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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.

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

Mattcutts Video Transcript

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.

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Query deserves freshness.Fact or Fiction?

Mattcutts Video Transcript

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.

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Is Google doing away with use of the meta description?

Mattcutts Video Transcript

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.

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Will Google find text in images someday?

Mattcutts Video Transcript

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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How do meta geo tags influence the search results?

Mattcutts Video Transcript

Jochen from Stuttgart, Germany asks, “How do meta geo tags influence the search results?”

And the answer is that it is not something that we look at very closely at all, not meta geo tags, we tend to look at the IP address, we tend to look at the GTLD or the CCTLD that’s the country code TLD, Top Level Domain so .fr, .de. There is also something in Google’s webmaster tools, where you can say my site is not just the .com that’s about the entire world it’s a British .com or it’s a .com that really pertains to New Zealand or Australia. You can highlight and say this .com is really about Germany or Canada or whatever your country is. But typically the geo tags that are in Meta tags are not as usual and we don’t give such way if at all. So I would spend your time trying to make sure you have the right domain name, trying to make sure you have the right IP address if you can and definitely if you have content that is geo located, even if it’s a sub-domain or sub-directory you can specify that within Google’s webmaster tools and say yes this is relevant for this particular country

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Will a link to a disallowed page transfer PageRank?

Mattcutts Video Transcript

Steen in Copenhagen asks, “If a page is disallowed in the robots.txt, will a link to this page transfer/leak link juice?”

So essentially suppose ebay.com is allowed in robots.txt will a link to ebay.com even though it’s roboted-out will it still collect link juice? And the answer is yes. So in the old days New York Times, eBay, the California DMV, all of them blocked us with robots.txt. And yet if someone comes to Google and types in California DMV you want to return the DMV’s home page. So we solve that by not crawling the page but we can still return the reference and so if you see enough people link to a page even though its roboted-out we can still return that in our search results

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Can my blogroll affect my blog’s reputation in Google?

Mattcutts Video Transcript

Remiz Rahnas from Kerala, India asks,”I keep a blogroll page with link to all my friends’ blogs on my blog. Will that affect my blogs reputation in Google? Recently my friend lost PR5 to 0 for such a page.”

Certainly, who you link to, can affect the reputation. So if you are linking to spammy sites, sites that we consider junky, skuzzy, spammy whatever that can affect your sites reputation. Certainly, if you are selling links within your blogroll, that can be a very high risk. But just because your friend lost PR5 to PR0 that doesn’t necessarily mean it was because of the blogroll, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we thought that he was selling links, it could be a temporary thing with canonicalization. So I wouldn’t automatically assume that it was the blogroll that did it. That said if you do have a blogroll its better that it be editorial real links and not link that you are secretly selling but you are calling it a blogroll or something like that. In general blogrolls are great things to have. I have one of my blogs so don’t be scared to have one. But if you are linking to a spammy stuff or things that you think are kind of low quality be aware that, that can affect how we think of the quality of your website.

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How can I optimize my site on a small budget?

Mattcutts Video Transcript

Keen Agents from Glendale, CA asks, “How does someone begin to SEO their site on a small budget in an overwhelmed industry such as real estate?”

I’ll give you the same answer regardless whether its real estate or any other industry. I think there are a couple of things to bear in mind. No. 1 start with a small niche, don’t say I’m going to rank 1 for real estate or whatever your trophy phrase is. Its probable better to concentrate on individual neighborhoods or individual markets or may be going to a consumer market is a little bit of a big thing to grasp at once. So maybe you want to go for a small sliver of the market, the niche that you can be well known for and then build your way outward. Build your reputation up; build your rankings up as you get to be more well known. The other factor is to be creative. If you have the same brochure way of site as everyone else in the industry, there is no reason for someone to link to you or even remember you. But if you have some sort of compelling thing about your website then, it could be a blog with a distinct voice; it could be you can really make amusing videos; it could be that you come up with fantastic advice, look for some unique angle. So start with a unique niche and try to be creative and how you tackle it and that can probably help you out quite a bit compared to a bunch of different competitors in your industry.

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When will the Data in Webmaster Tools be improved?

Mattcutts Video Transcript

Grahame Davies from London asks, “When will you commence work on improving the information provided in Google (Webmaster Tools) as per the suggestion you would at the start of the year?”

The answer is the webmaster team up in Curtlin has been working very hard to try to make sure that the information is both reliable and updated more often. You don’t always see that because it’s under the hood but they have made a number of significant improvements to make it so that the information continues to work well and be reliable. So the fact is they have been working on that the whole time and you are already benefitting from that and you will continue to benefit from that, and the infrastructure underneath the Google Webmaster Council is much more stable and much more reliable now if it’s as even a few months ago because of the good work that they have been doing

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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?

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

Query deserves freshness.Fact or Fiction?

Is Google doing away with use of the meta description?

Will Google find text in images someday?

How do meta geo tags influence the search results?

Will a link to a disallowed page transfer PageRank?

Can my blogroll affect my blog’s reputation in Google?

How can I optimize my site on a small budget?

When will the Data in Webmaster Tools be improved?

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