Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

I’m ready to head to Las Vegas for PubCon tomorrow. I’ll be at the Google “Safe Bets” session Wednesday evening to help discuss Google products and answer questions. Then I’ll be doing a site review panel (with lots of other search big hitters; it should be fun) on Thursday, followed by the super session with four different search engines, also on Thursday. And of course, I’ll be at the pub to chat and answer questions on Friday. See ya there!

Just for fun, I switched the logo around; it’s another design by goopymart. Also, because of the conference, comment approvals are lagging behind..

Update: By the way, the “pub” in PubCon didn’t always stand for “publishers.” For a while, it referred to the best part of the conference, where people just mill around in a pub and chat. To help preserve that early PubCon spirit, I promise to wear only jeans and T-shirts during the conference. If you see someone who looks like me and they’re wearing a tie, it must be my evil twin.

Someone asked about this, so here’s a quick one. It’s fine to run your website off your home DSL, as long as you configure your webserver correctly. This is an extension of the “virtual hosting vs. dedicated IP doesn’t matter” idea. As long as Google can load your web pages, it doesn’t really make a different whether the pages load in half a second or 5 seconds.

Someone recently suggested that a link sent to a Gmail account equals one link on one page. Also not true in any way.

I hear that there was recently a discussion on a NANOG (North American Network Operators Group) email list about virtual hosting vs. dedicated IP addresses. They were commenting on the misconception that having multiple sites hosted on the same IP address will in some way affect the PageRanks of those sites. There is no PageRank difference whatsoever between these two cases (virtual hosting vs. a dedicated IP). Someone on the email discussion already dug out this Slashdot interview from mid-2003 with Craig Silverstein, Google’s Director of Technology. I refer to question 5, in which someone asked

Why in this day and age does google continue to penalize sites that are virtual hosted? With ip addresses becoming harder to get/justify every day why does google discount the relevance of links that don’t come from a unique ip address. Please don’t just deny it, I think the Internet community deserves an explanation.

Craig’s reply was as follows:

I can’t just deny it? What are my other choices? Actually, Google handles virtually hosted domains and their links just the same as domains on unique IP addresses. If your ISP does virtual hosting correctly, you’ll never see a difference between the two cases. We do see a small percentage of ISPs every month that misconfigure their virtual hosting, which might account for this persistent misperception–thanks for giving me the chance to dispel a myth!

I’m happy to affirm that this statement which was true in 2003 is still true now. Links to virtually hosted domains are treated the same as links to domains on dedicated IP addresses.

I don’t do Googler-only posts that often, but this is one. Everyone who is not a Googler, please stop reading–thanks!

Okay, now it’s just me and 9,378 Googlers, according to the latest public numbers. Hola, recent Googlers! As Google gets bigger, it’s important to maintain our Googliness for as long as possible. But what can you do to help preserve Google’s culture? Well, there are lots of ways, but I’ll just suggest one for now.

I submit that if you work in Mountain View, you should try playing roller hockey. We play Tuesdays and Thursdays around 4pm or so. If you’d like more information, go to Google’s intranet search and search for [roller hockey]. Look for the page with “RollerHockey” in the title. It’s a little-known fact that once you play hockey 7-8 times (enough to show that you play regularly), Google will reimburse much of the cost of protective gear.

If you don’t work at Google (hey, why are you reading this post?!), first get a job at Google, then come join us for roller hockey.