More SEO Answers on Video

Alrighty, here’s another batch of answers on video. Again, make sure you’ve seen yon video disclaimer. Just as with my normal disclaimer, this is my personal opinion. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not necessarily those of my employer.

Session 4:

– Static vs. Dynamic urls: does PageRank flow the same to both? What pitfalls should I avoid with dynamic urls?
– Can Sitemaps alert webmasters when their site has been hacked?
– Can I do geotargetting within Google’s Quality Guidelines?

Session 5: (and I change the background to look less kidnapped!)

– Merging acquired domains with 301s?
– How to create a site architecture with themes and keywords?
– My urls have too many parameters–can I serve up static HTML to Googlebot instead?
– How to do split A/B testing?

Session 6: All about Supplemental Results

– Should I worry about results estimates for 1) supplemental results 2) using the site: operator 3) with negated terms and 4) special syntax such as intitle: ? Answer: No. That’s pretty far off the beaten path.
– Why do 301s take so long to be reflected in supplemental results? It’s been months.
– I started appearing in the supplemental results in May–should I be worried?

Remember these are single takes and I’m a newbie at this, so as Steve Martin would say, please forgive any interesting word usements I structure. πŸ˜‰

102 Responses to More SEO Answers on Video (Leave a comment)

  1. The language map is an improvement, but you should get something cool and Googley looking for your background, or have some funky Google lava lamps to provide ambiance πŸ˜‰ Or better yet, do it with one of the scrolling Google search keyword screens in the background… and it has the added bonus of your videos being watched twice, the first time to watch the scrolling searches and the second time to listen to you πŸ˜›

  2. Hi Matt,

    When are you starting a Google television station? Maybe webmasterradio.fm could start webmastervideo.tv.

    Great work, now I can concince my bosses that i’ve been telling the truth.

  3. thanks Matt for theses new videos.
    We are working on the translation -in French- of the videos, but you speak so much that we could be able to do a novel with the transcript πŸ™‚

    Bye!

  4. Hi Matt,

    Thanks for your contributions. Still, i am interested in the fact when the duplicate content filter kicks in.. How much of the page should be unique, and does link text count as content for that page?

  5. Hey matt have you got sunburn or are you like me and have a certain redglow when speaking in public.

    Thanks though really good information….

  6. I would be so grateful if you’d consider posting some alternative to video. I watched one video from the last batch and it had some really useful information, but I’m usually connected via dial-up and the load times are unbearable.

    An audio-only file would get the point across just as well and load way faster, a transcript would be even better, and a regular blog post would be ideal. I just don’t see how the video does anything to enhance your message, other than promoting Google Video.

    Maybe there’s an opportunity here for someone to start a blog with transcripts and commentary on your videos. I’d put that in my rss reader for sure, because there’s some valuable information here. It’s just not very accessible to me or the other 50% of the US without broadband access. Or deaf people.

  7. Matt-

    It almost sounds like all the Supplemental results are not what Google wants and you guys are working to address this issue. Is that one of the goals is to build up the infrastructure and minimize or do away with Supplementals???

    Tommy

  8. >> (and I change the background to look less kidnapped!)

    Yes, but we can make you look even more like you were kidnapped. πŸ™‚

    http://tkfiles.storage.msn.com/x1pnp_rgmi5o52RNzjTJnkGR8D08krvbnCEASq_UyYQldvgHDV21tHGm3FrcPK_L00crtO304tz3WgV_hUx0RX8GNjGWHAx31qFiEpXVAd_l-RwzMkJFCp875ndZHdVTlmH_dyd5zKdyb8

  9. These are helpful tips…..

    Please consider doing – as an alternative – one AUDIO only mono 64K MP3 for Continuous listening – as well as mobile listening (IPOD)

    also please consider adding a Chat even if temporary so that SEOs can pick each others brains in real-time while readin the Blog

    or you can still embed the
    gabbly.com/http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
    into a individual topic as an experiment

    The previous topic is just a few votes from being on the Digg Frontpage – opening up an entire new audience to this blog – guess will include this one as a comment πŸ™‚

  10. Matt

    What’s being done about sites that use sneaky redirects??? When searching for stuff on Google I often run accross these sites that take you to their page then within 1 sec redirect you to an affiliate site.

    Can you discuss more about linking??? Why are there webmasters out there that look to hurt other webmaster rankings by adding spammy links or site-wide links to a competitors site??? Do site-wide links really hurt chances of ranking in Google??? Tell us mroe about linking. πŸ™‚

    Tommy

  11. Hi Matt

    Thank you – that makes it completely clear!

    James

  12. I definitely prefer this over reading. I especially found session five to be very informative. Kudos =)

  13. I love the videos Matt! Great Job!

    Let me ask a few questions that maybe you can include in future videos.

    1. One of the most popular forum platforms is vBulletin. I run a site for vBulletin admins called vBulletin-faq.com. One of the big questions for vBulletin forum owners is if they should do a mod rewrite. Urls currently look like this: http://www.vbulletin-faq.com/forum/showthread.php?t=80 and some people are convinced that their forums would be better indexed if they did a mod rewrite.

    2. Should a webmaster use the rel=nofollow tag on internal links within his site to stop ‘pr leakeage’ to parts of his site that have little or no content? An example would be a contact page or a registration page.

    Thanks Matt! Keep up the good work!

  14. Thanks again, Matt.

    Please, next time consider to use a external mic, instead the “inbuilt” one.

    As a language diversity concerned guy, non english speakers will thanks so much sound quality as possible.

    Thanks again.

  15. These are all very helpful Matt, thanks. You no longer look like a kidnapping victim… but just resist the urge to put karaoke style sub-titles on at the bottom!

  16. I’m usually happy to let everyone else comment/bitch/praise/cry Matt, but I think on this occassion I’ll chime-in and join the chorus of back-patting and offer my thanks too.

    So thanks πŸ˜€

    (And it wouldn’t have mattered if it were video or text TBH; I’m on about that word, “content”)

    Judging by others’ comments RE: this MTV vidcast; I believe Pinewood Studio’s here in the UK is often free these days and I’m sure Martin Scorsese isn’t up to much either. The BBC also has a good translation service and also have staff for sign language too.

    … just a thought for next time πŸ˜‰

  17. Matt

    Have you got a link to Sessions 1 – 3

    Chris

    ps – i did do a search, but to no avail!

  18. This is great stuff Matt, thanks for taking the time and effort to produce the videos. πŸ™‚

  19. The video answers are far better than the typed ones – I hope there is more to come as I never posted my question in time πŸ™

  20. phantombookman

    Matt,
    Excellent as before, many thanks

    The downside is, you’ve really made a rod for your own back now!
    Welll done on raising the bar

  21. Hi Matt

    Great format – you’re a good presenter. Good news about supplementals – hope it will apply to us!

    Whats next SEO.tv, or Lost – in the Index, Spammers in the Caribbean:-)

    Keep up the good work!

  22. Hey Matt,

    Those are really good videos. REally very informative. But I guess you might want to add some meta data to the videos cos they are not searchable with your name. There is only one video that appears when I search with your name

  23. Dear Matt

    Great!

    Please provide download link, as I am not seeing any download button or link in those pages???. If I need to view your gestures later I need to reload the movie…………. πŸ™‚

  24. Thanks again Matt, great info as usual. Plan C for the background, though!

  25. Hey Matt,

    Thanks again for posting the videos! This is great material to get friends to view who aren’t into the blogging!

  26. Hey matt, Can you please email me, I have wrote up all videos in English for you, so you are free to use them, and I will also put them on my site pretty soon

    Great videos once again

    Take care

    Cheers,
    Dave

  27. Great Job man… although I think we are gonna have to chip in and buy you a nice backdrop πŸ™‚ … or green screen.

  28. Matt,
    Again, thank you for these resources.

    Peace,
    Nate

  29. Matt,
    I love the ideas of the videos, keep them coming. I try to find easy ways for my customers to learn about SEO and have pointed them to your videos. It is like an SEO training course in 4 minute classes. One thing I would be interested in, a video talking about the key things that someone should do at a minimum to get their site to rank well, not necessarily page 1 of generic terms, but what is needed to ensure your site gets crawled and indexed. Part of the problem is the wealth of information available out there that gets overwhelming for the average business person. That is why I love the idea about the doing videos.

    Thanks,
    Jeff

  30. Something is very strange with the “algos” of those Videos. I asked about a weather report about young JD , and Matt choosen to show a video of an “Ozzie” jumps. Better luck next time, maybe πŸ™

  31. Hi Matt

    do you also publish a short Q/A Guide about the sessions? It would be useful for all submiters with foreign language.

    have a good day
    Mario

  32. Matt,

    I have a question about Geottargeting, or more specifically about how Googlebot handles Geotargetting.
    Does Google have bots located in multiple countries? My concern is that if I setup geotargetting how will the content for the UK, Europe, US, Australia etc be index?
    I have only ever seen Googlebot from the US so I am concerned that the other content will never be indexed for local searches.

    Thanks,
    -Rob

  33. Thanks for the additional videos Matt. I think there’s more to be learned from this than just the info in the videos. It’s also a great example of creating super linkable content. I’ll wager your video posts generate quite a few links compared to others.

  34. The videos are excellent Matt, thank you! Please put me on your email list for the DVD πŸ™‚ Seriously …

    General Google suggestion: I’d like to see support for a global, page-wide “rel=nofollow” meta tag or something that will exclude external site links. Something to fill the gap between a robots.txt page exclusion and individual anchor tagging. Personally I have no problem implementing rel=nofollow as needed or through programming, but I think there can be useful applications especially for novice webmasters. Guestbooks, free-for-all-link pages and unsecured blogs/splogs are the obvious first candidates.

  35. * * URLs currently look like this: http://www.vbulletin-faq.com/forum/showthread.php?t=80 and some people are convinced that their forums would be better indexed if they did a mod rewrite. * *

    That URL format is just fine. One parameter on a URL is very easy to index.

    The problem with forum software (VBulletin, PHPbb, and so on) is in all the other URLs exposed to search engines, creating massive duplicate content problems.

    – Every thread has at least 10 different URLs that point to it so some of those get dumped into Supplemental very quickly.
    – You have thousands of links to NewPost, NewReply, SendPM, and many other functions, that all return a page that simply says “Error. You are not logged in”. Guess what happens to them.
    – The “Next” and “Previous” links add another twist to duplicate content, and additionally cause a problem that when a thread is bumped, the indexed URL no longer even points to the same thread any more.

    No wonder forumsend up with millions of Supplemental Results. The problem is easily fixed by adding the meta robots noindex tag to Login, Reply, PM, and alternative thread URL pages to start with.

  36. Ramon, my camera doesn’t have a mike for external audio (!). So we’re stuck with improving the existing audio, unless I get into this a lot more and am willing to actually edit things. πŸ™‚

    Harith, JD is a 301 redirect to Ozzie. When we got him from the santuary, that’s what the foster owner called him. But we like Oz or Ozzie better.

    Shane, I’m naturally that, um, sanguine. Unless I figure out what a “white balance” is and how to manually set it. πŸ˜‰

  37. I’m not sure if this has been addressed yet so…

    Web Host Location/Country vs. Site/Business Location and how this effects SERPs

    I have 2 ecomm sites (.com) hosted in Canada but am a US Only business, meaning I only ship my products to the contiguous 48. I rank much better on .co.ca than I do on .com and I’m wondering if I should move to a US host. I would perfer not to… it’s a great hosting company.

    I think it would be helpful to know if hosting outside your target country is a big no no… sure seems like it from my end.

    Thanks πŸ™‚

  38. Hey Matt,

    These videos are just brilliant! It made me think of a really good use for this sort of thing on my website. What camera do you use? What other extraneous equipment is needed to upload the files? (I use a Mac with OSX, but I imagine I could find something similar to what you have)

    Can’t thank you enough! These are really terrific!

  39. Great work Matt, thanks for answering these questions.

  40. Matt,

    I see. Thanks. Glad to see young Ozzie looks great and dynamic. Next time we might suggest Brett to call the next update:

    Update Ozzie πŸ™‚

  41. Update Bacon Polenta
    Update Inigo
    Update Ozzie
    … non-SEOers must think we are all MAD …

  42. Like everyone else. Great work Matt. It’s way easier to watch you talk about a topic at 3 in the morning than it is to read it πŸ˜‰

    Screw the backdrop. I say you go out and buy a nice Hawaiian shirt for these. That way no one will have time to focus on your glow or the background.

  43. Nice job Matt,

    This is a real good and very friendly way of answeringing those highly interesting SEO questions.

    Keep it up (background or no background, it’s the words and tone that does it!)

    Jan

  44. David O. Selznik called –he wants you to direct a sequel titled: “Gone with the Rankings.”

  45. Matt,

    Great informative video’s.
    However, in this far distance land where broadband is actually 256kbps shared with another 50 users for international bandwidth, your 6 minute video becomes a real long play movie! Around 25 minutes to watch one, with the frequent ‘freezes’ because the download cannot keep up with the limited bandwidth.
    Can you please make the video’s also available as downloads, so we can pre-download them and then watch a Matt Cutts without speaking disability πŸ™‚

    Kind regards,
    Joost

  46. I too would be interested in knowing what equipment you used Matt.

    I have an idea for my little niche market.

    Nice to see no adSense banners too πŸ˜‰

    Thanks so much – it makes Google seem much more human watching your videos

    Warm regards
    David

  47. Matt, we have to practice more with the synchronization to the songs, I guess:
    http://www.tradebit.com/channels/internet-marketing/110553/the-video-series-of-matt-continues/

    sorry, couldn’t resist… and i have added another poster suggestion!
    by the way: thanks for all the efforts!
    (the other Ralf)

  48. Hey Matt!

    Could you please consider doing this every Friday, or bi-monthly, or at least once a month? It is such great info and feedback! and with viperchill.com transcribing it (they did yesterday!) its great! Its kinda fun and quirky too – though that take could just be me, probably πŸ˜‰ and I must say brilliant PR from Googles perspective as you add a big personal touch to what can often be just, well….not

  49. Matt, nice job. While talking about dynamic page variables you said stay away from long numbers as they look like session ids. In the auto business I am always passing a vehicle’s VIN from page to page. Usually alone, but sometimes with other parameters. Is google smart enough to discern types of data like this on my sites, or is it more cut and dry?

  50. Dear Matt Cutts,
    My English listening is very very poor so I am not understand what you said,
    Can you offer the transcript or anybody can provide it?
    Thanks in advance.

  51. Matt,

    Last question, not to beat a dead horse. Hypothetically if I where to have a site say country.x.com, and it had maybe 10 million pages indexed. But we decided to buy the TLD for that country and 301 every single page to the exact appropriate page on the new site. Would I have the site growing to fast problem?

    Cheers

    Aaron

  52. Not really got much to add, but just thought I’d say thanks for the videos as they’ve been very insightful. Certainly far more interesting than comparable written resources. πŸ™‚

  53. Matt,

    Maybe a good topic to address in your next “Matt Cutts Presents…”, is the handling of re-inclusion requests by the Google search quality team.

    We have not been sucessfull with several re-inclusion requests and although the Googlebot has crawled ALL our pages sucessfully, we are still not indexed after 2 months. I could understand that when we did something wrong (Which we have done in the past but that should all be fixed now) that the Googlebot would not show any interest in our site and the site would not show up in the index.

    But seeing good crawling activity, all our pages have been crawled within 1 or 2 weeks after adding them, we are completely puzzled about the next phase. (Inclusion in the index). The fact that we do not get any reponse on our re-inclusing request and our sitemaps account does not show any “webmaster warning”, we start to think that we are victim of a ‘google bug’, which we all now, does not exist.

    Can you please give us a brief explanation of the re-inclusion process and the criteria that the search quality team uses to evaluate them?

    Kind regards,
    Joost

  54. ted, VIN numbers probably look exactly like session IDs. I’d avoid them if you can.

    Liane, I use a JVC Everio GZ-MG37 (boy, that rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it)? But you should know:
    – you can’t hook up an external mike
    – it outputs mpeg2, which Apple doesn’t speak natively. You have to pay ~$20 for the codec. Which is lame, in my opinion.
    So you might be better off just using a good quality DV camera and recording directly onto a Mac. I probably wouldn’t use a PC for video unless someone actually had kidnapped me. πŸ˜‰

    JD, good idea. I did a spiel about data centers last night that I haven’t posted yet. I think it’s a good idea to tackle some common topics like that. Reinclusion is a good idea, and how Google does geolocation is another. Nick, I love your Hawaiian shirt idea. I wore a goofy T-shirt last night; maybe I’ll see how silly a Hawaiian shirt looks. πŸ™‚

    Also, JD: I think there should be a download link to the right of the video for Mac/Win. Let me know if it doesn’t work or you don’t see it.

    PuzZler, you’ve got a real talent! You should branch out and do this stuff on your own. Laura, I’m glad you like it! We’ll see if I can get comfortable to just sit down and joke and talk about something. It still feels a bit weird right now.

  55. thanks for the videos matt. lotsa good nuggets in therer

  56. For those wondering about the video camera Matt mentions what he bought here:
    http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/i-hate-media/

    It’s a JVC GZ-MG37US with a 30G hard drive.

    Matt’s video posts illustrate how exciting a time this is for the web. The use of video is just going to keep exploding.

  57. Good stuff!

    When talking about cloaking, you also mentioned content that can change on a page refresh. How much of a change are you talking about? I’m assuming a text counter incrementing from 100 to 101 isn’t a problem. πŸ˜‰ Can a tiny change like a random quote/joke be a problem? How about a row of random product links on an e-commerce site?

    I’m assuming one way this is checked is by coming as google-bot, then coming right back as something else from a different IP. In that case, you’d see two different things–but so would every user with the browser of their choice.

    Also, does the bot see a difference between different content on a refresh and content that has just been moved around? I’m thinking of maybe a shopping cart that displays the same 5 or 10 products on a page, but shuffles them around.

    On a similar note, what about things that are hidden from both bots & users, but could be mistaken as hidden text? One example would be a CSS menu that uses display:none to hide a div until it’s selected — but I guess it could apply to other stuff as well.

  58. “You should branch out and do this stuff on your own…”
    gotcha :-), but celebrity jokes get more laughs! wait until you see my Matt Schwarzenegger montage…

  59. Matt, If download isn.t disabled one has to wait until the video is searchable until that, there’s no download button. Btw if download is enabled select Video iPod this is the smallest size.

  60. Hey Matt,

    If you are GeoTargeting to the same dotcom Url, is there a chance for a duplicate content penalty? Assuming that the geotargeting is done for advertising puroposes and the text based content is the same (but the advertising is targeting the specific countries).

    One workaround would be to refer them to a different domain (dotca) but then you lose out on the page rank of the dotcom domain.

    I guess the next step for the different domain solution would be to treat the dotca site as its own entity and build reputation in the dotca realm for that site.

    How would you approach this situation? Would there be a duplicate content penalty?

    Thanks,
    Maizal

  61. Hi Matt,

    Writing you from Israel, under the bombs.. your room looks like my shelter:) please paint it:)

    Now for a question that I really need an answer for.

    What will be the best practice to avoid duplicate penalty for a ecommerce website that offer very similar products for example “red widget” & “blue widget”? If you have your customer in mind a separated page for each will be a good idea but since they share very similar content I am afraid Google will not like it.

    Thanks

  62. Hi, Matt:)) It’s a great idea to make video, but there is some problem – as a matter of fact I can read in English but it’s too difficult for me to understand English by hearing(: Maybe, u can publish your answers for non-americans? Thanks

  63. Matt,

    I can’t say enough about the videos that you did. I have never seen anyone else from another search engine reach out in this manner. This is truely pioneering. And we are all thank-full that Google permitted you to do this. Thank you for reaching out to everyone and not just talking the talk when it comes to answering questions, but truely finding a way to do it that made sense. This is just as good as the meet the engineer sessions at Google Dance. Kudos!

  64. Matt.
    Great job!!!, you need a little more polishing up. So a seo grab bag is in order for the next few months. This way you can master your vidoes, and we’ll give you some pointers. lol
    Great Work!

  65. Thanks for that reply Matt. I look forward to your comments on geolocation… Life would be so much easier for me if Canada would just get over themselves and join the Union πŸ™‚

  66. Hello, I’m latin webmaster, and would be great if you include subtitles in english in your videos. Sorry, my english is poor.

  67. Matt,

    We did a redesign on a site in early January in which the entire site was re-written from the ground up. The primary *content* and url’s were preserved (gui redesigned, nav redesigned) however we are still showing a very very large number of supplemental results and cache dates from August 2005. Now the site is very crawlable and is in Google Sitemaps. It has shown a few errors in “not found” urls (each of which were fixed) however the problem persists. Approx. 50% of the site is showing as supp. result with nearly year old cache dates in spite of logs and Sitemaps not showing any problems (robots.txt ok, site nav ok, w3c compliant, NO cloaks/java redirects/advertising/etc…) The site in total is only about 200 pages and has a relatively decent PR 5/4/3 throughout. Do you have any suggestions on what may be causing this?

  68. Do you mind if I quote you in my answer-video? πŸ™‚

    Seriously, Matt. Please re-evaluate this video-blogging. There are people out there who can’t watch your videos (for whatever technical or sociological reasons); there are people like me who are not english-natives and who prefer a text in writing so that they can try to understand it correctly, there are people who have trouble following your issues in your videos, etc. There are already differing transscripts of your videos!

    If only for the non-english-speaking (global non-minority) people trying to understand everything, wouldn’t it make sense to put these things into writing?

    Blog about your cat on video if you want, but please at least keep the things that many here take seriously in writing. People come here to get an inside view of the black-box they see as Google. For many, you are the ONLY Google employee they will be able to put a face on (more than S+L in any case). Of course your blogging is “unofficial”, but you would have to be crazy to believe that someone like you is not taken seriously by those outside, even in his off-time.

    Thanks.

    PS do they have room in China for another mother-in-law?

  69. I love the videos too. It’s way more fun to watch and learn than read and learn. Thanks!

  70. For all of those who have wanted the videos in text format for a place to refer others too, we have them up Here

    And Documented version of Static VS Dynamic URL’s video Here

    Hope that helps some of you

  71. Nice. Better than what’s on TV: πŸ™‚
    When do we get to ask new questions?

  72. OK, these 3 videos have now been fully documented for those who were after the documentation

    Video 1
    Video 2

  73. Video 3

    Matt feel free to use these, and no, you don’t need to give us a backlink hehe

  74. I wonder who will create the opposite of jaws for video blogging!

    Love the videos, working with two laptops just now, developing on one, email, internet and watching ur videos on the other, great way to get through content, reading loads of blogs is an awful brain drain to to keep apace with whats going on so I found the videos great.

    Just wondering, are you going to be changing the Kidnapped / worldmap backdrop once in a while, following suit with ur employers logo. hehe πŸ˜‰

  75. * * The primary *content* and URLs were preserved (GUI redesigned, navigation redesigned) however we are still showing a very very large number of supplemental results and cache dates from August 2005. * *

    How are you counting the supplemental results? I assume by using a [i]site:[/i] search.

    Count the number of normally indexed pages in a site:domain.com search. See what you get. If it is almost all of your site, then you are doing OK.

    For the pages that show as Suplemental evaluate the page title and the meta description again, as well as the on-page content (is any of this content close to that shown on some other page?), and evaluate the navigation to that page (use Xenu LinkSleuth to see any problems).

    Google did a big clean up of old Supplemental Results just a few months ago. Prior to that there were cache dates going back about two and a half years (2004 January), now they only go back one year (nothing dated older than 2005 June).

    For any Supplemental Results that show for pages that are now 404, just ignore them – Google will show them for a year or two in the index to show what the site used to have online. You cannot make them go away. They just “are”. Make sure that anyone clicking one of those 404 URLs in the SERPs gets taken to a sane point on your site to start navigating from.

    These searches all show interesting things:

    site:domain.com
    site:domain.com inurl:www
    site:domain.com -inurl:www
    site:www.domain.com
    site:www.domain.com inurl:www
    site:www.domain.com -inurl:www

    Try them all. As long as Google has indexed most of the URLs that DO exist for your site, don’t worry too much about how many extra URLs show up as Supplemental.

  76. After six videos from the professor I’m guessing it’s time for a pop quiz. Good thing I have the Google Toolbar installed to block it.

    Have you considered blogging SEO as a subject for a future video? From your own extensive blogging, do you have any feeling about how archived blog pages fair in Google, as compared older fashioned HTML pages? I’ve wondered if archived blog posts fair poorly in Google results due to all the code overhead, all the outgoing links (Blogger in my case) for retrieving graphics, or even the overly specific file names blogging software tends to generate.

    Take the file name of your current post, “more-seo-answers-on-video.” It will almost certainly rank you high for a query like “SEO answers on video,” but will it lead Google to think that the thousands of pages out there with short file names and titled “SEO Answers” are more relevant for most related queries (which I assure you they aren’t:-)? Looking at server stats, I just get the feeling that archived blog posts require much closer matches on a phrase than “normal” pages to rank well.

  77. ** g1smd **,

    Looks like every page except rss feeds url’s and the homepage appear as supp. results for every permutation of “site:” I have tried…

  78. Hey Matt…hi from “downunder”…

    That is just way cool…and I think a green screen would be great…then we could drop in our own backgrounds from around the world and post them…sort of an e-version of Where’s Wally…will send you red striped shirt and beanie…

  79. Matt – just excellent. Thank you.

    If you are running out of topics πŸ™‚ – any chance you can address the &id= issue I’ve mentioned previously?

    i.e. Google does index URLS with &id= in the parameter http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%26id%3D
    even though the guidelines say:
    “Don’t use “&id=” as a parameter in your URLs, as we don’t include these pages in our index.” http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

    Can you clarify under what circumstances doesn’t Google index URLs with &id= in the URL? Is it related to the number of parameters in the URL?

    Thanks Matt.

  80. Bad ideia if someone can’t use (haven’t)audition… or a good ideia if text appear.

  81. g1smd said:

    Prior to that there were cache dates going back about two and a half years (2004 January), now they only go back one year (nothing dated older than 2005 June).

    Sorry, but this is not correct. I have a site that displays cache dates of December 2004.

    Matt, if you are interested, the site is domain in my email address. g1smd, will email you the site over at WW.

  82. Matt, I have been having 2 questions doing rounds in my mind for a while now πŸ™‚
    1. Similar to how UK sites are given a preference on google.co.uk, French sites on google.fr, are US sites given a preference on google.com?

    2. Does Google.com give preference to sites from the US when someone searches in the US? I mean, if results on google.com are geotargeted?

    The video idea was good and takes less time than reading it out :-). If you happen to pick my questions, please don’t forget to mention my name :-p

  83. If we use mod rewrite to convert a webpage with multiple parameters to a static URL, will it not cause the 3 months Google sandbox affect, which will kick the webpage out of the rankings for that period?

    Basically we want to consolidate our multiple URLs for the same product into one static HTML URL.

  84. Thanks for doing this. Some excellent insights. Perhaps you could be Google’s version subserviant chicken? Questions might include ‘Why isn’t my site top of Google?’ and ‘I launched my site yesterday. Why aren’t you indexing it yet?’ You would have to wear a chicken suit of course.

    Seriously though great stuff and would very much like to see more.

  85. That 5000 languages fact was cool, but is that based on regional dialects/subdialects or actual languages? Just curious.

    Also, video 4 isn’t working (“Not available. Please try again later.”)

    Anyway, this is a cool idea.

  86. I’m confused as to what you mean by “I wouldn’t use a PHP redirect, I would try to use a server-side redirect to actually serve up the two pages in-place”. Surely a PHP-redirect is a server-side redirect. Did you mean a JavaScript redirect?

  87. I think he got muddled up on one point. Matt claims G favours bold tags over strong slightly. That cant be correct. Bold is a visual element like .

    However and have actual meaning and should have more weight.

    is a depreciated tag and is replaced by CSS. has meaning and can not be replaced by CSS.

    Much SEO is obvious to those who understand Accessibility. Even if Matt is correct understanding Accessibility like I do I believe my case to be true if not now then defiantly will be in the future.

  88. I didn’t get the last part:
    Ginger or Marion (I think that’s what the question was)

    Can you please explain?

  89. Nice to see someone start a TV station.

    Keep up the good work

  90. Whoops…put an arrow explaining that the link above would explain Ginger vs. Mary Ann.

  91. Great videos Matt. I am sure you will find occasions when you will want to put things in writing because it creates a sense of finality or completeness (the 10 commandments were in written and most of us know most of them), and other times you will want to just video the answer. Jezz, I just want the answers any way I can get them. I truly appreciate your time creating this site.

    I gotta ask one more time: Does the absence of www. in the site name and site urls reduce the competitiveness of the site and its pages versus www. sites and page URLS? In other words, if all other things were equal, would the www. page have a higher rank than the non-www. page?

  92. Matt, these videos are great and make a lot clearer how Google works and what to do as a webmaster and what not. I like the choice of a world language map as your background because it symbolizes the international and multi-lingual approach of Google. This approach is however IMHO mostly in the user interface and SERPs sorting, but not in the crawling.

    I use content negotiation on some sites to send the best possible page to the visitors. People who have German as their preferred language setting in their browser receive a German language document, English oriented people an English version etc. The Googlebot however crawls without a preferred language setting which causes only the English page to be served when a specific URL is requested by Googlebot.

    I now have links between the static language versions of the pages for each negotiatable URL and this way Google picks up the different language variants, but it’s a trick rather than a solution. I would therefore rather see that Google uses language negotiation in its bot, causing all language versions to be indexed under one URL. People searching from http://www.google.de would see the German version of the page, people from http://www.google.fr the French version etc.

    I understand that this might have quite some impact on the underlying system (storing several different content pages under one URL) but is Google considering or planning such an addition?

  93. Hi Matt;

    Thanks for your explanations, I only want to say that JD idea abaut re-inclusion request process and phase is for me a great idea, we are in the same case itΒ΄s exactly the same and we (and certainly a lot of more people) are completly disconcert abaut this case.

    ThankΒ΄s Matt

  94. I have made 301 redirect from mysite.us to http://www.mysite.net and mysite.net to http://www.mysite.net
    For 4 months (February – June) I have lost 70 % of the visitors from google.
    Also mysite.us was excluded from yahoo dir (instead of a code 200 they have received 301).

    It seems, that google is unfair to webmasters which specify 301 redirect.

  95. Hi Matt,

    Nice info on Videos. Hey can we put down some more info on videos related to web directories.

    Like My favourite web directory is http://www.find2k.com and the webmaster is really interested to look for innovative stuffs for his directory. Can we add on few stuffs related to videos or video ads in it and how much will the SE consider these stuffs.

    Please do reply.

    Thanks & Regards,

  96. For people like me -with listening’s problems-, here is the video transcription for all videos sessions, read the videos here: http://www.petertdavis.net/category/video-transcriptions/

  97. Very good details in Video. I hope that we can see in series. You might create the video tour for Google campus with Matt colleagues. πŸ™‚

  98. Like the videos … but does anyone else think you sound a little like Kermit on them?
    Maybe its just poor audio compression πŸ™‚ … or you could get some vocal lessons from James Earl Jones?

  99. It would be nice if there was some updated information posted πŸ™‚

  100. Nice Videos, I put some comments on each video which I think they are good. WHAT ABOUT SEMANTIC WEB?, If you have a idea or something interesting about this issue, please let me know. Thanks in advanced for your help.

  101. Wow, these video’s are amazing.

    Thanks Matt!

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