Mattcutts Video Transcript
Why aren’t penalized sites notified in Webmaster Tools?
We got a question from JP in Los Angeles. JP asks “When a site is penalized by Google, why isn’t a message sent to the owner via Google Webmaster Tools telling them how/why it was penalized? Currently site owners are left grasping in the dark trying to figure out what they did to cause a penalty.”
But the fact is we do, we don’t do it for all penalties because there are some bad guys, some spammers and black hats who you don’t want to clue in. But for things like hidden text, if we think your site is hacked or even vulnerable to hacking, we’ve even talked about sending messages to people who we think have all Google analytics packages. But we do send a large number of people warnings about their site that sort of say ‘hey! Heads up we had to penalize your site because of hidden text or for some other reasons. We don’t do it for every single site we don’t do it for every single penalty, because there are people who try to see how far they can get away with and if they’ve been caught and if they know that they’ve caught they’ll start it on another site. So we’ll try to find out ways to let the good guys know that they have issues without clueing in or alerting the bad guys. But we’ll never be able to tell or probably never be able to tell every single person that they’ve been penalized. We’ll keep trying to do a good job though.
How are load times displayed in Webmaster Tools calculated?
We have a question from Deepesh in New York, who asks “How does Google calculate site load times in the data it exposes in the Google’s webmaster statistics? Is the calculation simply average time to get and receive the HTML content for a page?”
I think the answer is yes. It’s pretty much it! Googlebot sends out the request and starting from there we time how long it takes for us to see the request back. So it is the end to end time for us to fetch the page or fetch the data from the server and that’s pretty much it. We are looking at it from Googlebot’s perspective, we have no idea how long it takes for any given user to fetch a page; we can only look at how long Googlebot takes. But that’s essentially what we are looking at.
Should I use nofollow in links to my disclaimer and privacy policy?
We have a question from Michelle in Netherlands, who asks “Is it good thing to put ‘nofollow’ in links to a disclaimer, privacy statements and other pages like that with the internal PageRank in mind? I hear different stories about this.”
Good question! The reason that I would use nofollow is if you truly don’t want your page indexed at all. So for example a login page, Googlebot does not know how to login, and that’s not of any value for users to have. I can imagine that the disclaimer or privacy statement could be kind of useful. So you can put those links on, it’s not that it’s going to cause you a spam penalty but truthfully I would tend to worry more about having enough good links because you have enough great content that you tend to get a lot of people linking to you, you tend to get a lot of good coverage in Google’s index. It’s a second order effect the best, I really wouldn’t spend a lot of time in saying that I have nofollow on my links on the stuff that I don’t care about. Typically you do better by may be linking or by not linking to stuff. Link to the privacy policy for once but you don’t have to link to it on every page of your site or something like that. But really I would only use it for the pages that you really don’t want to be in Google at all. Don’t worry much about sculpting that tends to take a lot more time and not really be a bigger bang for your buck compared to just putting your efforts on making a good content that will attract links.
Will domain registration changes ding me in Google?
Hello! We have a question from Scott Clark in Lexington, KY. Scott says “When you move a domain from one register to another or your registrant information changes slightly (e.g. new phone number) will Google ding you for instability at the registrar?”
And my answer is No, probably not. Certainly people need to change their information, sometimes they change the registrars, that’s completely normal, that’s completely expected behavior. The only times that we try to really keep an eye on that is if we think that someone as a spammer might be trying to buy someone’s domain only for the links or buy an expired domain or something like that. But there’s plenty of times when you are switching to a new address, you are switching to a new phone number where it does make complete sense where that information does need to change. So we try to be very smart about it and you should never see any difference if you are a regular person and the hope is if you are trying to do something sneaky or spammy then we might pay a little bit of a closer eye. But in the typical case I really wouldn’t worry about it.
Is Google doing anything different for Twitter results?
We have a question from Matt in California. This is not me Matt, this is some other Matt in California who asks “Is Google doing anything different when it comes to serving up Twitter results?”
And the answer is no, we are not doing anything different. We have our web search results and if lot of people link to a particular tweet or if particular message that someone did on twitter then we think that’s really relevant and we see the content of that page or that status message and we’ll just return it within our normal scoring. So we look at the content of the page which is probably pretty short 140 characters or less for the core of the message we look at the people that link to it or and what they said when they linked to it. But it’s not as if we do anything different for our scoring for twitter or we do anything strange or anything like that. We treat them just like normal web pages so we crawl the web and as a part of crawling the web we end up at lot of different tweets or twitters by different people on twitter and so they just get ranked normally. So there’s no special sauce or anything different going on within our search results for just showing twitter.
Do site load times have an impact on Google rankings?
It’s time for another round for Grab Bag questions. We record all these questions on one day and send them out on the course on many different days. Last time everyone complained they saw the same red polo shirt for 30 – 40 days in a row, so I actually brought a bunch of different shirts so we’ll just sprinkle it up and mix it up a little bit. So you’ll get a little more variety in your shirt. So let’s start with the first question from Deepesh in New York. Deepesh asks “What impact do site load times have on Google rankings?”
The short answer is, none, right now. Now let’s give it a little more color. Of course if the site takes so long to load that we can’t even fetch it, Googlebot can’t get a copy of it then that will have an effect on your rankings because your site is essentially timing out. So if your site is taking 20 or 30 seconds to respond to request that could be a problem. But if your site takes 1 second versus 2 seconds that has no difference what so ever on Google’s rankings. So that’s the short answer. Now let’s give a little more color. If you haven’t heard Larry Page has talked about how he wants the web to be. He wants the web to be really fast, almost as fast as a magazine like as soon as you turn the page you are ready for the next page. And so chrome was built with that philosophy, we want to make the web really fast make it a really good experience so currently site loading times have no effect on Google’s rankings. What might happen in the future, I don’t know. I can certainly imagine Google saying while we like the web to be faster, what can we do to encourage people to make their sites faster and how can we get the word out, that if your site is faster people will be happier and more likely to come back to your site or use your site more often. We’ve seen that on our own site. So it is interesting that we want the web to be fast and we want sites to load quickly. Right now it’s not at all affecting our rankings. For the future who knows what might be involved, personally I think it’s a great idea if you can look at some other ways to make your site a little faster. For example don’t include 40 different java script files. You can compact those all down into one java script or one CSS file. Don’t include huge images when your image size is only set to something tiny. There are lots of ways to minify or compact your pages to make them return faster for users. You can Gzip pages for example. So there’s a lot of ways to look at that’s really good for user experience. Don’t worry about from the search engine ranking perspective right now but it probably can make a really big difference for your users.
Will SEO still exist in five years?
Kevin from Marseille, France asks “Will SEO still exist in five years?”
Four people liked that question 45 didn’t like that question I’m still going to answer it. Yes! I think SEO will still exist in five years. Google tries to make it so that you don’t need to be an SEO expert. But SEO in some sense it’s almost like a resume. In the same way you polish your resume you figure out how to put your best foot forward, SEO tries to figure out how to put the best foot forward for your website. So SEO is not spam, there are many many white hat ways to do SEO; canonicalization, something that we’ve been talking a lot recently can help make sure that all of your URLs get the back links that they deserve you don’t have a lot of duplicate content. And so there’s a plenty of great things that you can do as a developer or as an SEO to make sure that your site is well represented it makes the right impression it’s really useful for the visitors, those are all the great things that you can do. So I think that as a practice will definitely still exist in five years. The hope is that the black hat or sometimes the illegal stuff, crap hat or whatever you want to call it, the stuff that is really kind of annoying if you are the site owner, the stuff that pollutes or clogs up the web that will not be as productive. So my hope is more and more people keep switching to white hat, more and more people learn about SEO but don’t necessarily have to become an expert and they could use self service tools like the Webmaster Council or other search engine’s councils to help them out on SEO but we provide a free SEO starter guide it’s a 20 page PDF and we wouldn’t do that if we didn’t think there was some value to that if we didn’t think there was some value to SEO. So SEO doesn’t have to be spam SEO doesn’t have to mean black hat SEO can help you put your best phrase on your website just like you polish your resume. So I think it will be around in five years and I don’t think that that’s a bad thing.
Which SEO agency do you recommend?
A question from West Virginia, Frank asks “If I’m looking to hire an SEO agency, which one do you recommend?”
I’m not going to say which SEO agency I personally recommend because, you never know things can change; people change their policies you never know exactly what different agencies might be doing. I’ll give you a general answer to the question. If you search for Google SEO Guidelines or something like that, we have an entire page on our Webmaster help centre. This sort of says here’s something to look out for and says some things to look for in an SEO. So things like references, they should be able to tell you exactly what they are going to do like if they are going to wave some magic smoke and not tell you what they are doing be a little worried about that. You might find what they say boring but they should be transparent about what they are doing. I’m going to change the site architecture, I’m going to do all this, they should be completely upfront about all those sorts of things. We’ve changed our SEO guidelines so they used to be a little more controversial now they are much more focused on here are some great ways to identify them so it’s a really good page I recommend you to check it out. There are lots of great SEOs out there. If an SEO gives you sort of a queasy feeling or they seem a little shady or fly by night there are lots of SEOs out there. So don’t go with anybody where you are worried that you can’t leave them or you just get a bad feeling from them because there are lots of good SEOs out there.
Does the ordering of heading tags matter?
Nik from London asks “I’m using a template website (I’m an amateur!). The h1 tag appears below the h2 tag in the code. Does the spider still know what’s going on?”
Yeah! I wouldn’t worry about it, we can handle h1s and h2s very well don’t make your entire page h1 or h2 but you will not believe the sort of stuff that people put up on the web. There is study several years ago that said 40% of web pages have syntax errors. So having one h1 below h2 I wouldn’t sweat it. There are so many people who do broken web pages and ugly web pages and pages that are not really HTML and we still try to process that because there could be some good information on those pages. So just having out of order h1s or h2 pages I wouldn’t worry about.
When did Google start displaying “Did you mean” results?
BlindFiveYearOld in SF asks “When did ‘Did you mean’ search results begin to be displayed? And what is the criteria for presenting ‘Did you mean’ search results above the normal search results?”
The short answer is, it happened relatively recently; I want to say like Novemberish of 2008. So relatively recently is the first time you might have seen it. And when do we show it is when even more sure it’s something useful. Because not everybody clicks on ‘Did you mean’. They are not savvy or they didn’t see it they get blindness so they don’t click on the result which is probably going to help them a lot. So if we think there’s a high prior probability that this will be a very helpful suggestion to users not just a normal search result but really really helpful like they misspelled it badly or we think there are great results waiting for them just around the corner if only they would do this corrected search then we are willing to show this new user interface. And it’s not perfect 100% of the time, you can always use the plus sign or put a phrase or keyword in double quotes to do exactly the search you wanted to do. But if we do have bad search results we’ll try to learn that overtime and improve on the individual algorithms but we have seen a real quality improvement for the majority of users.
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