Matt Cutts’ Google Updates

March 2, 2009 · Filed Under SEO Advice, SEO Resources, SEO Tips, Video 

Recently, Google engineer Matt Cutts made a “State of the Index” video for those who were not able to attend the Webmaster World PubCon in Las Vegas.  Here is the video in its entirety along with a summary just underneath.

Highlights

  1. Google trends discovers the search volume differences between keyword phrases as well as using Google Trends for websites to see what the search volumes look like for a set of websites.  It will also show you related sites so if you typed in MattCutts.com then you’d see a list of sites that people also went to (latent sites).
  2. Google Ad Manager – allows you to manage all of the ads on your site including whatever third party ads you want to have.
  3. Google Ad Planner – let’s you choose demographic areas.
  4. Google has introduced OCR (Optical Character Recognition) in some PDFs.  Some PDFs only contain a snapshot of what the page would look like.  With Google’s OCR they can take those pictures of text, run the OCR program and then index those just like regular text.
  5. Better crawling of Flash.  Always good to have static HTML in addition to flash.
  6. Better processing of JavaScript.
  7. Better at keyword spam.
  8. Show URLS that link to the 404 pages on your site.
  9. Custom 404 pages.  Using 14 lines of JavaScript in your 404 template so the JS will run and suggest other pages on your site that would be useful.  Find within Google Webmaster Central Blog.
  10. Advanced segmentation introduced in Google Analytics.
  11. On-demand indexing for Google Custom Searches.  You can request that Google index a certain page “on-demand” and “usually within 24 hours”.  Note that this does not affect search results as a whole but will affect Google Custom Searches.
  12. Webmaster Communication with Google.  Including webmaster chats.  Many times there will be a Q&A at the end.
  13. If you register for Google Webmaster central they will hold all of your messages for you.
  14. Identified sites that are hackable.  The message center will notify you if they believe your site falls into this category.
  15. Produced a 22-page PDF talking about SEO.  “Google does not hate SEO.”  They use internally and those outside of Google can also use this as well.  “A good SEO can help you put your best foot forward.”
  16. They see a continuation of Black Hat trends.  People grabbing expired domains and put p0_rn on it.  You’ll also see it get more vicious.  It will be more common to see your site hacked.  Mainly due to the openings on a web host provider.  Blackhat moves to the outright illegal.  Using DNS subdomain hijacking.  You try to take control of another persons sub-domain.  They’ll also use and take advantage of a cross-site scripting flaw and then try to install malware on your machine.  “If this is what it takes to compete in the black hat SEO world, is it worth it?
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