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Here’s the second in the series of videos posted by Google’s Matt Cutts to Google Video over the past year. These are important for every web developer to see. Please see Matt’s disclaimer first!

See the rest of the videos!

Transcription

Alright! Well, I am trying to upload the last take to Google Video, so we will see how it looks. While I am waiting, why don’t I do few more questions and see if we can knock a few out. I am realizing that with this video camera that I’ve got, I can do about 8 minutes worth of video before I get 200 megabytes and then I have to use the client upload or so. I’ll probably break it into chunks of 5 to 8 minutes each.

OK. Ryan writes in.

He says,”Can you put an end to some myths about having too many sites on the same server or having sites with IPs too similar to each other or having them all include the same java script of a different site”.

In general, if you are an average webmaster, this is something that I wouldn’t really worry about. Now, I have to tell a story about Tim Myer and I have been on the same panel together and somebody said, “you took all my sites out” and he said, “both Google and Yahoo did. I don’t really have that many”. And so, Tim Myer asked, “Well, how many sites did you have?”. And the guy looked a little sheepish for about a minute and then he said,”Well… I had about 2000 sites”.

So, there is a range, right - there’s continuum. If you’ve got two, three, four or five sites and they are all different themes, stuff like that, you are not in the place, where you really need to worry that much. If you have 2000 sites, you need to be asking yourself, do I really have enough unique value add content to support 2000 sites? Becuase the answer is probably not. But if you are just an average guy, you’ve got a few sites, I wouldn’t worry about them being on the same IP address, I definitely wouldn’t worry about them being on the same server. That’s something that everybody does.

And the last thing Ryan asked was including the same Javascript off a different site. Well this is a very common idiom. People use Javascript trackers. Google Adsense is Javascript included off another site. So this is something that a lot of sites do on the web, I wouldn’t necessarily worry about it at all. Now again, if you have 5000 sites and if you are including the Javascript that does the sneaky redirect, then you do need to worry. But if it is just a few sites or if you are doing something that is entirely logical with your Javascript, I wouldn’t worry at all.

Alright! Erin Shear writes in. Its kind of an interesting question.

He says, “I am having trouble understanding the problems that we face every time we launch a new country. Typically, we launch a new country with millions of new pages at the same time. Additionally, due to our ambitious PR Team, we get tons of link from our network of sites as well as press, during every launch.”

So he is saying that the last time they did this, they didn’t do very well in French and they lost a site in Australia that didn’t do very well at all.

Erin, this is a good question, primarily because the answer has changed somewhat since the last time we talked. Somebody asked me this question at SES Conference New York and I said, ”Just go ahead and launch stuff. Don’t worry about it. It may bring more scrutiny but in general you will be fine.”

I think if you are launching sites with millions of new pages, you want to be a little more cautious, if you can. In general if you are launching with that many pages, its probably better to try to launch a little more softly. So, a few thousand pages and then add a few thousand more… stuff like that.

It could be… Millions of pages is a lot of pages. I mean, Wikipedia is only, how many, 5 or 10 million pages. So if you are launching millions that could be attracting scrutiny and you want to make sure that they are all good pages. Otherwise you might find yourself, not doing as well as you had hoped for.

Alright! Quick question.

Classic Nation writes in and says, “I am wondering what the status is on Google Images and if we can expect to see an update on the indexing technology of the future.”

Actually there was a word on this at the Web Master World. We just did an index update, (just I think last week end) of our index for Google Images. And, I was talking to somebody on the Images team and they are always working hard. So a lot of that stuff you may not see, it may be as simple as bringing in new infrastructure that the main web index has, but they are always working hard to make Google Images index better.

Transcription thanks to Peter T. Davis

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Here’s the first in the series of videos posted by Google’s Matt Cutts to Google Video over the past year. These are important for every web developer to see. Please see Matt’s disclaimer first!

See the rest of the videos!

Transcription

OK. lets try a few questions and answers. I don’t know if this will work. So, lets give it a shot. (Picks up the first letter) Ralph writes in. He says,

“Some comments on sitemaps please. It seems updates on sitemaps depend on page views of a site”.

No Ralph. that’s not really true. As far as I understand it, page views are not really a factor on when things are updated in sitemaps. So, there are different pieces of data with in sitemaps. Imagine five different little pieces of data. They can all be updated at different times and at different frequencies. Typically they will be updated, you know, with-in days or worst case, with-in weeks. However, as far as I know, its not dependant on page views.

Lets try another one. (Picks up another letter)

“What are some general guidelines and recommendations you would make to people who desire to increase their site’s visibility on Google.”

Wow! OK. So, this is a meaty topic. Definitely a longer issue. But lets go ahead and dive into it.

So, in general, the number one thing that most people kind of make mistake on, on SEO is, they don’t make their site crawlable.

So you want to look at your site, either through a search engine’s eyes or you know, use a text browser, do something and go back to 1994 and use Links or something like that. If you can get through your entire site using only a text browser, then you are going to be in pretty good shape, because most people don’t even bother about crawlability.

You also want to have things like sitemaps on your site, and you can also use our site maps tool in addition to that.

Once you have got your content and you want to have good content, content that’s interesting you know, a reason why somebody would want to link to you and your site is actually crawlable, then you need to go about marketing, promoting or optimizing your site.

So, the main things that I would advise are, think about the people who are really relevant to your niche and make sure that they know about you.
If you are associated with a doctor, because you have got some medical kind of website, make sure that the doctor knows about you and if he has got a website, it might be appropriate for him to link to you.

You also want to be thinking about a hook, something that’s viable. It can be really good content, for example, newsletters, tutorials, I would set it up all these video stuff, trying to make it look semi-professional.

There were tutorials by a company called Photoflex(??), they were saying here is how to make the fill light, the key light and all that sort of stuff and oh by the way, you can buy our equipment to do that. That’s really really smart and infact, another photography site that I went to, they had syndicated their tutorial lessons to that other (photoflex)website. So, content can be a great way to get links. You can also look at things like digg, Slashdot, Tearrank(?), Reddit, you know, social networking sites, MySpace, those sort of things.

But fundamentally you need something interesting that sets you apart from the pack.

Once you got something like that, then you are going to be in much better shape as far as promoting your site is concerned. But again, the biggest step is making sure that your site is crawlable. After that, making sure that you got content, and then finally trying to do the best you can to find some hook, some reason why users would love your site, return to it and bookmark it.

Alright. Lets do another one! (picks up another letter)

“What conditions”, asks Brian M, ”call Google to use DMOZ snippet when there is already a valid meta description tag on the page?”

That’s a really good question. I actually had to go and ask the snippets team. I was like “Hi, why does this happen?”.

I am not going to go into too much of detail, but here’s the way you should think about it. Suppose that you have a page about Christina Aguilera or something like that and your open directory snippet is something about Britney Spears. Well, if you type in or some user types in Britney Spears, that’s going to be a much better snippet.

So the way I would be thinking about it is that there is always a scoring process which does all this selection to say, OK you are the best document to be returned. Once we have selected and scored your document, so that, you are going to be returned at a certain slot on the search engines.

Now what you need do is to think, is the open directory snippet or my meta tag a better match for what the user actually typed in.
Its actually ‘query dependant’. That is, depending on query the user typed, we say, well, we think that the meta description tag from the open directory project or from your meta tags is going to be a better match for the user’s query. Then based on that, we try to say, OK, in that case lets go with the meta-tags, or in this other case lets go with the open directory project.

Now you can, If you don’t like the open directory snippet, you can use the meta ‘noodp’ tag and that will prevent us from using the description from the open directory project. So you have sort of the ability to scope things a little bit and choose which things you want to have happen(?).

Alright! (Picks up another letter) This one is a good one. Lara McKenzie(??) writes in.

She says, “does Google favor ‘bold’ over ’strong’ tags?” (Sigh).

In general, we probably favor bold just a little bit more, but its so slight that I wouldn’t really worry about it. I would go ahead and do your markup how ever you want to do it, not worrying so much about “oh if I use a tag like this I am going to get a little bit of boost in Google” or something like that. Any kind of effect like that is relatively small. So in general, I do what ever is best for users or whatever is best for you site and then not worry much about it after that.

I think I am going to go ahead and upload what we got so far, see how it looks and hopefully I will be back in a bit.

Transcription thanks to Peter T. Davis

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FOR THOSE COMING FROM REDDIT, READ THE EXPLANATION BELOW BEFORE YOU VISIT THE VIDEO:
If you look at the tags associated with Matt’s video here, you will see that someone has managed to get it associated with the Gay Porn tag. Is this a joke by an SEO or fellow Google Employee? Other attached tags include ‘Shoemoney was here’, ‘umpa umpa love’, ‘gilligan’ and more.

I think this is bloody hilarious. Obviously, someone has a great sense of humour, and couldn’t resist the opportunity to poke one at Matt. To whoever did this, great job!

Check out the Matt Cutts Video on Google Video Tagged as Gay Porn

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