Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

How sad is it that I notice that the World Series is starting because of an Ask Jeeves logo? That’s the danger of personalized news--you get a great view of the bark on the trees, but you can lose the forest.

But if you want to look at the bark on my trees, click this link to see how I’ve personalized Google News. I’ve got sections for Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves, plus a section for Search Engine Optimization.

Although for the SEO section, I had to add “-mets -jae” to the query; evidently there’s some baseball pitcher with the name “Seo.” Baseball again, geez; when will people learn that basketball and maybe soccer are where the action is?

Back when I was getting my domain hosted, I wanted to try outsourcing my site blogginess to typepad.com; they offer a way to host their centralized blog service on your domain name. So I bought a copy of DNS for Dummies. My recommendation: look for a different book. How can you have entire book about DNS and mention CNAME exactly one time? Frankly, that was all I wanted to know about. Oh well; you live you learn, you restart named a few times.

I wanted to see how hard it would be to install a captcha with WordPress. Turns out it wasn’t too bad. I may leave it there to play with. Now, does anyone know of a simple plugin that adds an “email this comment to [textbox]” option when I’m approving comments? Reading through the plug-in documentation, it sounds like there’s not a good action/filter for that, so I’d have to muck around in the PHP..

Let’s continue our ongoing series about things not to do when optimizing your site. Here’s a site that looks great at first glance:

But if you use Prefbar or something similar to turn off CSS, you see something different:

Why the big difference? Let’s view the source and check out the relevant part of the page:

Hmm. “Insert your hidden text here. Do not forget to [embiggen] your keywords.” I don’t recommend that people use CSS to hide text, and I don’t recommend that they document it, either.

Several people pointed out that WebmasterWorld can be reached at http://www.searchengineworld.com/ until Westhost brings back the main WMW domain. If you want to say “this update sux0rs!” or “this update rulez!” without specifics, that’s the best place to discuss. If you want to give Google specific feedback, use the methods to contact Google that I mentioned earlier.

Also, if you’re a PageRank junkie, new externally-visible PageRanks are starting to be visible at places like
216.239.57.99
216.239.59.104
216.239.37.104
If you don’t know how to hardwire your hosts file to point to specific IP addresses or hunt down PageRank at multiple data centers, I’d just wait a day or so for the values to become visible more widely. We update external PageRanks every 3-4 months or so.

And again, these PageRanks and backlinks have already been incorporated into scoring a while back (Google updates PageRank continually and continuously), but some people just love to look at PageRanks. Looks like this update may yield my first green pixels. I’m hoping for a PR12.

Finally, GoogleGuy posted yesterday or so that a new binary is also wending its way from data centers like 66.102.7.x. And I wouldn’t be surprised if a second stage of the index rolls out around this time next week. I also wouldn’t be surprised if a third stage of the index rolls out the week after that. I just wanted to let people know that there’s still flux to come.