Google has never exactly made it easy to figure out their search algorithm’s secret sauce. Over the past couple of years, they have pulled back the curtain much more than before but they still don’t like to put much in print. Instead, they send out Matt Cutts to tell the world about how to get found (and not found) in the world’s biggest search engine. He regularly does media interviews and is featured in a series of very educational YouTube videos.
The series of YouTube videos is SO GOOD I kept thinking I wish I could have a hard copy text version to review and refer to easily. Then it occurred to me, Google indexes the rest of the world’s content so I’m sure they would appreciate me helping to index some of their content. Below, you will find a transcript featuring 5 very informative videos from Matt Cutts. The videos are embedded on the bottom of this page.
I highly recommend anyone interested in search engine optimization watch the video series from Matt Cutts on Google’s Webmaster Central Channel.
1) Does Google use keywords meta tag info in web ranking?
MATT CUTTS:
“ We had an interesting question from someone who just asked me ‘How much do you use the keyword or keywords meta tag in your main search results?’
The answer is basically not at all. So let’s talk about that in a little bit more detail because sometimes people file lawsuits – you know Alice has Alice.com and Bob has Bob.com, and maybe Bob takes Alice’s name and puts it in the keyword meta tags. Then, Alice sees that and she gets really angry and she talks to Bob and maybe sues Bob and that sort of stuff. How much should Alice be worried about Bob using that one term ‘Alice’ in the keywords meta tag? THE ANSWER IS WE DON’T USE THE KEYWORDS METATAG in our search ranking.
Other search engines might but Google doesn’t. Now, we do use some meta tags for the Google Search Appliance so you can specify ‘only return results if they match a meta tag and things like that. But for our main, core web search, whenever we look at the keywords meta tag, we say, ‘you know what – too many people have spammed that too much.’ We really just don’t use this information at all.
Now that’s not to say we don’t use any meta tags. For example, there’s one called “meta description.” Often times, if you have a good meta description tag we will use that information or part of that information in our snippet. So, if we are going to return Alice.com and your meta description is something really useful, we might show that as the snippet in the search result. But, if you’re looking at the keyword meta tags, we really don’t use that at all so don’t bother to get frustrated if someone else is using your name in the keyword meta tags. It’s really not worth suing over because at least for Google, we don’t use that information in our ranking even the least little bit.
We really just don’t use this information at all. Now that’s not to say we don’t use any meta tags. For example, there’s one called “meta description.” Often times, if you have a good meta description tag we will use that information or part of that information in our snippet. So, if we are going to return Alice.com and your meta description is something really useful, we might show that as the snippet in the search result. But, if you’re looking at the keyword meta tags, we really don’t use that at all so don’t bother to get frustrated if someone else is using your name in the keyword meta tags. It’s really not worth suing over because at least for Google, we don’t use that information in our ranking even the least little bit.”
2) Are links in footers treated differently than paragraph links?
Matt Cutts:
“Ok we have a question from Andres in Boston, MA. who asks Does Google treat links in footers differently than links surrounded by text for example in a paragraph. If you go back and read the original PageRank paper, they said links were distributed completely uniformly, PR was distributed, without regard to whether the link was at the top of the page, the bottom of the page, in the footer, in the text, all that sort of stuff. In general our link analysis continues to get more and more sophisticated to the point where what we compute today is still called PageRank and still bears resemblance to the original PageRank but it’s much more sophisticated than the original PageRank use to be. We do reserve the right to treat links in the footer a little bit differently. For example, if something is in a footer, it might not carry the same editorial weight because someone might have set up a single link and it might be something that’s across the entire site whereas something that is an actual paragraph of text is a little more likely to be an editorial link so we do reserve the right to treat those links differently in terms of how we consider them for relevance, how we consider them for reputation, how much we trust them, all those sorts of things.”
3) Which is more important: content or links?
MATT CUTTS:
“Here’s a fun question from Jeff in NYC. ‘As Google’s algorithm evolves, is it better to have exceptional links and mediocre content, or exceptional content and mediocre links? (By links I mean inbound link quantity/quality. Can new sites with awesome content outrank mediocre/established sites?)’
“I’ll stop you right there rather than finishing the question. Google always has to trade of the balance between authority and topicality for lack of a better word. If somebody types in “viagra” which is one of the most spammed terms in the world, you want something that’s about viagra, you do not just want something that has a lot of authority, like Newsweek and or Time, that is talking about, you know, right in the article they have one mention of viagra, where they say: ‘Oh this is something like Viagra’, you know, just a throw off phrase.
So, you do want authority, you want the sites that are trustworthy, that are reputable, but you also want topicality, you don’t just want something that is off topic. You want it to be about what the user typed in. So we try to find a good balance there. I would say look have a well-rounded site, great content has to be the foundation of any good site, because mediocre content tends not to attract exceptional links by itself and if you’re trying to get exceptional links on really, really crappy content you are going to be pushing up hill, it is going to be harder to get those links, you are gonna have to do the sort of stuff that we consider bad and scuzzy on the web, like paying for them.
It is much better to have great content where you get those links naturally and then you have both. You get great content and you get great links. Rather than trying to have something that’s really, really not that interesting and trying to push, push, push and bug people and send out spam emails and ask for links and all those sorts of things. So, you want to have a well rounded site and one of the best ways to do that is to have fantastic, interesting, useful content, great resources, great information and then that naturally attracts the links. Then, search engines want to reflect the fact that the web thinks that you are interesting or important or helpful.”
4) Snippets and Titles
MATT CUTTS:
“Hi everybody, I wanted to talk to you a little bit today about snippets and titles. So, Google tries to return the best snippet, the most relevant snippet that we can so that — and the snippet is what? — whenever you type, say flowers in the search results — what we show for a given website, the title and the description underneath it, that is what we call a snippet.
We want it to be as relevant as possible. So, if someone types in flower, we compute what we call ‘keyword in context’ or quick snippets. The idea is just that we want to know – we want to tell users whether that page is going to be useful. We can do that by highlighting some of the places that flowers occur on that page if that’s what you typed in for your search query. If we only show the first 50 words for the page, that wouldn’t be useful to let you know you want to click through to it. We’ve always had the policy that we try to show useful snippets and useful titles.
It’s funny because in the old days some people used to call them ransom note snippets because they were like, ‘Oh, its stitched together from random places of the page.’ But users really appreciated it. Even though it took a lot more computer power, we were willing to say, “Okay, that’s when — we’re willing to put in that computing power to compute a relevant snippet specifically for that query. For a different query, the snippet for the page would look different.
By the same logic, we’ve been willing to show the titles that we think are most useful. For example, suppose the title of your page is ‘Untitled’ or if there is no title. If that’s the case, we try to show relevant useful titles. There’s lots of different heuristics that we can use. In addition, if you sort of have the same meta description across all of the different pages on your site or if you have the same title across all the different pages of your site, then we reserve the right to try and figure out what’s a better title, what’s a more descriptive title or snippet to show users. Finally, if you have a title that’s really, really long and has a bunch of different words in it, we may still use that in our scoring but when we’re ready to show the snippet to the user, we may try to find a better title.
I think webmasters have gotten used to the idea that the snippet can change based on the content of the page. We can sometimes use the open directory project snippets. We can use snippets from the page, you know, keywords and context or we use the meta description tag and we do a bunch of different things to find the best description that we can. Webmasters are probably not used to the idea that we’re willing to find a better title as well. If you have a bad title or a title that we don’t think helps the users as much, we can try to find a better title – one that we think will be an informative result so users will know whether that’s a good result from them to click on. I just wanted to give people a heads-up that, because they’re used to the idea of the things below the title changing, but they’re maybe not used to the idea that the title itself can change in our search as well.”
5) What are some effective techniques for building links?
MATT CUTTS:
“OK, we have a question from Pulkit Argrawal, Ahmedabad, India. Pulkit asks”, ‘Organic link building, according to me, is one of the most difficult tasks for SEOs. Can you please list 5 effective ways of organic link building other than building great content?’
Well, I think that is kind of a false dichotomy because you do want to build great content and building great content is often what brings you those links. So i’m not going to say, ‘Oh I’m going to leave out all the ways of getting good links that involve having good content. I’m just going to talk about a few ways, and I don’t know whether its five or more or less getting good organic links.
First and foremost, I’ll start with the worst one, which is controversy. A controversy is one of those hooks, one of these link bait ideas where no matter what you say, ‘This person sucks,’ or you pick one company or you pick a person that you hate and you really pick on them, there’s a few people that have made a profession out of hating everybody, which might do well for them, but boy its not always fun to hang out with them. So you do that little bit, but think of it more like the leavening or the spice that you do every so often. It can be fun to uncork a good rant whenever you’re really frustrated because somebody’s had bad customer service or something like that. But, you don’t always want to be going for the controversy or you’re like the boy who cried wolf. You are just always saying ‘Look at me I’m being loud. You have to pay attention to me.‘ Over time, people will end up paying less attention to you. There are a lot softer ways to do that whether it involves humor or bringing something original to the table. So, I wouldn’t rely on controversy all the time.
One of the best ways to get links is to participate in the community. I’m not talking about signing up and spamming a bunch of blogs or forums, but rather, showing up and… a good example is answering questions. If you have something of worth, some value that you can add by saying, ‘Hey, you know what, I know the answer to this. This is how you configure .htaccess to do a 301redirect.’ Somebody appreciates that somebody will remember that you answered their question. They’ll be more willing and more receptive to link when they realize ‘Oh that’s their site. They have a whole pile of interesting articles about how to do good things with 301 redirect access or .htaccess.’ So, I think participating in the community, answering questions that help other people can be a big way to do it.
Going back to what is building great content but is still super important — original research — to this day, if somebody does even a little bit of work to dig into a subject they are a lot more likely to get links. One of my favorite examples is Danny Sullivan compared how well different webmail services were able to de-Spam his inbox. All he did was, like for a month or so, compared how much spam he got and what the false positive rate was. He got good data out of it, which he then blogged. A lot of people linked to that. Just earlier today, for example, Google released Google Public DNS, which is a DNS server that anyone, anywhere around the world can use, it’s public for everyone and there was a guy, www.manu–j.com I believe who rather than just read and rehash the blog post, took it and tested it out. Open DNS versus his ISP’s DNS versus Google Public DNS and he found out that we were especially good for international domains where sometimes DNS resolvers were a little bit slower. Just that original research, makes it that much more likely that I will link to him, he will stick in my mind, all those sorts of things. So, original research can really make a big difference.
Newsletters, if you have people already coming to your blog, make it a little bit easier for that sort of information or article to show up in their inbox because then that can drive traffic and drive conversions.
Social media, participating on a forum or a blog is one thing but then participating on Twitter or FriendFeed or Facebook can be another great way. Think about where people spend their time. If they spend five hours a day on Facebook, then maybe you should spend some of your time on Facebook because getting to know these people can pay off in lots of ways, not just links, maybe you get to present at a conference. I guarantee if you’re doing a conference presentation, that is a great way to get links because people will live blog it, they’ll link to your website, all those sorts of things.
Along with controversy, one of the weaker ones I consider is lists. So, for example, if you will go to Google and say, ’50 ways to build backlinks.’ You will find those articles, right, and those things tend to get Dug and linked to and all that sort of stuff. So they tend to get a little tiresome after a while. It’s almost like the candy in your diet, you want to have a little bit of spinach and substance as well but writing a few every so often is not such a bad thing.
Good piece of advice, I was talking about this question with my cameraman, Wysz before this, get a blog and establish yourself as an authority, right? There’s no excuse for a company these days not to have a blog and for most people to not have a blog because you don’t have to update them all the time, and if you want you can use Tumblr or Posterous or something then you don’t have to maintain the software. But it’s really not that hard to do. If you see a funny picture or something like that, you post it on your blog. You can get links very quickly. More likely, you’ll probably use your blog to establish yourself. It’s your online business card, your profile. You can use it to project how you want to be on the internet so just building that up as a resource of good articles.
Another good example is how-tos and tutorials. I recently had to figure out how to change to a default printer in Firefox on Linux and when I was done, I said, ‘OK, I’m going to write down those steps, so that I can remember it’ more importantly the people searching for it can remember it. Even if you don’t get a ton of links to that post, sometimes you don’t need a ton of links, sometimes that long tail content is enough where the other people who are searching for it will find you even if you only have two or three links to it. It’s not always about links, it can sometimes be about having a resource that nobody else in the world has.
Talking about resources, another thing you can do is run a service that people really find useful or even make a product and release it for free or give it to the community. A Firefox extension or Chrome extension, something that improves your Apache experience, or makes things easier for WordPress, WordPress plug-ins, stuff like that. Services are good because people will come to you to try to try things out, but open source is also fantastic because then people can download it. They’re grateful that they got something for free. You can do the work once and then lots of people downstream can be grateful and some of those people will link to you.
Another good piece of advice, try to make sure your site has good site architecture. You’d be amazed at how many people don’t handle things like, ‘Can my site be crawled? Can my site URLs be bookmarked? Can Google get to all the pages on my site?’ You might think it sounds remedial but you’d be amazed at how many websites messed that up. So make it easy to link to your site or individual pieces of content on your site, like individual blog posts.
That’s almost everything on my list, but I’ll make one final one, which is make a few videos. It turns out making videos can be a really easy way where you’re just talking but people can watch it at any point. They get a lot of value out of it, and hopefully it’s enjoyable. Make a video once and then it’s useful all the way down the line.
Those are just a few tips and different ways to try and build links, not necessarily always content but it can be a really helpful and it can be a good way to try and get some good links.”
Does Google use keywords meta tag info in web ranking?
Are links in footers treated differently than paragraph links?