Mattcutts Video Transcript
Is SearchWiki or Analytics data used for ranking?
We’ve got a question from Boston. Micahn asks “Is Google aggregating Search Wiki data with Analytics for ranking?”
No. I’ve said before that my team; the web spam team will not go over and ask the analytics team for data so we don’t get any feed from the analytics team and we’ve said that we are currently not using SearchWiki data. Is it possible then in the future we might, may be, but at least right now if you are spinning it up all day everyday voting up or submitting your URLs in SearchWiki you are basically wasting your time. We are not using that data right now. And if we ever did use that data we’d be very cautious about how we used it such that we try to prevent any sort of abuse. So instead, better to make great sites, get lots of visitors, build lots of buzz and that’s a great way forward and you don’t have to worry about SearchWiki data or anything like that.
Does Google Analytics work with Web 2.0 and social media?
We have a question from Indainapolis, Indiana. Benji says “Does Google Analytics have plans to start adding specific tools around web 2.0 or social media websites?”
Well Analytics is a tool for your website right, so the question is if I have a web 2.0 can Google Analytics help me? And I think the answer is yes, as I recall, I’m not the expert in Google analytics and I love those guys but I don’t talk to them that often, I think that we do provide analytics solutions for flash these days and also for AJAX. So there are ways to track internal events on your page, there are hooks where you can say so I’ve got to this part of the HTML fire-off some sort of things that analytics can use. So double check and do a little research to verify that, but if you do have a rich website with all sorts of interesting things I think you can still use Google Analytics for different events and track that. You have to do a little more work if it’s just static HTML but you’re already doing more work to make a really rich web 2.0 experience anyway. So I think it is possible, you just have to do some thought on what are the events that I want to track and then can I insert those hooks to track the visitors as they go through the funnel and how they convert.
Has Google changed the relevancy it awards to social media?
HandH in Chichester asks “Has Google changed its relevancy it awards to Social Media sites in the last six months?”
We tend not to think about like oh just links from social media sites just like we tend not to think about oh brands or things like that. We tend to think about links whether they are useful or whether they are not useful and so we use that as our limits test. We try to give more credit or more trust to the link that we think are really valuable. For example we roll out over 300 or 400 changes per year. so I was in a meeting just before this one where we were talking about a change that has a slightly different weighting how we do some types or links some types of anchors. And so could that have an effect on social media site, it could but that wasn’t the intent of it. So have we made relevancy changes that would change how we do various social media links and how we weight them in the last six months? Yeah we’ve probably have but it hasn’t been lets change how we think about social sites. That said, what we said about put out a call for what people want to see the web spam team do in 2009, I was surprised six different people even in one day said oh change how you weight social media links. So we are open to doing what we need to do to have the best search results and things that are really useful for users but at least so far we haven’t gone after that as a dedicated project or anything like that.
Should we expect more spelling corrections in search results?
Let’s have a question from Florida; Marjy in Boca Raton asks “Recently, Google has been more proactive in providing results that feature “corrected” spellings. In what way will smart guesses be employed in search results in the future? Can we expect more synonyms in search results for example?
I think as we look forward we get more and more users and some of those users are not savvy and some of those users don’t know how to spell well. So one figure that I’ve heard is if you look at random queries something like 10% of them might be misspelled. And when we realize just how many queries were misspelled that’s when we decided to write what in my opinion is one of the world’s best spell checkers. But the fact is even if you do that even if you have like a huge click through on ‘did you mean’ there are always some people who didn’t realize that it was there. And so we have introduced a change recently where we will spell correct what we think is the right answer or one or two results and then we’ll show the normal answers down below. Then if you are a user who just didn’t know how to spell it correctly that really helps you out a lot. And in fact it helps the web spam out a little bit as well because people who were just using typos and misspellings you know the regular users don’t stumble on spam as that much as they stumble on good results first. Now if you are really really are a power user and there are a ton of people who are you can always put a + in order to say this is the exact word I’m searching for you can even put it in double quotes you can also put those double quotes even on a single word. So there are lots of ways to tell Google no this is what exactly I meant to search for. We try to be smart so if somebody types something that looks like it’s a misspelling but it’s not, we’ll try to figure that out over time. So it’s not the case where we roll out something and we’ll never make changes for the several more years. Instead we try to come up with something that’s pretty reasonable which works well for the vast majority of users, power users can still have the escape hatch the + sign or the double quotes and if we do make mistakes we try to figure out what can we do to improve it in the next generation of our algorithms or in the next time we push out new data for the spell correcting code. So I think we do a pretty good job about that we are always open to more suggestions ways that we could improve the interface. But that’s probably I wouldn’t be surprised if we continue to improve how we use spell corrections to help out regular users who don’t want to learn the intricacies of search engines who are probably not watching this video they just want to get where they want to go as quickly as possible.
Is excessive whitespace in the HTML source bad?
A question from Funkman at an undisclosed location. “’Excessive White space’ in HTML source is bad. Fact, myth or somewhere in between?
We really don’t care that much. We’re pretty good you know, every time we see white space we separate stuff and we ignore the white space so it doesn’t really cause us a lot of harm in either way. The only thing to pay attention is to I have seen some sneaky people who will try to do hidden text or whatever and they’ll start off their HTML with 60 new lines. So whenever you view source you will be like oh man its blank there is no source, dude you just blew my mind. Anybody who is savvy is like or I can use the scroll bar and see what’s down here. So I would just use white space wherever it’s reasonable for you. I think some clean HTML with some nice indentation and all those sort of stuff looks good it makes your site more maintainable and makes it easy to upgrade and see what’s going on with your source and Google does a very good job about finding separators and breaking it. So don’t make one word for every 200 blank lines but otherwise if you are doing normal reasonable stuff I wouldn’t worry about it that much. I do whatever is best for you as you are maintaining the site.
Can I disallow crawling of my CSS and JavaScript files?
A fun question from SEOmofo in Simi Valley. They ask “If I externalize all CSS style definitions and JaveScript scripts and disallow all user agents from accessing these files (via.robot.txt), would this cause problems for Googlebot? Does Googlebot need access to these files?”
I personally would recommend not blocking that for example the white house recently rolled out a new robot.txt and I think they blocked the images, directory or CSS or Java Script or something like that. You really don’t need to that. In fact sometimes it can be very helpful if we think something spam is going on with Java Script or if somebody is doing a sneaky redirect or something like that. So my personal advice would to let Googlebot to go ahead and crawl that and then it’s not like these files are huge anyway so it doesn’t consume a lot of bandwidth. So my personal advice just let Googlebot access to all that stuff and then most of the time we won’t ever fetch it. But in the rare occasion when we doing a quality check on behalf of someone or we receive a spam report and then we can go ahead and fetch that make sure your site is clean and not having any source of problems.
Which is more important: content or links?
Here’s a funny question from Jeff in NYC, “As Google’s algo evolves, is it better to have exceptional links and mediocre content, or exceptional content and mediocre links?”
I’ll stop right there rather than finishing the question. Google always has to trade off the balance between authority and topicality for lack of a better word. If somebody types in Viagra which is one of the most spammed terms in the world, you want something that’s about Viagra you don’t just want something that has lot of authority something like news week or time that is talking about or writing an article and they have one mention of Viagra and they say oh this is something like Viagra or something just to throw-off phrase. So you do want authority, the sites that are trust worthy, that are reputable but you also want topicality you don’t want something that is off topic you want to about what user typed down. So we try to find a good balance there. So I would like to say have a well rounded site, great content has to be the foundation of any good site because, mediocre content tends not to attract exceptional link by itself and if you try getting exceptional link on really really crappy content you are going to be pushing uphill it’s going to be harder to get those links you have to do stuff that we can set as bad or scuzzy for the web like paying for them. So it’s better to have great content and to get those links naturally and then you get both, you get great content and you get great links. Then trying to have something that’s really really not that interesting and trying to just push and push and push and bug people and send out spam emails and ask for links and those sorts of things. So you want to have a well rounded site, and one of the best ways to do that, is to have a fantastic, interesting, useful content, great resources, great information and then that naturally attracts the links and then search engines want to reflect the fact that the web thinks that you are interesting or important or helpful.
Do ids in heading tags affect search engines?
Alright, we’ve got a question from Spain specifically Madrid, Dictina asks “Does using a class or an id in a header tag <h1 id=”whatever”>text</h1> instead of plain headers <h1>text</h1> interfere with the way search engines see and understand headings?”
I believe the answer is no, because you still have for example h1, you just have h1 id= whatever. So I don’t think that interferes in anyway. We are pretty good about saying here’s a hyperlink or an image tag and here are extra attributes, width or heights and we can prose those and sometimes we can use them. For example an image search you can now search for a specific image width and height of the images. But we are very good about noisy documents, documents width, extra ids all sorts of DIVs tables that aren’t closed those sorts of things. We do pretty well about disregarding those. So I would do clean great syntax make it easier for yourself when you develop or upgrade your site in future and Google will do a good job of ignoring the elements like on DIVs and stuff like that where you give it a class or an id name that’s not strictly necessary but often good form to do. So don’t worry about it, as far as search engines go.
What can I do if a competitor is spamming?
Laura Thieme from Columbus, OH says “A client has a leading competitor who has created 100 or so blog sites with little depth – Google gives them top ranking on every related term to their industry. Why does this tactic win? I thought this was crap hat tactics?”
This ‘crap hat’ at a phrase Danny Sullivan used in a recent conference, he’s just annoyed when people do spamming junky stuff that doesn’t really help anybody on the web. So Laura, do a spam report and give us some specifics because, I’d love to check it out. I think our scoring does pretty well on finding out links that we shouldn’t be crediting but we love to get new data on things that we should be doing better or link exchanges that don’t appear to be diffusing if they are really really excessive. So send a standard report so that we can check it out because that’s the sort of stuff we love to get and we’ll see where it goes from there. Thanks!
Should I strip file extensions from my URLs?
Tons of questions from the UK! J from London asks “Does stripping file extensions from URLs (site.com/folder/page/html versus site.com/folder/page have demonstrable benefit in the SERPs?”
I don’t really think it does and personally I would not do that. People like to know that it’s a html page that they are hitting. If you have a directory then, sure have a directory, but personally if you do not have .html then if your web server is not configured correctly we are making guesses about is it a pdf or is it a .exe or is it a cfm all the different mime types that there are trying to figure out what type of content it is. So if possible I would probably just stick with the standard convention have something like htm or html, users understand that, they don’t get confused they won’t be quite as cautious about clicking on a result. So it doesn’t make much difference in core ranking but I think behaviorally and not making something that a rough edge that people would get stuck on or worry about so I would probably stick with having the extension, having the html or something like that.
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