Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

My wife is back in town, so expect my blog post volume to plummet as I regain a life. My family is coming in for Christmas next week as well, and (I’m just guessing here) they’ll want to talk to me and visit, not just watch me type on a laptop.

My favorite post over the last couple days is from Pandia, entitled “What we want from Google this Christmas”. It’s addressed to “Santa Brin” and talks about 15 things they’d like from Google. A couple of the requests will never happen; on #7, we slowed down external PageRank updates because if you do them more often than every 3-4 months, SEOs pay too much attention to the PageRank bar, and not enough to the over 100 other factors that go into our scoring. But several items really resonated with Googlers here. My favorite part is the tone. Per and Susanne don’t slather on praise or criticism. They just mention several things that they as intelligent people would like Google to do. As I hope I’ve made clear, it’s great that people care so much about search that they’ll give us constructive advice for free.

Adam Lasnik said it best when we were discussing Pandia’s list: “I found myself nodding my head several times in agreement.” I think I can take care of one of them right now: #16, a Google travel mug. Per or Susanne, if you leave a comment from a new, unique email address with “DO NOT APPROVE - THIS COMMENT CONTAINS THE SECRET ADDRESS OF PANDIA HEADQUARTERS” I’ll ask Adam to take care of it.

Andy Beal’s recent article about click fraud is notable. Not just because he talked to Shuman Ghosemajumder, a Google program manager who works on click fraud. The more notable reason is that it led to Shuman posting on his blog to clarify and offer more info:

Our top priority is to protect advertisers, so that means not disclosing any proprietary methods which would allow click fraud perpetrators to reverse-engineer our systems. However, there is still a great deal of information we can share. I and others on our team have spent literally hundreds of hours on communications and sharing such information outside Google.

Read Shuman’s post for more details. I’m sure he had to take the precaution to run his post by the legal team, but personally, I’m delighted to see Shuman talking about this issue on his blog.

I was going to read some Penny Arcade, but Robert Scoble invoked me. Jeremy points out that Google had an IE7 promo page that looked remarkably similar to a Yahoo! IE7 promo page.

I can only speak for me personally on this. If Jeremy looked into it and says that it wasn’t a template from Microsoft, I believe him. That would mean that the Yahoo! page was used as a template for Google’s IE7 promo page. I can’t say why someone at Google would decide to do that, but to the Yahoo! UI designer whose page was copied: my apologies. In my personal opinion, it sucks when someone else copies a page layout without attribution.

It can take a lot of work to come up with creative HTML. I remember when Google did a bunch of UI research to decide on a distinctive look for AdWords. We decided to go with pastel boxes with a darker border on the right-hand side of the search results:

Not too long afterwards, Yahoo! changed their side ads to pastel boxes with a darker border:

Then at some point, Google decided to go for a fresh look. After a ton of prototypes, testing, and internal research, we decided on a blue background for the top ads, with a blue line separating ads on the right-hand side:

Not too long afterwards, Yahoo! changed their top ads to a blue background, made the right-hand ads on a white background, and added a blue line separating the ads:

Of course, changing the just UI alone can cause weirdness, so it’s good that Yahoo! changed their ads to be the same number of characters as Google.

Yup, getting copied without credit can suck. I’m glad that Jeremy was so observant and pointed this out immediately. Google has already changed the page, but I trust Yahoo will be on the lookout for copying in the future.

One more fun post tonight.

At this point, many people on the web have seen Ms. Dewey, the viral marketing site that encourages people to search using live.com. The nice Ms. Dewey looks like this:

But what happens if you refuse to search with live.com? Well, Ms. Dewey gets MMMMMAAAAAADDDDD!!!

It turns out that Janina Gavankar, the actress who played Ms. Dewey, had a role in Cup of My Blood. Valleywag calls the film soft-porn (<—— Not safe for work), but other sources place it in the religious-horror genre. In the spirit of investigation, does anyone want to add it to their Netflix queue?

Okay, now I’m off to read comic books graphic novels and head to bed. No more blogging for a while! Goodnight..

Okay, looks like I’ve got one more debunking (and fun!) blog post in me this weekend.

So many people talk all the time about SEO. Is it better to use hyphens or underscores? Is it better to separate meta tags with commas or spaces? Is it worth doing the table trick? Can the Google Toolbar cause pages to be indexed? Many of these questions work out well if you just experiment with them. Here’s an example.

You sometimes hear people say “I installed the Google Toolbar, and a day later, Google crawled my secret/unlinked page. Clearly installing the Google Toolbar caused that!” Then you’ll often see me post and say “No, it didn’t.” You’ll often see me point to this page that discusses how a page that you think is secret and unlinked can be crawled (hint: our addurl form is one way, referrer leaks is another). Philipp Lenssen decided to try an experiment. He created an unlinked web page in August, then visited it with the Google toolbar to see if it would be crawled. Read his description of the experiment, then come on back.

When I heard about his experiment, I wrote to give him some advice on how to do the experiment well:

Just to be safe, you should make sure that the name isn’t guessable (e.g. use a different long random number for the path/filename). If it’s guessable, someone could submit the url to Google. I’d also keep an eye for any accesses to that page at all, b/c if someone finds it and surfs to a new site, it could leave a referrer in the server log of the dest site, when then might turn into a hyperlink that Google could crawl.

Philipp replied and offered a bet. Eventually we settled on the terms. If the hidden page showed up in our search results, I would autograph this card and send it back to him:

(This card is part of a fun series that Philipp did in May 2006.)

If the hidden page (and he didn’t tell me where it was, so it could have been anywhere) never showed up in Google after a couple months, he would send a copy of his book, 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google, to anyone that I chose.

Google didn’t index the hidden page that Philipp visited with the toolbar, so I won the bet. Now the question is: who should get the free copy of Philipp’s book? I already bought myself a personal copy of Philipp’s book months ago. Should I donate this new copy to Google’s engineering library or send it to some SEO who needs to have more fun with Google? Let me know your thoughts. The main thing is that I’m glad an experiment by a smart third party supports what I’ve been saying for a while.

More details for the terminally interested.
Q: What toolbar did Philipp use?
A: I didn’t know until he wrote it up. It turns out Philipp used the Firefox toolbar. However, in the comments on the experiment, Ionut reveals that unbeknownst to both of us, he ran a similar experiment starting in August with the IE toolbar, with the same results.