Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

While you’re waiting for me to get my posting gusto back, check out Xooglers. It’s a blog that Doug Edwards started to reminisce about his experiences at Google (other ex-Googlers may join in at some point). Doug’s a great guy and he helped shape Google culture in many ways. If you’ve read the copy on the spam report page, you’ve seen some of his polishing work.

Reminder: this post tells how to get only Google/SEO-related posts.

Last week I mentioned how some bloggers like to post pictures of their cat. Then on Friday I came back from PubCon and one of our two cats, Frank, was really listless and not interested in eating. We took him to the vet the next day. To make a long story short, it looks like he has a very serious illness called FIP (Feline Infectious Peritonitis). There is no cure, and it’s almost always fatal. Right now we’re doing what we can to keep him happy and healthy, so don’t expect much blog/email communication from me this week.

I’m here at WebmasterWorld Pubcon. Jumbled bunch of thoughts so far:

• The timing worked out to announce a new webmaster console on Google Sitemaps. I signed up today and it’s pretty sweet. For example, you can now see crawl errors, timeouts on pages, robots.txt errors, unreachable urls, etc. Just really useful hard data that tells you if you have crawl problems and what they are. And you do not need a sitemap to use this functionality. You just create an empty file to verify that you own the domain. Check it out.
• Yahoo! knows how to throw a party. They threw a fun shindig at Pure last night with good food and free drinks. I stuck to Sprite, but several webmasters were drinking with both hands.
• Lots of people liked the price of Google Analytics (free). More to post on Analytics later.
• I finally got to hear Jeremy Zawodny speak (we always seem to be on different panels at the same time). He’s making hundreds of dollars a month from AdSense, and he hasn’t gotten around to using YPN yet. He’s said he’s gotten a “talking to” three times over the last three years. I haven’t gotten a “talking to” from my company yet, and would prefer not to.
• The conference went pretty smoothly, or at least the talks I was on. The coffee talk Q&A was full of juicy questions that I’ll try to recap later. Lots of people have said hello today, which is nice. I’ll be at pubcon tomorrow, so please come up and say hi if you see me.

I’m heading downstairs to the hotel lobby to hang with webmasters for a few hours; catcha later..

Sweet, it pays to be a night owl. I just noticed that Google Analytics is live. This is a result of Urchin joining Google. I tried it out and here’s what I’ve noticed so far:

• It’s free. Technically it’s free for sites with 5 million pageviews/month or less. If you have more than 5M pageviews, you need to sign up for an AdWords account, but it sounds like there’s no minimum spend once you sign up. In other words, it’s free.
• It’s quick to sign up. It took me five minutes to sign up (I already had a Google account for Gmail, so add 1-2 minutes if you don’t have a Google account). That includes filling out 2-3 forms, getting the JavaScript to include on pages, ssh’ing to my webhost, and dropping the JavaScript in my templates.
• If you’re using WordPress with a theme like almost-spring, you would edit your header.php file, e.g. wp-content/themes/almost-spring/header.php and put the JS just above the </head> tag. That’s it. Do a view-source on this page and search for “urchin” to see where to drop the code.
• The help pages are pretty good, and it looks like the system is available in 16 languages. If you use weird tricks like reloading the same url with different params as someone submits information, you can add virtual stages so that you can track the progress of users on that url.
• You can track all sorts of things like Flash events, JavaScript events, and PDF downloads.
• They’ve done a very nice job of emphasizing that conversion data is well-protected. Take this quote from the benefits page, for example:
  

  Google takes the trust people place in us very seriously, and is pledged to safeguard the privacy of your corporate data. We understand that web analytics data is sensitive information, so we accord it the ironclad protection it deserves. Read our industry leading privacy policy.

  ZDNet also has a good quote from Paul Muret, one of the Urchin founders who is now a director at Google:

  Though in theory people who are using Google Analytics and competitive services to monitor their ad campaigns could be exposing information to Google on how those rival services work, Muret said Google would not get any competitive advantage from that.

  “We have very strict controls on the data. It is only used to provide reporting to customers and people using the analytics,” he said.

  Blackhat SEOs may be leery of using Google for analytics, but regular site owners should be reassured.

The timing on this is great for me. I often advise site owners to check out their server logs, but I hadn’t done much rooting around on my own logs since I started my blog. In fact, the first webhost I signed up for didn’t include access to server logs! To be fair, I did sign up for the “I am a cheap bastard” plan though. I only got error logs, so I had to estimate visitor levels by looking for misses when browsers tried to load a favicon from my site and failed. My current web host gives me server logs and offers a couple packages for reporting (Analog and something else), but they’re not set up by default and it looked like a hassle, so I never bothered. I guess being lazy paid off this time.

I feel a little guilty using a massively powerful analytics package to track visitors to my halloween costume, but hey: it’s free. Swatting a fly with a Buick may feel like overkill, but if the Buick is free, I’m not complaining. The only downside so far is that you have to wait 6-12 hours for the first report to show up. I’ll head to bed and let you know how it looks when I get some reports. Or, you know, try it yourself and see what you think.

Overall, Google Analytics should be a hot topic at the WebmasterWorld conference this week. Some people will care a lot about the AdWords features, but plenty of people will want to use it just for tracking. Now, I wonder who I’d talk to on the Analytics team to get them to offer a web counter service..

I’m getting stuff together for Pubcon. I’ve got a USB drive, a long-ass ethernet cable for Wi-Fi unfriendly hotel rooms, cell phone charger, breath mints, a bitchin’ laser pointer, and plenty of mini notebooks for writing down feedback. I have Bejeweled on my cell phone for wasting time in airport lines. You’d think I’m 100% ready, but I’m not.

The one thing I don’t have is business cards; lately, I never have business cards at conferences. My initial batch ran out a year or two ago, and I never bothered getting more. Googlers can order them with almost any job title, and I’ve been struck with business card writer’s block. Should I just go with the tried-and-true but generic title of Software Engineer? Or I could put something more out there, like “The guy who knows the spam you made last summer” or “Whitehat.” I’ll figure it out, but what do you think I should put on my business cards? And am I missing anything important for my travels in the next couple weeks?