More material for web site owners

Here’s some more stuff you should know about.

– I did a monster-long interview with Eric Enge. I think the interview lasted an hour or something like that, and we covered several areas in depth.

– Next, take a break and go read this post by Rhea Drysdale. Heck, maybe send her a donation by Paypal (Added: the address if you want to send a Paypal donation is rhea_drysdale [at] yahoo [dot] com). Rhea took on a big fight for the benefit of the SEO industry, saw it through to the end — and won! In the process, she earned the sort of credibility that you just can’t buy.

– We continue to answer webmaster questions over on the YouTube webmaster video channel. My recent favorite video is an eight-minute discussion of “What are some good link-building techniques?”

We now have over 200 videos live on the webmaster video channel, including topics such as “Is it worth spending time on tags and categories?”

You might want to check out the video channel; there’s a lot of good material there. You can also follow me or the Google webmaster account on Twitter; we often tweet when new webmaster videos are released.

77 Responses to More material for web site owners (Leave a comment)

  1. Off topic but do you have any updates about caffeine? Had a few people asking me and there are lots of people speculating that it’s about to launch.

  2. Thanks for the sub-titles on the Category/Tag video. It is a great feature to use when I’m at the office or don’t have headphones available.

    I’ve feel that if I plan out my categories correctly then my site is much easier to navigate. I also try to keep my tags at a 2-4 range and only where it makes sense for navigation purposes.

  3. Also, since the videos have captions is the text available in article format?

  4. Great videos. The subtitles are a nice touch.

    Is the Google webmaster team going to be making a contribution to Rhea?

  5. Dude…the link building video is a must-have primer and I’m naming my next kid Rhea…even if it is a boy. She needs to put a paypal link so we can all thank her.

  6. Vincent Ammirato, you can send her a donation by Paypal at rhea_drysdale [at] yahoo [dot] com. Justin, I dropped some money in the donation box for Rhea on Google’s behalf.

    Patrick Altoft, I covered it on my SMX panel but for some reason Lisa didn’t mention it in the live-blog coverage. You might check this link: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/5186826 I think I talked about it some there too. The short answer is that Caffeine is still live at only one datacenter. Things are on track though, and we expect to roll out Caffeine to all data centers in the coming weeks/months.

    Edited April 1 to add “weeks.”

  7. Hi Matt
    Already blogged it before you post this video on your blog 🙂
    http://www.aniksumon.co.uk/effective-link-building-techniques/93

  8. Thanks for the information.

    Personally, I much prefer categories to tags. Categories are broad enough to capture a sensible range of information. Tags, by contrast, are often either much too general or much too specific. In the former case, they don’t really help to sort information much. In the latter case, they fail to group together items that are actually quite related.

    The ideal solution would be something like search within GMail, where you can search for ‘categories’ using labels and achieve most of what tags do by adding search terms.

  9. This is a little off topic but when are you going to grow some hair again? When I watch these vids I am always reminded of people offering me flowers at airports.

  10. Rhea Rocks. Matt can you tell us what else is on the horizon??

  11. Rhea Rocks! Matt can you please tell us what else is on the Google horizon?

  12. Wow that was an amazing story about Rhea. I hadn’t heard of any of this, mind you I’m not one for reading blogs all day. That should be a mainstream news story…but then maybe I’m biased.

    Thanks for alerting the SEO world to her amazing fight.

  13. Wow.. nice videos Matt, Thanks.

    All eyes to Rhea..

    By the way… I am thinking to copy your hair style.. hope it would look as good on me as it looks on you… No kidding.. :))

  14. Matt, why don’t you list the tweets addressed @mattcutts soemwhere in the blog or to the related blog post topic. This will help the newbie.

    Best,
    Jag

  15. Interesting SEO tips, sound easy but not easy to do it.

  16. OFF TOPIC, dude, how long does it take hair to grow on your head? it’s been a while since you lost the bet, but all your videos you’re still bald? 🙂

  17. I was kind of stunned since I hadn’t seen any pictures in awhile…… you’re starting to look like gb (yeah, yeah!).

  18. Nice video on link building.. I think the ideas tend to work better for information based sites and not ecommerce though. Perhaps people could argue ecommerce sites should become information sites but then wouldn’t google be serving ecommerce shoppers the best information and not the best retail products? Maybe that is a false dichotomy? I would love to hear your thoughts on this Matt..

  19. Hello,

    Loved the Eric Enge interview! Great when the reporter also has such a good grasp of what you are talking about. Would love one clarification though on a thing that “scared” me a bit (Might also be good as a few of the links we have in is now might not be regarded, and should be easy to ask the website owners to fix them)

    It is about the question Eric asked that went as follows: Eric Enge: “If Googlebot sees an affiliate link out there, does it treat that link as an endorsement or an ad?”

    And you say as it ought to be, that you treat it as an ad. What I wonder about is that the context before and after the question it might seem like you treat any inlinks with a ? Parameter like a ad.

    Does that mean that if I have a page that show up some dynamic context like http://www.example.com/?Product=test all inlinks on this format would be treated as ads? Or do you do some kind of check to see if the page is dynamic before it is treated like an ad?

    If you don’t, I have some redesigning to do… (Nothing much though, and I know you should generally provide static URL’s, but sometimes it is just so much easier…. )

    Regards,
    M.

  20. Great video about linkbuilding. Help me a lot and i will try for example making some Videos or How Tos. I will see how worth they are.

  21. Great interview Matt and thanks to Eric Enge for making it happen!

  22. Morris Rosenthal

    Matt,

    I Googled to find a video I did a few years ago on getting organic links, which I called a website personal add, and it popped up under “Video Results” next to a video by Matt Cutts. I guess that gives me an excuse to post the link in here (mine, not yours:-)

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxQqz0F2MXE

    BTW, what happpened to the “preview” option for your comments?

    Morris

  23. Really enjoyed the link-building video. I know/have heard most of these before but it gave me some good, fresh ideas anyway.

    Thanks Matt.

  24. thanks your videos are very usefull, I post in my blog the video “How do you rate links from sites like Twitter and Facebook?” http://www.creatuweb.com.mx/blog/ with subtitles in spanish, if you think are good I can send you in a .srt. And I’m interesting in continue translate the following videos, what do you think? is usefull?

  25. Wealth of information in the various posts. The site is a tremendous resource, I knew of the FAQs but was not aware of the associated videos. I had never heard of Rhea and wasn’t aware of the backstory, fascinating and it will probably end up as a discussion case in law schools for years to come.

  26. I really like the link building video. Great information about building links for a site. But I have a doubt about tags. I always think that if google consider tag pages as duplicate content.

  27. I always thought that tags are much better than category. The reason why i am saying this is that a tag tells more specifically than a category about what the content in a post is all about.
    Also categories are predefined so whatever post one writes, it has to go in any one category among those categories. But as far as the tags are concerned they are post specific, So its really easy to deal with them and they will provide more information about the subject of the post.

    But after seeing your second video i almost got my answer why categories are important than tags. Specially category feeds is most important one for users having interest in particular category

    Thanks matt for these nice ideas!

  28. Hello Matt,

    Thanks for your video on tags and categories. I have an additional question though.

    In my (WordPress) blog am using tags not so much for clarifying the content of the specific (taged) page to SE’s, but to create an additional, relevant page referring to articles that got the specific tag. Tags give us the possibility to create another perspective on the information than one can with categories alone.

    I think that those tagpages can be interesting to SE’s when:
    * the number of tags are limited and carefully chosen (so that tags refer to several articles)
    * the tagpage also gets unique content about the specific tag

    What’s your take on this? Thanks!

  29. Matt, One question I have regarding your interview with Eric Enge is when you mention about “If-Modified-Since”. Basically I’ve worked on many websites whereby the actual file timestamp doesn’t change, but the content does since the pages are database driven. How should we deal with such situations ? Cheers, Neil

  30. Matt,
    I am a copywriter and freelance marketer so mastering SEO has been mind boggling. In fact, for this creative guy even grasping the concepts has been confounding. Yet I have found your videos to be super easy and I am continuing to learn more about things I never thought possible. I blogged about dipping my toes into the SEO waters here http://ibrandcasting.com/seo-for-dummies-and-even-artsy-types/03/17/2010/
    Thanks for your help!

    Sean

  31. Nice video refresh course on link building. Interesting how ideas we are well aware off can be slipped into deep void and pulled back by video – thanks for that!

  32. Hi Matt,
    Great videos I really enjoyed the video. Thanks for sharing that.

  33. RE: she earned the sort of credibility that you just can’t buy

    You can “buy” credibility????

  34. @Matt Cutts:

    I realize this may be thought of as “off topic” but I don’t think so. More and more, I am seeing complaints of business owners on Local Search of bogus reviews about their businesses by individuals who are more likely than not, their competitors. I am also seeing that competitors, and Blackmailing SEO companies, are using the spam reports to try and get their competitors knocked out of the SERPS.

    For example, I had an SEO company call me who does sites for my main competitor. (“We work with Yahoo! and Google to guarantee you first page placement”) I was instructed that unless I used them, they would call their “friends” at Google and have my site de-indexed. Sure enough, several of my blogs got PR zeroed and my main site went from a PR 5 to a PR 4 on the last update.

    I contacted Google and they were kind enough to restore the PR to my blog. We’ll see if my portal site gets its juice back on the next update. My concern is that an automated algo just looks at number of reports and if enough, it destroys your livelihood. Can you address these issues in a new post, or link me to a discussion you have had on these topics?

    I have a wife and children and am more than a little concerned that there are no real safety devices to protect a legitimate business from bogus reviews and bogus spam reports other than after the fact requests. In other words, once your bankrupt you can request re inclusion.

  35. Hey,
    Is there any project on Deep Web Search in Google? 🙂
    Thanks for the video.

  36. Very interesting SEO tips!!

  37. these seo tips are good but I have to see whether these will really help in real time…..thanks

  38. The video about organic link building is a must watch Matt. I’m happy to know that my contribution to the different forums that I use is being rewarded. According to me that best way for SEO is ‘Original Research’ which is the most difficult way to get backlinks as it require a lot of work on the webmaster’s behalf.

  39. Hi Matt,
    Unfortunately, the Webmaster Help Forums and the internet is full of conflicting information, so wanted your thoughts on one of the issues.
    Had a question regarding Blogger and use of meta tags.
    Blogger, being a google product, does not have meta tags for keywords and description. However, they are highly recommended as per the many SEO tips.

    What are your thoughts on adding the meta tags for keywords and description, to the blogger template. Will it be beneficial or will it be useless.

    Thanks,
    Seth

  40. A big thumbs up for the link building tips, Its given me a great idea for a blog post aimed at the local market. Thanks Matt

  41. Thesis:
    Link popularity can be heavily influenced by link builders rather than by the content being link worthy.

    Visitor statistics that show the stickiness of web pages are more indicative to the issue whether content is relevant to a search.

    These statistics should therefore strongly figure in the indexing algorithms of search engines and take precedence over link popularity.

    Question:
    Does the stickiness of a web page take precedence over link popularity when all other seo aspects are equal?

  42. Your link building video didn’t really go into organic link building the way I was hoping it would. I don’t want to build links to a funny cat picture or a top 10 lists, I want to build links to my product page. I may think my content is the best around but you were very specific to tech related link building. If my site were about flowers I doubt that any social networking sites would put a “top 10 ways to weed your garden” on the front page. Link building for the non-technical crowd is where the problems start. Generating traffic for funny pictures and jokes is easy and the traffic is also not worth anything, hit and runs from stumbleupon do not lead to organic traffic results for my main product site.

  43. Really nice Matt. I don’t think i’ll be too busy with my blog’s tags from now on 🙂

  44. Thanks for the video on link building techniques. Matt. Many of the tips seem useful and they will be part of the link building strategy for my site. Hopefully they will generate more traffic. I guess the coming months will show…

  45. Just made some short videos last week based on that with tips on buying cars. 🙂

  46. The more SEO evolves, SEOers have to start thinking like Marketers. By thinking outside the box, you can create genius marketing ideas that will generate links.

  47. I think building widgets and badges is a great way to build organic backlinks. If you have a community, you can have users get badges to put on their blogs or sites, and say: hey I belong this community! Widgets are good too but would requiere a bit more work (for example, I love twitter showing your latest posts on my blog)

  48. Adam J. Humphreys

    Really glad you did your interview with Eric. While a lot of things are quite obvious it solidified some of the questions a lot of search analysts have been wondering.

  49. These are great videos. Straight from the horses mouth.
    Thanks Matt

  50. I try to coach my clients on alternative link-building such as social media and blogs too. One word of advice from myself would be to make sure that you are offering good content through these channels- as you would on your website. We’ve seen a lot of attempts at social media that just come off as boring sales pitches, and not link-worthy.

  51. This is great advice for all businesses looking to get into SEO and strengthen their online brand. I love when Matt comes out and does these types of videos because way to often people look for the “tricks” to achieve success online and it just doesn’t happen that way. Becoming an authority, getting involved with the social community and putting out good quality outside the box thinking it what really works to build a business online. The resources are out there you just have to put down the TV remote and utilize them. Stop looking for the magical genie lamp to rub and build your business through hard work and creative thinking.

  52. Dear Matt, please consider to include a transcript of these videos as you each time excluding as others that doesn’t have access to broadband, i.e. good part of Africa!

  53. Hi Matt,
    i play around with seo and i give great importance to onsite factors but link building is something i really hate. The most of the professionals has really few time to spend on facebook or other social sites to attract people toward their sites, so what’s the final trick for people that has to work? Great content alone is not enough, you need to show it to someone before you obtain link popularity and if you don’t have time to do it you can’t wish that google shows you on first page. I think that google should give a chance to new pages showing them in good serp rankings just to understand if people likes it or not… having links or not…

  54. Google is killing the value of organic listings. I am doing searches with only 3 sponsored ads and they are all listing above the organic results every time. I have watched a lot of non-technical internet browsers search Google and they always click a sponsored ad first. Google is going to ruin the profitability of being ranked #1 to earn more AdWords dollars then what will happen to SEO in the future as a service or otherwise?

  55. Hey Matt,

    Thanks for the tips. I recently came across one of your conferences about WordPress blogs on Google from a friend and the content was awesome. Just wanted to stop by and check out your site. Ended up watching a few videos and have been trying to improve my blog, amazing tips, just what I was looking for. I am new to SEO and never really got my hands wet with it. Now that I see the importance I am constantly looking for ways to improve my blog. Thanks again and will be passing by again really soon!

    Have a great day!
    Tommy D.
    “The Prospecting Hero”

  56. Nice one Matt! very informative information, particularly on just being unique and doing research and posting something someone else may not of heard about. I really liked the video you did so I posted it here – http://www.gseo.net/video/post/347

    I will certainly be looking forward to seeing more videos like this in the near coming future.

  57. Very nice video’s but some things are really a lot of work. Like a month of research thats not someting you just will do for some backlinks. We are doing research and I don’t know if I want to share this information. I think sharing information is oke but not all. The lists that are mention is something that we have done in the past some results but not a lot.

    The best results we had so far is creating a free tool and making it avaible for al to use. We got a lot of backlinks! Thats my experince…

  58. Hey Matt,

    Interesting to hear Caffeine is live at only 1 DC, we thought as you promised Caffeine results will be available after holidays…..but Holidays are still going on 🙂

    Will be eager to have your views on some tentative date’s on Caffeine, b/w I knew Google will never inform or have Caffeine news public even if you roll it.

  59. Hi Matt if you do almost all of those things you propose and hardly any links are generated what is wrong ?
    Example: LEADSExplorer

  60. Hi Matts,
    Thanks for sharing useful tips about organic link building and importance of categories in blogs.Both of are wonderful videos.

  61. Nice to finally get some quality input about link-building from a REAL expert as opposed to all these people who claim to know the ins and outs of SEO but have it all wrong. Thanks so much, Matt.

  62. Good SEO tips, will try and incorporated them when I can find some time in my already 12 hour a day work schedule.

  63. Great informative videos as usual.

    Thanks Matt !

  64. Matt,

    I can’t tell you how useful these simple tips are for me.

    Off topic but are you going to blog while in Japan?

  65. Hello Matt,
    If i sponsor an project,lets say an CMS platform and they add the link of my company into the script,will this hurt my ranking?
    Regards,
    Jorgo G.

  66. Rhea did a great job.

    There is absolutely no need for an SEO patent that covers the purpose described (to regulate the SEO industry). If he wanted to patent that, I’m sure there was a hidden agenda behind it.

    There already is an unbiased independent source to know which are the best Internet Marketing companies in the US and the world (recommended even by CNN).

    From the consumers, for the consumers. It’s http://www.topseos.com

  67. Hi Matt,

    The second video gives me a clear idea on how tagging is actually not very important. When I exploring your blog you not even use tags. Surprisingly your blog ranks high on search engine. It is a good idea indeed, and more thing, why you use “type” not “category” in your URL?

  68. I agree, I can’t think of a reason he would want to copyright SEO without some selfish malevolent intent.

  69. Matt,

    I just started reading your blog daily, now I’m working into the archives, great stuff. I especially like the videos and subscribed to the YouTube channel.

    The videos above alone, will help me tremendously.

    Thanks again, you’ve got a new fan.

    Frank

  70. I liked the link building video. Thanks for the tips.

  71. I am glad to see my long-standing intuition that tags are essentially useless justified.

    Categories, as you point out, are rather useful for those of us who post on wildly varying topics.

  72. I always like to watch your videos and apply your given tips in my websites/blogs. I most like community tips which you have mentioned in first video. But I noticed that many people use community to get ONLY backlinks of their websites that is really looking like Spamming. I most like your tips on Organic link building which Pulkit has asked.

    Question:
    What you think if we publish our content on most popular site like squidoo, hubpages, wetpaint & many more and get backlinks from them? What the value google will give us?

    I would be much appreciate if you can give me detailed answer like first video.

    Waiting for answer.

    Thanks,
    Hardip Patel

  73. Hey Matt,
    Thanks for clearing things up in the second video. As far as the first video about link building, I think I’ve watched it 10 times now, and just now getting to say thanks.. Your new haircut (or rather newest) is grown on me and easier on the eyes. Thanks, lol.

    – James F.

  74. I blogged about this video, summarizing all the points you’ve mentioned + given a few examples for some of the points: http://blog.directorymaximizer.com/2010/07/23/matt-cutts-tips-on-link-building/ – I hope it’s useful for all those looking at a permanent text-based version of the video

  75. Hey mate, i am quite confused regarding this info age online. Google wants us to have pages full of info, but how in this world an E-commerce store owner can fill his pages with info.

    I know link building is important too in ranking but on the one hand Google wants everybody to be while hat and gain links naturally but one the other hand it favors sites with thousands of links. Guess I need to do what everybody else is doing and use a vacation.

  76. I don’t know how to get page rank, but I’ve already done all the above, including article submissions on multiple websites (amazines, ezine, articlesdashboard, articlefeeder), social bookmarking(propeller, digg, diigo, reddit,…) and social networking on facebook.

    STILL my website is not have good PR.

  77. I still think linkbuilding is the most important thing to score in Googl. But I’m curious how the Google “like”-system is going to work out. I don’t think it’s permanent since only a small percentage of people understand this.

    I Think Google startpage is a bit like a Carnival these days with all the extra options.

    How do you guys think about this?

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