Mattcutts video transcript – Does site load time affect rankings

Its time for an other round of grab bag questions. We report all these questions on one and then we send them on a course of many different days, so last time every body complained that they were seeing same red polo shirts for thirty of forty days so we actually brought a bunch of different shirts and we are just sprinkling up and mixing it up a little bit so you get a little more variety in your shirts. So lets start with the first question from Deepesh in newyork.

Deepesh Asks

What impact do site load times have on Google rankings?

The short answer is none right now, so lets give it a little more color so ofcourse if a site took so long to load we can’t even fetch it Googlebot cannot get a copy of it, then it will have an affect on your rankings because your site is essentially timing out so if your site is taking 20 or 30 seconds to respond to requests that could be a problem. But if your site takes one second or two seconds there is no problem what so ever on Google’s rankings. So that’s the short answer. Now lets give it a little more color. If you haven’t heard Larry ( Larry page ) talked about how he wants the web to be, he wants the web to be really fast he wants it as fast as a magazine like as soon as you turn the page you are ready for the next page. So the crawler is build of that philosophy. We want the web to be really fast make it a really good experience. So currently Site load time do not have any impact on Google’s rankings , what might happen in the future i don’t know, i can imagine Google to say we want the web to be faster what can we do to encourage people to make their site 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 and use your site more often. We are seeing that on our own site, so it is interesting that we want the web to be fast and we want the site to load quickly right now its not having any effect in our rankings but in future who knows what might be involved so personally i feel its a great idea if you look at some of the ways to make your site load faster. So for example don’t include 49 different javascript files you can compact all of them into one Javascript or one CSS file. Don’t set huge images which your images are actually meant to be tiny there are lot of ways you can magnify or compact your pages so that it turns faster for users. SO there are a lot of ways that you can look at that is really good for user experience don’t worry in search engine perspective right now but it can probably make a lot of difference for your users.

Google gets all the bashing but why?

From what I have seen in forums and blogs Google gets so much bashing for something they do to defend their algorithm. Why do people do that? Don’t they ever know they wouldn’t have been doing SEO for their sites to rank in Google if Google never exist?

I have been watching Google ever since I started my online Business. I have seen major Google updates for a period of over 7 years almost all the updates were aimed at protecting their algorithm and getting rid of Spam and sites that entertain aggressive search engine ranking tactics. Today Google has changed into a highly quality search engine with good results. If they were not targeting the aggressive search engine optimization people they will not be what they are today.

Hottest topic in today’s SEO world is the Google’s ability to detect and penalize paid links. Whether you buy it or sell it if you get caught by Google police you are gone. Once in a SEOmoz post Matt cuts replied to Rebecca’s post where he talks about natural links being like very strong tires and paid or other artificial links as week tubes / tires than can burst any time. It’s actually true and from what I have seen every site that got affected for links had some sort of problem with artificial links.

Personal experience

Our own site had some problem with Google rankings when we created the search engine promotion widget and got lots of backlinks without knowing we were abusing it. Then we were hit with ranking filter which prevented our site from being in top 10. Did we whine? Well know personally we were not aware that widget links can hurt a site. We were not abusing the system in any way with widgets we spent money on our widgets and the only way we get back our investment is by links. We do that for all our tools but Google never complained on it but when we redirected the links from widgets to our Homepage Google algorithm got angry with our site and reduced our rankings.

What did we do?

We never whined we made all the widget links optional no-follow, cleaned up some links to homepage, removed link to homepage and added it to the widget page directory, checked for any other potential problem with our website and submitted a re-consideration review and in 1 month we were back in rankings.

So was Google wrong with our website?

Ofcourse no even though we thought widget links when not abused will not affect rankings still we shouldn’t have linked to the homepage with keywords. It’s our mistake and Google has every right to make us regret for this mistake their own way. But Google were nice, in fact very nice after rectifying our mistake and explaining them we got back to rankings. So Google definitely want us back in their rankings. Over 4000 people use our SEO tools (http://www.searchenginegenie.com/seo-tools.htm ) and out of that almost 2000 come from search engines. Google knows that and they know our tools get lot of traffic from them and they are happy to send people because people like it.

We don’t come under link buying / selling category

We never bought a single link to our site almost all of them are links to our tools, widgets and some custom built links through articles, directories, blogging etc. We don’t buy links but still hit with a link buying / selling detection algorithm. Was Google wrong in doing this? Ofcourse no why because abusing a widget Is same like buying links. Those links are not editorially given links, people linked to us in exchange for our widget. They didn’t link to our homepage because they liked our site. We understand / I understand and when everyone in our company understands Google’s position we are all good with anything Google decides. But not everyone take it that way I see so much Google bashing out there when something Google does to protect itself and its algorithm.

Being SEO is nothing to be proud of.

Some people think SEO is something great and they are the best in the world. I’ll tell you in Google point of view most of the SEOs are very close to spammers. Not everyone but most I said, including places like SEOmoz which is popular among SEOs discuss so much link buying / selling. Even Rand fishkin is an active support of Text-link-ads and he also supports buying / selling links for ranking. If this industry supports so much text link buying / link selling for ranking purposes and Google tries to defend itself is it wrong? For most SEOs yes Google is wrong. I would call that **** ****. Without Google you would have never existed, who are you to give commands to Google? The massive improvement by Google in transparency with webmasters and Google has helped webmasters a lot. But still webmasters and SEOs want more and more. They don’t want Google to penalize link buying, selling and other sort of aggressive and abusive link building tactics. I would say better leave the SEOs to run the search engine they know how difficult it is. Even the so called Google supporters abuse the search engines when they loose rankings. If you lost your ranking see the mistake you did. Rectify your mistakes, fix them and ask Google to reconsider rather than whining that Google is useless.

Confession from a SEO.

I am in this industry for more than 7 years. Am I proud to be a SEO? No never this industry is hated by so many people including the search quality engineers themselves. I am passionate about search engines I like them, I like the miracle algorithm that works behind it, I like all the PHDs. I personally wanted to become a scientist which never happened. I want to be friends of search engineers not for SEO benefit but to admire and gain knowledge from the wonderful work they do. I sometimes wonder why I came into this SEO industry. Truth I came into SEO from my programming background only for the money involved. This industry has so much money involved than programming and web design. People will pour money if they get good business from search engines. I have seen that practically in some PPC campaigns our company handles. Some big clients spend around 100,000$ a month for PPC. Though ‘not the same case in SEO still the rewards are high. But I am always looking alternate ways because I am not the bad guy type who goes after money. I like to earn money in a way everyone appreciates. Not in a way everyone glares at you. To all the SEOs out there realize the type of work you are doing and please give respect to my loveable search engine. If Google never existed I wouldn’t be here running a Business in SEO. Love Google and appreciate everything they do whether its right or wrong. Everyone appreciates if Google does something right and everyone bashes if they do something harsh to protect their algorithm. Love Google and all its efforts.

My suggestion to all the SEOs and newbie’s (so called SEOs out there) . Google is a search engine for people it’s not for you to play with.

Keeping Top ranking for competitive phrase:

You get top ranking for competitive phrase. How to you sustain its rankings? We have used the knowledge gained over the years to keep competitive rankings consistently for more than 3 years but following some simple yet strong SEO tactics.
1. Make sure your links are consistent most of the time ranking drops happen when the existing links lose its value. Keeping looking for quality natural resources to get backlinks. There are many organizations out there willing to link out to quality websites without any monetary benefit. You can approach them and they will eventually link to you.
2. If you have achieved top ranking it doesn’t justify you achieved everything. We need to make sure we keep adding quality contents, blogs and whatever you were doing before to come up on top.
3. Also if one phrase is ranking make sure you rank for more relative phrases, synonyms, plurals etc. This will help the search engines understand better your rankings are deserved and they will keep your ranking on top.
4. If a page ranks in search engine for top competitive phrase make sure you don’t too much play with it. You can play around it not play with it. We never know what factors contribute to the ranking for a phrase and it’s important not to mess it up.
5. Avoid using anything negative that might result in over optimization or penalty. When people get top rankings they get existed and tend to go more aggressive. Aggression not only hurts but your site can disappear from rankings for a long time.

What determines a website size?

Particularly in SEO industry we are used to calling small, medium sized, large and extra large websites. So what determines the size. Well size is a relative word in our industry. It’s important we know the size before quoting for SEO work or starting work on the site.

Small sized sites: Most of the small Business sites that come to us a small. People think just putting one website online is enough to be on top of search engines. Fact its not enough we need to have a quality site to be on top. We say a site is small when it is built completely in flash, or html sites with only 10 to 20 pages ( without any database / products ) , just pages with contact and few other pages, sites that have products but very few like 10 or 20 etc. If sites like these come to us we tell our clients to add blogs, articles, news and all other possible information that helps SEO and helps expand the size of the site.

Medium sized website: Medium sized website sites that has decent amount of pages with articles, good well written information pages, at-least 50 products etc. Medium sized websites are ideal for targeting regional and low competitive keywords. So we prefer to take medium sized sites for SEO for low competitive keywords. To be eligible to be medium sized you can say the site should have at least search engine crawl able pages. We don’t consider flash sites as medium sized even if it has 500 pages embedded into flash. It’s because flash are still not efficiently crawled and it’s difficult for us to optimize a flash website.

Large websites: Large websites are mostly product based websites. We get lots of websites that are product driven for optimization. Some sites have up to 10,000 products. It can range from costumes, cosmetics, tools etc. In rare cases we get large websites that are not product based but still have 1000s of pages. These websites have good contents already and it’s easier to optimize. A large website is mostly database driven and it’s eligible to be called large only if it has 1000s of search engine index-able pages.

Very large websites: These websites are rare but lots of them exist we rarely take these sites for SEO because it contains more than 100,000 products and it’s not easy to optimize these sites. We had a client in medicine industry that had more than 150,000 pages. Optimization was never easy because it’s difficult to funnel PageRank and backlink power to all those pages.
So as you can see from my explanation size is a more relative word. Online marketing industry is the most concerned when it comes to size. We take size seriously. www replica watch shop com tag heuer replica replica watches for men omega replica breitling copy

Is Google penetrating our secret lives?

Many of us are not aware how much we get addicted to Google and its products. I personally use Google search, Gmail, Google reader for reading my favorite blogs, Google images, Product search, Google Maps and much more Google products. Virtually you can say most of my internet experience in around Google search engine. It’s not just because I am Google addict. It’s also because SEO is my lively hood. I spend most of my time in internet and Google.
But doing all these most of us forget, Google is tracking every activity of us using cookies and other technologies. So more we use Google and its products more our privacy is invaded. I suspect a big YES. We all know Google needs to collect information from its visitors to keep its search engine going efficiently, if any of our sites use Google analytics it’s important they track down every detail possible for their Analytics users. Similarly every product has a catch for itself. Google has a reason always to spy on us for each of its products. So is this something to worry about? If someone is spying on you will be happy to let it go? Don’t you think you will get disturbed it’s true that more you use Google products more they spy at you? But it’s their duty you cannot blame them but you need to be aware that Google knows what you are doing.
The most penetrating and efficient Google spy tool is the Google Pagerank display on the Google toolbar. If you enable PageRank display on Google toolbar for each and every web page or website you visit the toolbar needs to query the Google datacenter to get its PageRank. So Google knows each and every page you are visiting. Most of us who are aware of this either turn of the PageRank display or turn off the Toolbar itself when we are surfing for personal or sensitive information. Its not just me who is concerned on Google’s penetration there are lots of discussion on blogs and forums about this issue. Most of the people conclude by saying if you are worried about privacy don’t use products that invade your privacy. That is the reason many corporate don’t allow emails like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail etc. Only corporate emails are allowed to be used. Some companies even ban search engine usage to protect privacy. I recently came across an interesting theory in a forum on Google’s privacy invasion. A user posts
“Google’s Algorithm has changed to the point where it now tracks every user by IP address, so for example if you are searching for a specific search term or browsing a website running AdSense ads, then it will log the sites you visit or terms you search for and display matching ads to you regardless of what website you visit. I think this is one of the reasons why people often see irrelevant ads on their websites. Google is refining their technique and logging all of our activity individually. I also believe Google has a way of rating the relevance of each users visit, for example Google might pay AdSense account holders for clicks based on criteria around the kinds of sites a person visits prior to arriving at their site.

I will provide a better example; A person that visits Gamespot.com and then clicks on a link to Netflix from Gamespot might result in a publisher earning .10-.20 cents for that click, however a person that has visited moviereviews.com and then went to Gamespot and then clicked the Netflix link might result in a publisher earning .20-.30 cents for the click since the chance of an actual sale is increased. “
Even he agrees it’s just a theory but it looks dangerous and little bit possible. Also you should look at the most interesting Google flu trends search.
http://www.google.org/flutrends/
Here Google will show the spread of flu in certain parts of the world monitoring the searches arising from those places for flu related keywords. This is one example what Google can do with the data it collects I am sure we can see something similar to this a lot in future.
What I am telling Google users is that be aware that you are being monitored for everything you do in Google. Even if you don’t have cookie enabled still there are lots of ways Google will collect your data. What is important is the awareness that’s required when using internet and Google.
Good Luck.

MSN Vs Yahoo search engine.

We always had the habit of debating Google and Yahoo for a change now let us debate between Yahoo and MSN or Yahoo vs. the new Microsoft Bing Search engine.
Primarily most of us will just conclude Yahoo is the much better compared to MSN. In most cases I agree with that when you see the below image from hit link it shows a clear trend where yahoo is well ahead than MSN.

Yahoo was once very dominant and was getting about 30% of search engine traffic. But as Google grew it made it very dominant and much stronger in some places in US market share of Google is well above 90%. 3 years back Yahoo results were powered by Google so virtually Yahoo’s market share is Google’s market share. Now they are an independent search engine and they power a lot of search engines. So I am sure Yahoo is a search engine here to stay.
As a SEO company we monitor a lot of logs of our clients. In most cases we see consistent performances from Yahoo when rankings are similar in all top 3 search engines. So I see no point in comparing who is better Yahoo or MSN. But wait it’s not all over. After years of being an underdog Microsoft cant anymore to get back their search engine market share. They came down with a bang with the search engine called Bing. So did Bing work indeed yes? They excess advertising of Bing and the improved quality of results made Bing instant famous and already a hit. Bing as far as I tested has much better quality results than the MSN live search and MSN Global search. I am sure Bing is here to stay we need to see few more months whether they can steal any percentage of Market share from Google. It’s just 15 days from launch and too early to say whether they will be dominant. But there are early signs it will be a success story.
Wall street Journal reports
“The number of times people clicked on ads listed next to Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) search results jumped about 8% in the week since the software giant released its newly revamped search engine, dubbed Bing, the world’s largest search engine marketing firm said Thursday.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090611-716373.html

Bloomberg reports
“Microsoft’s share rose to 11.1 percent in the June 2-6 period, Bing’s first week in operation, from 9.1 percent a week prior, ComScore said on its Web site. Average daily penetration among searchers, a measure of how many people are being reached by the product, rose to 15.5 percent from 13.8 percent.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=a0xxEn3GGCd0

We never know what the future holds for search engines. I am sure there will be some real tough competitors for Google.

Can rel="canonical" index my hostname and not my IP address?

a small question from sweden, anders ask-

will the new canonical tag help with issues where you by accident (stupid editors linking to wrong addresses) have indexed sites by the IP address rather than hostname?

I had the double check that there is the certain things you would like to be able to do it , you would like to take your IP address and put that in to the hostname. neither i am thinking allowed, we make the IP address different from the host name so we have the confirment but we dont think it would hurt to go ahead and have that. And i think that there is certain things when you dont want your IP address to show up, you want your host or domain name to show up instead. So i think that would be a nice thing to do, i m not sure whether we supported

Should I use underscores or hyphens in URLs?

Should I use underscores or hyphens in URLs?

question from tripstar, ontario canada –

underscores vs hyphens in URLS, does it make a difference? my-page vs. my_page?

it doe make a difference, i would go with dashes or hyphens if you can, if you have underscores an things are working fine for you.—- using an underscore is a separate and reason y we typically never talk about the stuff in future is that it gives us the freedom to change your mind infact the people who work in there project worked on a something slightly different for scoring in the URL that has high impact in the much higher event. we might still get reminder for thanks for paying as it focus on the quality trh team hey can we take a fresh look at this. but for time being dashes and hyphens are treated as separate from underscores. that might change in the future but that the way it is now.

Yahoo June 2009 search engine ranking update:

Yahoo updated its search engine index on 2nd of June. I can see a lot of shuffling happening most of our rankings got boosted. This is the 1st update in June 2009 I am happy to see yahoo keeping upto expectations.

Bing replaces Microsoft Live search:

At last Microsoft has come up with a search engine which I feel can be a serious competitor for Google. Results are just amazing from the past 6 years I am with search engines this is the first time MSN has come up with somewhat clean results. It just looks amazing I really appreciate Microsoft for bringing this product.
I just some searches for our websites as well as our client websites and almost all of them are doing well and the results are very similar to Google. There are some areas that needs to be cleaned especially the geo-targeting is too uneasy. I can see a lot of .au domains poping up when I search from India. This is natural when geo targeting exists and I see it visibly. Overall results are far better than MSN live results and I am sure there is some future for Bing search engine. I can see there might be some bugs in search results but its perfectly acceptable since the search engine is very new. Google was terrible when it came out especially with all the spammers ready to exploit Google was bad when it came out but it improved and proved to be a really worthy search engine today. I am sure Bing will one day remove the monopoly of Google in search engine industry. I personally like Google but their decision making is becoming too aggressive and I see lots of innocent sites getting affected due to this aggression. I hope Bing stops this aggression of Google.