Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

(This is a quickie note.)

If someone came to you and said “I want to rent out your mail server. I’d like to send out some emails from your server, and I’ll give you $N to do it,” you’d be suspicious and probably say no--unless you wanted your mail server to end up on email blacklists. In the same way, if someone comes to you and says “I’ll give you $N to rent subdomains, subdirectories, or pages from you. Just link to my doorway pages from your content,” I would recommend to say no as well. It can affect the reputation of your domain if you host doorway pages for someone else and then that other person creates spam on the pages on your domain.

Some site owners over at WebmasterWorld have been discussing an issue where on Bigdaddy data centers, the site wouldn’t be crawled as much in the main index. That would result in Google showing more pages from the supplemental results for that site. GoogleGuy requested feedback with concrete details, and several people responded with enough details that we identified and changed a threshold in Bigdaddy to crawl more pages from those sites.

I checked in that email queue tonight to see how the “gonesupplemental” feedback looked. I looked at an emergency responder site, a truck site, a ticket site, a karate site, a silver site, a T-shirt site, a site about memory, a site selling a type of document, a boating site, and a jewelry site. All were getting more pages crawled, and I expect over time that we’ll crawl more pages from these sites and similar sites that people mentioned. The biggest site that I saw had 711K pages reported, and I saw other sites with 40,400 estimated pages and 52,700 estimated pages for a site: search.

So the upshot is that if you’re one of these people who was paying attention to this issue, I think it has already improved quite a bit, and I would expect to see more pages indexed in the coming week or two. Some sites may see improvements earlier than others because of where a site happens to be in Google’s crawl cycle.

I guess if Ubuntu can delay their “Dapper Drake” release by several weeks, then Vista can too. That means no Vista installed on holiday computers though. These are operating systems that are going to be supported for years and years, so it makes sense to get them right. Sounds like MSFT is using the time in part to get security tightened on Vista, which can only be a good thing if you have an internet-connected computer.

(Just a quick note. I’ve been trying to get to bed by midnight each night.)

Here’s the thing. I don’t check our stock price that often. When I do, it’s mostly to assure myself that I can still afford plenty of cat food and/or cat toys to keep our cat in the style to which she has become accustomed. I’m not really a stock/finance kinda guy. Remind me to tell you my Cisco story some time.

But Google Finance just launched, and I notice that they nailed one thing that always bothers me. If you do a search for Lexmark, the search will show you an info page for Lexmark (stock symbol: LXK). If you didn’t want a company profile page, over in the top right is a “Find more results for lexmark” link so you can search for Lexmark Canada or whatever. At most finance pages, if you typed “Lexmark” into the search box, you’ll get a message like “That’s not a stock symbol! Click over here to search for a stock symbol.” You end up clicking 3-4 times, when the logical behavior is to give you the best matching stock profile, then give you the option to do a deeper search.

The draggable stock chart is nice, but I’m just happy to have a single search box that takes a pretty good guess about what company I’m interested in.

Sometimes I forget I’m a geek. Then I get a fortune cookie like

There will always be delightful
mysteries in your life.

Lucky numbers: 10 22 25 19 31 41

and I immediately notice “Hmm. Those numbers could form an IP address of 102.225.193.141. Should I ping it?”

By the way, the best fortune cookie I ever got? It was a stock cookie from the fortune cookie factory, and it said

Kiss the person standing next to you.

How did it know I was standing by a pretty girl at the time? Nice.