Matt Cutts’ SEO Tidbits
Hello! I see that you are new here! Let me be the first to welcome you. Notice above a button where you can get a free report from BoneheadSEO. Feel free to look around. Thanks for visiting!Google Webmaster Tools has a channel on YouTube where Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, answers various questions that users send in.
Since he has a LOT of videos (174 as of this writing) that discuss a LOT of different topics, I felt it would be useful to put all of the answers here in one easy-to-reference blog post that will concisely answer the question for you rather than having to watch the entire set of videos.
Note that as of this writing this is not all inclusive. As time permits I will continue to add snippets of answers.
Links to the specific videos themselves are included as well as the date that the videos were added to help give you some reference.
Matt Cutts' Videos
If you are unsure of Matt's answer, please visit the URL to the actual video itself (linked within the question itself) to get the full explanation.| Question | Date Added | Answer |
|---|---|---|
| Does Google use the meta keywords tag? | 9/21/2009 | "Basically, not at all." |
| Do underscores or hyphens in my URL's make a difference? | 3/6/2009 | "It does make a difference, I would go with dashes or hyphens if you can." |
| Does the position of keywords in a URL have a significant impact? | 3/5/2009 | "It does help a little bit to have keywords in the URL." |
| Does Google take into account quality factors from nofollowed links that come from well established authority sites? For example Wikipedia. | 3/4/2009 | "We do not take into account links from sites like Wikipedia because they are no followed." |
| More than one H1 on a page, good or bad? | 3/5/2009 | "If there's a logical reason to have multiple sections it's not so bad to have multiple H1's. But you really should use it for headers or headings which is what the intent is." |
| Is over optimization bad for a website? EX: Excessive use of nofollow? | 6/23/2009 | "There's no penalty for excessive use of nofollow. " Please see the video for a further explanation of "excessive over-optimization". |
| Is Google doing away with the meta description tags? | 7/8/2009 | "If you have a meta description, we will sometimes use that meta description over a little snippet within the page. We're a little more likely to use the meta description but we don't use it all the time." |
| How much does a domain's age affect its ranking? | 5/7/2009 | "Don't worry about that very much. Not very much at all in fact." |
| What's more important, content or links? | 2/26/2009 | "Great content has to be the foundation of a great website. Much better to have great content which will attract those links." |
| Do site load times have an impact on Google rankings? | 4/28/2009 | "None right now. Currently site load times have no effect on rankings. What might happen in the future I don't know." |
| How can I optimize my site on a small budget? | 6/29/2009 | "Start with a small niche. A small sliver of the market and then build your way outwards." |
| Will SEO still exist in 5 years? | 3/8/2009 | "Yes. SEO tries to figure out how to put your best foot forward for your website. SEO is not spam." |
| How do meta geo tags influence the search results. | 7/6/2009 | "It's not something we look at closely. We look at the TLD's, the IP address, etc. The geo tags in meta tags are not useful and we don't spend too much time on those at all." |
| Are links in footers treated differently than paragraph links? | 8/20/2009 | "We do reserve the right to treat links in footers a little differently." |
Related posts:
- Getting a Handle on Your Canonicals
- Tips to Get Your WordPress Blog to the Top of the Search Engines
- Google’s Link Operator – What’s it REALLY Holding Back?
- SEO News & Understanding Universal Search
- Give Your Business Credibility with Google Knol
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