once?
We have a question from Dave in the Philippines, who asks “If you have a lot of blog content for a new section of a site (100+ pages), is it best to release it over a period of time, or is it fine to just unleash 100 pages?”
I think in most pages especially if it’s a high quality content, I would just unleash the 100 pages. Now if you are talking about 10,000 or 100,000 or million pages you might be a little more cautious. It’s not that it would cause sort of automatic penalty but if we see a site that was nothing the other day and suddenly there are 4 million pages at our index that might be a sort of thing where someone might come and take a look of that site and just say is this a legitimate content or is this some sort of auto generated junk or that sort of thing. There is no value add to this content. So 100 pages I really wouldn’t worry about but I would make sure its high quality content. A lot of the times when you are creating content organically you’ll end up at a page at a time and I would say just go ahead and publish it when you have that new page. You don’t necessarily have to wait till you get a lot of different content and batch it up and release it, it’s totally fine to release one page at a time but specially for small scale stuff and especially for high content I wouldn’t worry about it.
Will DiggBar create duplicate content issues?
A question from Remiz Rahnas from Kerala, India. Remiz asks”Will DiggBar create duplicate content issues? For example: my site is www.example.com and now when you add digg.com before my site’s address (digg.com/example.com), it is showing a page from Digg.com with my content (exactly the same).”
The short answer is no. So as Digg originally launched it, it could have caused duplicate issues and infact it could have resulted in pages being removed from Google. But they made a number of changes to make things better. The big one in Google’s point of view is that it had a meta no index tag. So that itself says anything that we know of that’s on Digg that’s one of these framed short URLs, we’ll have a no index tag that tells Google not to index that page. We just don’t show any reference to it at all in our search results. So the fact that we see two copies and one is a meta no index means yes we won’t show this one and so we should correctly assign all the page rank and all the other characteristics to your original content. So the Digg bar as originally implemented was a little dangerous. But they quickly adjusted and integrated and made some changes that made it such that you shouldn’t have duplicate content issues. Now as a webmaster do I like framing my site without my permission? I’m not a huge fan of that so there a lot of people who think the Digg bar is rude but if I put on your search engine policy hat it is no longer a violation of search engine quality guidelines or Google’s guidelines and it shouldn’t cause any duplicate content issues for your site.
Can Experts Exchange be excluded from search results?
Here’s a fun question from Joshua Starr in Indianapolis, Indiana. Joshua asks “Is it possible to exclude Experts Exchange from search result? Why are they ranked so high, with such a spammy interface?”
Alright there are lots of different new answers to the answer to this question. We are not going to remove that Experts Exchange because they don’t violate our quality guidelines atleast they currently don’t and that they don’t cloak. Some people think that they do cloak but if you go in and look at the cash page you try to get an answer and then you click on the cash page and you go to the very bottom the content is there. So it’s not as if they are showing a different content to Googlebot than they are to users. If they did that would be a valid reason for removing Experts Exchange or any other site. However if you use search wiki you can remove Experts Exchange from individual queries and it’s not just for that one query we’ll often remove it from related queries. So if you really don’t like a particular URL or Experts Exchange or even the site you can click to remove that, do a search for them and remove and all that sort of stuff through search wiki. And we’ll try to learn overtime that you do not like Experts Exchange. Why are they ranking so high why don’t you take action and they look spammy? If they are not violating our quality guidelines, just because someone does or doesn’t like a website is not a good enough reason to take somebody out. We try to maintain that quote by vote tag I may not like what you said but I may but I’ll defend to the dare to the ability to say it. So, just because someone says something about something objectionable to us doesn’t mean we’ll remove them from our index. So whether you think its spammy is upto you and you can use search wiki but it doesn’t violate our quality guidelines we try to be very careful about that. You don’t just remove a site just because you don’t like it for example it has to an actual violation of our quality guidelines or something like a legal removal or something like virus or malware changing those sorts of things, so you can still do it for yourself but unless something changes I don’t expect us to remove results.
What are the factors that go into determining the PageRank of a Twitter page?
We have a twitter question from Atul Arora in Fremont. Atul says “What are the factors that go into determining of PageRank of a Twitter page, e.g. it is the followers, backlines?”
I gave an answer about twitter where I said that we treat twitter pages just like regular web pages. So it’s the exact same thing we don’t look at the number of followers that you have on twitter, we look at the number of links that you have to your profile or to your specific tweets. So if you have a lot of page ranks or lot of linking into one particular really interesting status message that one might be more interesting or more likely to show up in our search results but we don’t look at how many followers you have or anything like that. We certainly assume that the followers can be gamed pretty easily on a lot of different sites. So what we find tends to be back links and the reputation of those back links is the way that we score how reputable the page is on twitter just like any other site across the web.
How much does a domain’s age affect its ranking?
We have a question from JZ in Ohio, who asks “How much weight does the number of years a domain is registered for have on your ranking?”
My short answer is not to worry about that very much, not very much at all infact. Danny Sullivan had asked about this recently because there were some registrars sending around emails saying ‘did you know that Google give you a bonus in ranking if you register your site for three or more years.’ Just to clarify that’s not based on anything that we have said. The only thing that might be coming from is that we did file a pattern that basically said we could use historical data in our ranking so you could in theory look for how many years your site has been registered for. Just like you could look at the history of the site to say whether it’s high quality or low quality but we have a lot of ideas and we file a lot of patterns that doesn’t mean all of that gets used in our rankings. So I don’t want people to jump to that assumption just because there was one pattern filed in 2002 and 38 claims down somebody said well, you can look at how many years your site is registered for and to jump to the conclusion that we use that in our ranking. so my short answer is make great content don’t worry nearly as much about how many years your domain is registered for just because someone sending you an email that says Google does or may use that in your ranking doesn’t mean that you should automatically take that to face value. What makes the big difference is the quality of your site and the sort of links that are pointing to you or not, is my site registered for three or four years instead of one or two years.
Can you talk about the change in Google’s referrer string?
Hey folks! Whenever we started off with a bunch of questions, I threw a couple of example questions in and some people wanted to hear the answers. So people asked “Can you talk about the change in Google’s referrer string?” so that was one of my questions that got voted up. And I would be happy to!
The short answer is that there is a change on the horizon and it’s only a very small percentage of users right now but I think that it probably will grow and will grow over time, where Google’s referrer, that is whenever you do a Google search and you click on a result you go to another website and your browser passes along a value called a referrer, that referrer string will change a little bit. It used to be google.com/search for example, now it’ll be google.com/url and for a short time we didn’t have what the query was, which got a lot of people frustrated. But the google.com/search, the new Google referrer string will have the query embedded in it and there’s really interesting tit-bit that not everybody knows it also has embedded in that referrer string a pretty good idea of where on the page the click happened. So for example if you were result number 1 there’s a parameter in there that indicates that the click came from result number1. If you were number 4 it will indicate that the click came from result number 4. So now you don’t necessarily need to go scrapping Google to find what your rankings were for these queries. You can find out, I was number 1 for this query whenever someone clicked on it and came to my website. So that can save you ton of work. You don’t need to worry nearly as much; you don’t need to scrape Google, you don’t have to think about ranking reports. Now we don’t promise that this will be a feature that we guarantee that will always have on Google forever but definitely take advantage of it for now. There’s one interesting twist which is, Google’s universal search or blended search is also taken account into the results. So imagine that you’ve done a search for sunset and maybe we have three images of a sunset and your website is number 1 for sunset, you might show up as if you are at position number 4 because those images are treated as if they were results 1, 2 and 3. Or if you had a news result, the news headline and the two or three links after that might be treated as regular results. So in theory you could think you are at position 4 when it just was that you had an image or 2 or 3 up ahead of you. But for most parts it gives an accurate idea of where on the page you were and so you get all kinds of extra information that you can use in you analytics, and to compute your ROIs without having to do a lot of extra work. Or if you can it’s a great idea to look at that referrer string and try to take advantage of that information. Again this only affects a small percentage of users right now but we expect that it’ll grow overtime.
Blogroll
Categories
- 2013 seo trends
- author rank
- Bing search engine
- blogger
- Fake popularity
- google ads
- Google Adsense
- google fault
- google impact
- google Investigation
- google knowledge
- Google panda
- Google penguin
- Google Plus
- Google webmaster tools
- Hummingbird algorithm
- infographics
- link building
- Mattcutts Video Transcript
- Microsoft
- MSN Live Search
- Negative SEO
- pagerank
- Paid links
- Panda and penguin timeline
- Panda Update
- Panda Update #22
- Panda Update 25
- Panda update releases 2012
- Penguin Update
- Sandbox Tool
- search engines
- SEO
- SEO cartoons comics
- seo predictions
- seo techniques
- SEO tools
- seo updates
- social bookmarking
- Social Media
- SOPA Act
- Spam
- Uncategorized
- Webmaster News
- website
- Yahoo