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.

[table id=1 /]

Now, it’s my job to help you understand this patent so here I will do my absolute best to de-construct this new patent and help you understand it in plain English.

In a nutshell, this new patent allows Google to take multiple query paths and associate them so that one URL wins out above the others when it’s related to that same kind of query path.

Here’s what I mean.

And for the record, whenever Google refers to “content items” in their patent, or when I refer to them in this blog post, they (and I) are referring to URLs; whether that URL be a “video and/or audio files, web pages for particular subjects, news articles, etc.”

I’ll use an example that Google used in their patent.

When someone visits Google and does a search, during that search session they’ll revise their queries if they aren’t getting the kinds of results that they want, eventually clicking on a URL after they’re done revising their search.

If a “statistically significant number of users” submit that same set of queries and then end up clicking on the same URL this URL will be considered more relevant and that URL will then get a ranking increase.

In another example, if 55% of searchers using a query path such as apples/bananas/strawberries click on FruitURL1 and 35% of searchers using this same path click on FruitURL2, the search engine can rank FruitURL1 first and FruitURL2 second.  These can also be ranked as #1 and #2 whenever someone searches on apples/bananas or even apples, bananas, or strawberries as long as that path is identified as being related to the original query path that ranked FruitURL1 first and FruitURL2 second.

In other words, if more people click on FruitURL1 whenever they do a similar query that is identified as part of a query path apples -> bananas -> strawberries, then that URL will get a better ranking in the organic search results.

There’s many more examples provided in the patent itself but suffice it to say, that this is quite honestly, a popularity contest.  The more people click through to your website within the organic search results, the more likely you are to have a better ranking.

Think if it like a CTR (click-through-rate) of your website in the natural search results.  Much like your positioning in the Google AdWords program is determined by how well your ad performs, such is the case with this new patent.  If it’s determined that more people searching on apples/oranges/bananas tend to visit FruitURL1, then FruitURL1 will gain a better position in the organic search engine rankings.

What I found interesting however, is this little snippet of text taken from the patent which gives a little bit of insight into exactly how Google ranks pages.

The search results can, for example, be ranked by a quality measure and a relevance measure. For example, a particular web page can have a quality measure derived from the number of other web pages that are linked to the particular web page, and can have an information retrieval score related to the matching the query terms to words in the particular web page. The information retrieval score can be combined with the page rank to give a final rank to the particular web page.

From this little bit of information we can determine a few things that indicate how Google does in fact rank web pages:

• The “quality measure” of a web page is determined by the number of sites linking to that web page (no surprise there).
• The “information retrieval score” is determined by the number of matching query terms on the web page.  Note that this doesn’t mention where on the web page, only that it looks at the web page itself to see if there are matching query terms.
• The “information retrieval score” can be combined with the page rank to give the page a final rank.  Here again is the dreaded PageRank.  Now, to be fair, the term “page rank” is not capitalized nor does it have a trademark symbol associated with it, but one can only assume that PageRank is definitely playing a role in how web pages rank even though Google has recently removed PageRank from the Google Webmaster tools area (and updated PageRank across the board just recently).  Check out this post by Barry Schwartz where he states that “…according to Susan Moskwa from the Google Webmaster Central team “…it [PageRank] was removed [from Google's Webmaster tools] because Google keeps telling webmasters “that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much.” They felt it was “silly” to keep telling webmasters that, and at the same time show it in Webmaster Tools. So Google removed it from Webmaster Tools. I think this is a good thing, since I agree it is obsessed over too much, plus what Google showed in Webmaster Tools was not very useful to webmasters.”So, all this said, I wonder then why it’s referred to within the patent?  Since it’s not used in it’s proper form, spelled PageRank, do we then assume that they’re just using the phrase “page rank” as an overall encompassing term, not associated with the actual trademarked PageRank?

  Since they’ve removed it from Google Webmaster tools but then days later updated the PageRank on the Google toolbar across the board for websites, one can only assume that they are referring to actual PageRank.  Never let it be said that Google was transparent.

The bottom line is, this new patent appears as though it will begin ranking web content based upon the number of clicks that an individual URL gets by actual web searchers and the paths that they take to get there.  So my advice to you, as a website owner, is to be sure that people want to click over to your website.

Do you offer compelling reasons to do so?  Are these reasons contained within your web pages’ descriptions?

If not, now might be a good time to get to work on that.

Transcript

One of the most frequently asked questions I receive is “How do I get my site into Google?” And the process is a very easy and simple one.

There’s actually one of two ways to get your site found by Google.  The first way is to have another website that is already listed in Google link to you.  This can be done in various ways:

• If you’re a regular on a forum in the same industry that your website is about, you can add your new website in your signature.  Forums, especially active forums, tend to get indexed quite regularly.
• You can write an article on the same topic as your website and submit that article to places like EzineArticles.com or GoArticles.com.  Both of these places get visited very often by Google.
• You can leave a real (not spammy) comment on a regularly visited blog.  Typically when you leave blog comments, the blog owner allows you to add your website URL.  Be sure however that the blog is a “do follow” blog.  That is, they allow the search engines to follow the links off of their site back to the site source.  Click here for a list of do follow blogs.

The second way to get your site indexed by Google is to submit your sitemap to them.  A sitemap file is a list of all the links contained on your website and is Google’s preferred way of finding and indexing your website.

Sitemaps are XML web pages that are created for the purpose of letting the search engines know about all of the pages on your website and they’re essential for getting all of your web pages indexed in a search engine.

Although XML format of a web page might sound a little intimidating, you’ll be happy to know that there are plenty of services online that will create one for you.  http://www.xml-sitemaps.com is one of them.

Once you have a good set of pages created for your website, you can simply tell xml-sitemaps to create a sitemap file for you which you can then move to your web host.  Once there, you’ll want to create a Google Webmaster Tools account at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ and then submit the sitemap URL to Google.  This way, Google will be notified that you have submitted a sitemap and will generally visit that page within 24 hours; oftentimes less.  Aside from a search engine robot finding one of your pages through a link, this is one of the best ways to notify Google that you have a new website with content.

While Google doesn’t always guarantee that they’ll crawl your sitemap, you’ll generally find that they do so within 24 hours of you submitting the sitemap to them.

In our Premium BoneheadSEO membership, I discuss Google’s Webmaster Tools in depth.  Visit http://BoneheadSEO.com for more information.

Using either or both of these ways will get your site indexed in Google.

During this talk (which runs around 45 minutes), Matt revealed some very interesting facts and ideas about SEO which I found…well…enlightening as I’m sure you will too.

If you do have the time to watch the entire video for yourself (like I said it runs about 45 minutes); see my notes below the video which gives you plenty of highlights.

In the video Matt States:

• WordPress takes care of 80-90% of the mechanics of SEO. [@3:30]
  • Mechanics = “how crawlable a website is.”
• Plugins Matt uses: [@4:15]
  • Askimet
  • Cookies for Comments
    • Spam prevention.
  • Enforce www. Preference
    • What you prefer (canonical).
  • FeedBurner FeedSmith
  • WP Super Cache
• “We crawl roughly in order of PageRank.  The more PR you have the faster you’re likely to be found, the deeper we’ll crawl, the more often we’ll visit.” [@5:40]
  • PageRank = the number of people that link to you and how important those links are.  (basic SEO).
  • Example:  A web page has a PR of 9 and has three outlinks (links heading out and away from the website) then each of those outlinks gets 3.
  • PageRank starts to “evaporate” each time it goes across a link.
  • Getting backlinks:  You want people to know you and you want them to be reputable.
• Blog posts need to be on-topic and you want to be reputable. [@9:40]
  • How to do this:
    • If you don’t love it, don’t write about it.
      • Write often, write every day.
    • What am I good at doing?
    • What do I have to say?
• Keywords [@12:05]
  • Think about all the different ways someone can describe something. Put those into your blog post naturally.
  • Jargon mis-match:  Translate [jargon] into regular language.
    • what are titles you could type that are “normal”.
  • Use Google Keyword Tool.
  • If you don’t have [a specific word] on your site you probably aren’t going to rank.
• Custom Structure on URLs “/%postname%/ [@19:15]
• Google looks at over 200 things [when determining where to rank you]
  • Things in the title
  • Things in the URL
  • Things that are highlighted like H1 tags and stuff like that.
  • Be sure you put the keywords in the title in some way.
  • Power Tip:  Use variations between the post title itself and within the URL itself [the permalink].  Not spam.  One or two variants.  Use them as separate opportunities to put keywords in.  Now you can rank for both variations of the keywords.
• Use categories that are also good keywords.
• Keywords in URL paths:  example.com/my-keywords
  • Dashes are best
  • Next best is underscores
  • No spaces is worst.
• If you’ve already done your site should you change things?
  • No.
• Don’t overdo [on page SEO]
  • After you mention a term two or three times Google knows what your post is about.
• Gaining a reputation [@25:24]
  • Be interesting. Funny, alternative opinions.
  • Update often.
  • Apply Katamari Philosophy.
    • Start small.  Start in a niche that you can do well.
    • Build up, build up, build up.  Get there gradually.
  • Ways to Get Links [@30:14 in the video]
    • Provide a useful service.
    • Do original research or reporting. Huge!
    • Give great information.
    • Find a creative niche.  One good idea can carry you so, so far.
    • Write some code.  Open source.
    • Live blogging!  Blogging as it happens.
    • Make lists.  People love lists.
    • Create controversy.  Too often sometimes can’t work well.
    • Meet folks on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed
• Should you do a podcast?
  • Recommends videos over podcasts.
  • Videos tend to rank relatively well on Google.
• Tools you should know about [@35:55]
  • Webmaster console at http://Google.com/webmasters/
  • Google Analytics
  • FeedBurner:  MyBrand for free feeds.mattcutts.com instead of feeds.feedburner.com.
  • Google website optimizer
  • Custom Search Engine: free site search
  • AdSense
    • Use these tags to mark out the meat of your blog post so that AdSense will only target what’s contained in the tags: (highly recommended)
      • <!–google_ad_section_start–>
      • <!– google_ad_section_end –>
• Google Analytics Tip [@38:12]
  • Click Settings -> top landing pages and will tell you which blog posts get the most visitors.
  • Bounces tell you how often people come to your page and then leave.
  • Simple trick:  Show related posts.
• What NOT to do [@40:19]
  • Avoid paid posts.
• Keep your WordPress updated!
• Power Tip: [@43:57]
  • Add an .htaccess to your /wp-admin
    • This says only these two IP addresses are allowed to use the wp-admin.
    • Search for “protect wp-admin”.  Also on Matt’s blog.
• In WP core 2.8 you don’t have to worry about the rel=canonical tags.  Already included. [@44:50]

Everyone who runs a website has at one point or another worried about whether or not their site is being silently penalized in the search engines for having duplicate content.

Just to be sure everyone’s on the same page let’s first define what duplicate content REALLY is.

When you have two pages that are identical to one another on your own website, this is considered duplicate content.  And chances are you likely have duplicate content but you just don’t know it.

Here’s why that would happen…

Let’s say that you have a website located at http://www.Example.com.

You create a new web page on your site and have a few people link to that page.

• Person #1 links to you using http://www.Example.com.
• Person #2 links to you using http://Example.com (notice the lack of the “www”).
• Person #3 links to you using http://www.Example.com/ (notice the trailing slash).
• And Person #4 links to you using http://www.Example.com/index.html (notice the “index.html).

To YOU and to the people visiting your site, this is all the same page.

To the SEARCH ENGINES however, these are all different URLs. Surprised?

So as far as the search engines are concerned you have 4 pages on your site that all contain the same exact content – hence, the duplicate content issue.

You see, search engines can’t tell that these are the same URLs (I’m shaking my head as I say that because it’s still beyond me), but, the fact remains, that this is in fact, very true.

So how do you fix this issue?  Well, thankfully, there’s a few ways to fix this issue.

1. When you link internally, that is, link to other pages within your own website, consistently use the same URL.  ALWAYS use http://www.Example.com or http://Example.com -whichever one is your preferred way of linking, choose one and stick with it.
2. Additionally you can also use a 301 redirect to point to your preferred way of linking to your URL.  For example, if you prefer http://www.Example.com then set up a 301 redirect on http://Example.com, http://www.Example.com/, http://www.Example.com/index.html, etc.  (I’ve listed below the most common ways people would link to your site).
3. Within your Google webmaster tools area you can TELL Google what you’re preferred way of linking is.
4. Be sure that when you submit a sitemap for your website that within that sitemap, all of the URLs are using your preferred way of linking.

Some potential issues are:

1. If you don’t have direct control over the webhost that administers your files, you’ll have to have someone else place that 301 redirect on the URLs you want.
2. A lot of free web hosts don’t let you create a 301 redirect.
3. Session IDs on a website can create a huge duplicate content issue.  Since each page may be accessed with a different session ID in the URL, that page may be indexed multiple times; even though it’s the same page.

Now if all else fails and you simply can’t implement a 301 redirect to your preferred way of linking, then consider placing the canonical link element on the individual page.

In the head of the individual web page you’d place the following:

<head>
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.Example.com/page.html” />
</head>

Note the trailing slash after “page.html”.  This is very important to include.

The bottom line is, using the canonical link element on your website is EXTREMELY beneficial to you.  But first and foremost, use the methods listed in the first four items at the top and if those fail, then use the canonical link element.

This information has summarized what Matt Cutts said in his 20-minute presentation; but if you want more information, here’s a few more places you can check out:

• The Matt Cutts video.
• The blog post at Google webmaster central.
• Yahoo’s blog post.
• Microsoft

And, as promised, here’s a list of URLs that are all different in the search engines eyes and that might cause duplicate content issues:

• www.Example.com
• Example.com
• www.Example.com/
• example.com/
• www.example.com/index.html
• example.com/index.html
• www.example.com/Home.aspx
• example.com/Home.aspx

• An easier to use interface.  Before you had drop-down lists where you had to hunt for specific information but now, the navigation on the left is much easier to understand and use.
• For each site that you have verified, you’ll get a dashboard that allows you to view your data easier than before.

Perhaps one of the biggest benefits is that you can now see more search queries for your sites than you have been able to in the past.  Here’s a quick video of the new changes.

The good news is, this is very easy to do just by making a small edit to the URL.

Here’s what we’ll use as the example video.  This video talks about reconsideration requests in Google’s Webmaster Tools area:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntJhrM7CU5I

But let’s say that I only want to point viewers to a certain spot in that video, which starts to talk about how to gather further information in the Google Webmaster Tools area.  This is about 36 seconds into the video.

In this case I would just add the following to the end of the URL:  #t=0m36s

You’ll need to add the #t= and then add the number of minutes (in my case 0 minutes) and then the number of seconds (I chose 36 seconds into the video).

If I wanted to instead link to the 2 minute 12 second portion I’d then add to the URL #t=2m12s.

So here’s that link again with the point in time that I want to link to.  If you click on the link you’ll see that you’re immediately taken to that spot in the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntJhrM7CU5I#t=0m36s

This is a great help to those who only want to reference certain points in long videos without making their viewer sit and wait for the entire video.

The link operator allows you to see who is linking to you in Google’s eyes as well as who may be linking to your competition.  The way that you use Google’s link operator, is to just go to Google, enter in the word link and then a colon and then the URL of the site.  Like so:

The biggest gripe that people have had with the link operator is that it doesn’t show you a true count of links pointing to a website.  Matt’s explanation for this is that the reason Google doesn’t show all of the backlinks is that “spammers or competitors could use that to reverse someone’s ranking.”

Thank goodness there’s still tools available like Yahoo’s site explorer tool to get numbers of backlinks to any one site.

As it stands, even using Yahoo’s tool will only locate up to 1,000 backlinks for any domain, which still doesn’t touch the tip of the iceberg when you’re up against a highly competitive site.  Take for example, CNN.com who easily has hundreds of thousands of incoming links to their site.

But, even so, the Site Explorer tool will give you plenty of data to start working on your own link-building campaign for your site.

I can’t say I see eye-to-eye on Google about this restriction simply because the Internet is “The Internet”.  If our websites were meant to be private then we’d password protect directories, exclude directories and pages within our robots.txt files, and more which many sites already do.

My take on the explanation is that Google just doesn’t “want” to show you all of the backlinks because you would in fact be able to reverse-engineer how Google ranks sites.  And since the data that you receive from Yahoo! is based on information contained at Yahoo! then you still aren’t able to reverse engineer any data from Google.

He does however go on to say that if you want to see all of your backlinks for your site, that all you need to do is sign up and use Google’s webmaster central which is helpful to see more information about your own sites.  But as far as not showing all backlinks to any one given site, well, I could probably write an entire opinion piece on how Google tracks nearly every move you make but when it comes to information that should be available to the general public it closes up shop.

You’re an intelligent person, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.