I’ll be speaking at WordCamp 2007 at 5 p.m. today. My presentation is still pretty rough right now (I have a lots to say, but it’s not at all organized), so I may be mildly distracted for a while during the day. But if you see me there, please introduce yourself and say hello. 
Update: The conference starts in half an hour and I’m getting a late start (just now leaving for San Francisco), but at least I’ve got a rough cut of slides that I could present in the worst case. WordCamp is only $25 for the whole two-day conference and 15 sessions, so I feel the need to deliver at least $25/15 = $1.66 of value to attendees.
I did the presentation from scratch in PowerPoint, so it might be doable to post the presentation on my blog (” Whitehat SEO Tips for Bloggers”) later. I’ll see what I can do.
{ 47 comments… read them below or add one }
Matt
C’mon. Tell us at least what would be the title of your presentation
Harith, it’s on the schedule at http://2007.wordcamp.org/schedule/ and it’s titled “Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers.”
Only whitehat ?
.
It’ll be interesting to read if there ‘d be a written version (.doc for example or a post here, on this blog). I’m living in Russia. How do you think where I could find it?
Cool!
I’m really envious – that conference would be worth attending..
I’m especially interested to know about any ideas anyone has about how to get additional link love for plugin authors – it seems that in terms of link love, the authors of plugins receive fairly spartan recognition under the current system (although I have seen a few misguided authors insert hidden links along with their plugins) compared to theme authors.
Seems to me that it would be very cool to encourage stronger representation of these plugin authors in terms of links or some other form of ‘vote’ from users – I think it would accelerate future wordpress development significantly – after all, if an author develops a plugin that everyone uses – for FREE – I think the democratic thing to do is ensure they get some form of thankyou – whether it be a link back or otherwise – that would probably also help search engines to gauge the relative popularity of each plugin and pick out the real diamonds amongst them..
Cheers,
doc
Is there any chance for those who not living in the US to get a written or digital version about all presentation given at the WorldCamp ?
I may make a point of attending a conference where you are scheduled to be as well. Do you publish any sort of schedule?
David, here ya go:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/travel-plans-for-late-2007/
It would be great if there was a video of this conference as well. Or even a video of your presentation
We’re here! Looks like your latest mysql command is right on topic this morning.
Matt-
Would love to meet you in person but I have no clue what you look like.
Look for me. Mesh conference teeshirt, shaved head.
Matt,
It will be great to meet you next month at SES San Jose!
Aaron, you better be there too! It was good meeting you at the Problogger meetup here in NYC last month
Talking of WH SEO (well, not quite), I’m developing a series of posts on the concept ‘virtual link cloning’. And it’s not theory; I’ve successfully employed the technique many times.
Virtual link cloning exploits a shortcoming in the SEs indexing algorithms. It would be interesting to get Matt’s view on such a controversial subject, before I discuss it in more detail – the link is above.
Dave, I think someone might be taping the talk.
Good Luck! I will be watching!
Matt is talking right now at WordCamp… very entertaining, so far.
Matt, thanx!
Dave,
Matt,
From what Charles Stricklin was telling me, they will be probably be putting it up here: http://tech5.podshow.com/
Matt,
“Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers.”
May be its time to look at the terms Whitehat SEO and Blackhat SEO. Those terms by one way or the other are adding some legitimacy to spamming search engines.
Blackhat SEO represents in fact using adversary techniques, which are outside the quality guidelines of search engines in general, to manipulate the serps. I.e we are talking about 100% spamming. Accordingly Blackhat SEO should be referred to as SPAM!
While Whitehat SEO represents ethical search engine optimization within the quality guidelines of search engines. Accordingly Whitehat SEO should be referred to as SEO.
I.e we have either SEO or Spam
(…continue from above post)
For example we have IMPORTERS which are individuals or companies bringing goods inside the country in accordance to the commercial and financial regulations of the country.
And we have SMUGGLERS which are individuals or companies bringing goods inside the country as a result of following adversary methods which are not in accordance with the commercial and financial regulations of the country.
Matt,
As you see we don’t have terms like Whitehat Importers & Blackhat Importers.
Either IMPORTERS or SMUGGLERS
some early points found here,
http://www.lowrimore.com/?p=84
Harith said,
Harith, have you ever read bluehatseo.com ? It certainly grays the lines between bh and wh seo.
Here’s one eye opening example:How To Dupe Content And Get Away With It
I hope you can post your presentation on your blog so we who can’t attend will be able to learn from it. That’ll be useful I’m sure. Thanks.
It would be better if you provide us the audio recording.
Your presentation was the most immediately useful one all Saturday. I don’t care what format it’s in, but please do post your presentation notes. You threw out gems of information so fast and furiously I wasn’t able to take good notes for myself.
I can’t thank you enough for sharing your expertise. I’m subscribing to your blog now.
Matt thanks so much for coming to WordCamp yesterday. Great (best) presentation. Thanks too for settling the score between my employer and I about the effects on SEO of having a large number of domains on a server.
BEST!
Michael
Harith
Black and white hat are terms borowed from hacking and some black hat seo can’t realy be called.
I wrote up about your presentation on The WordCamp Report… and I think I got good parts of it. But I’m looking forward to your slides with “baited breath.” I’d suggest using the SlideShare.net site and upload it there. But however you post them, I look forward to them. Just wait for a work day, your wife was iffy enough about this whole speak about wordpress thing.
Hi Matt,
I just wanted to thank you for your great presentation at WordCamp yesterday. You were not only very informative in a practical way, but enthusiastic and fun to listen to. Your presentation was the highlight of my day and I’m sure many others felt the same.
Thanks and looking forward to downloading your PowerPoint when you put it up!
-Westi
Hey Matt,
Dave might be on to something here. You haven’t done a video post in a while, and a PPT with some Matt audio might be cool (ideally, something you’d put onto Youtube or somewhere else in the public domain so that other bloggers might be able to redistribute it with proper credit in their blogs…you know, like me!)
Multi-Worded Adam, I thought about it. I think someone recorded the talk, so that might be the easier way to go though.
MWA
Meanwhile, you can read Stephanie Booth notes of Matt Cutts session at WordCamp 2007. And while you are there, you might wish to Sphinn it as well
Great talk Saturday, Matt. Thanks for coming! This was the first time I’d seen you in person (and heard you). Been following this blog for about half a year. Thanks for being an engaging speaker with a great sense of humor that’s not full of himself (while still being The Expert on The Topic).
Hello Mr Cutts
I’m so pleased to comment on your Blog !
So, I’m a wordpress user and I’m living in Tunisia, I would be very thankful if you could post about this event (Wordcamp 2007)
To quote:
“Harith said,
Matt,
“Whitehat SEO tips for bloggers.”
May be its time to look at the terms Whitehat SEO and Blackhat SEO.
[….]
I.e we have either SEO or Spam
Harith, have you ever read bluehatseo.com ? It certainly grays the lines between bh and wh seo.
Here’s one eye opening example:How To Dupe Content And Get Away With It”
and on reading the said eye opening example we learn that blue hat seo =black hat seo =spam
now I happen to think that the duplicate content rules are an extremely lazy way for Google to detect one form of spam content and should be replaced with a smarter tool that allows genuine and real examples of duplicate content. but the example cited is a clear attempt to actually use duplicitous duplicate content – and thus is SPAM.
Can you publish the PDF file you’ve used on wordcamp here in your blog?
Would also like to see your video and/or PowerPoints, if your time permits.
Have read some summaries, and very informative. Curious if your talk mentions more detail on domain moves. I recently moved my blog to a new domain, did the 301 redirects, left the robots.txt in place for a while (allows all), had the bright idea of changing robots.txt to disallow all (to “force the 301 redirects”), watched traffic decline even further, deleted the robots.txt file, watched traffic decline some more, and reinstalled it this morning with allow all. But, your guidance indicates I should really just kill the old domain.
As a relatively new blogger, I look for all the help I can get on building traffic the right way and on how to avoid stupid mistakes, like the ones I have apparently been making.
Would also like to see your video and/or PowerPoints, if your time permits.
Have read some summaries, and very informative. Curious if your talk mentions more detail on domain moves. I recently moved my blog to a new domain, did the 301 redirects, left the robots.txt in place for a while (allows all), had the bright idea of changing robots.txt to disallow all (to “force the 301 redirects”), watched traffic decline even further, deleted the robots.txt file, watched traffic decline some more, and reinstalled it this morning with allow all. But, your guidance indicates I should really just kill the old domain.
As a relatively new blogger, I look for all the help I can get on building traffic the right way and on how to avoid stupid mistakes, like the ones I have apparently been making.
Matt,
Your presentation at WordCamp was great. The information and the way you presented it was awesome! Thank you for presenting. It would be extremely helpful if we could see and hear it again.
Thanks
Matt, as noted above I’d be interested in any type of review of your presentation. Audio, video whateverr works for you. I’d prefer to hear/read what you had to say vs what someone else thinks you said.
Oh oh! Please do show it to us! I would looovvee to see your presentation
Matt -
Thanks for sharing such great information with us. Over at Pureblogging we are discussing a summary bullet point of your talk that was summarized by Lisa Barone and post here: http://www.pureblogging.com/2007/07/25/seo-advice-for-bloggers-from-matt-cutts/
If you want to get into Google News, you’ll need to add multiple authors.
Can you elaborate on this concept? It makes sense, but then it does not make any sense. Does Google store a data point for author names for each site and then count them to make sure there are 3 or more before Google News will consider the site/post worth displaying?
Thank you for your time,
Tyson
hey Matt, we are still waiting on that powerpoint.
Matt (and everyone else of course),
I’ve posted the video of this lecture here:
http://onemansblog.com/2007/08/04/matt-cutts-lecture-whitehat-seo-tips-for-bloggers/
The quality is so-so because I had to compress it so much to upload it, then they compress it even more… but I’ll post a higher quality version to Blip.tv later for those that can handle the download.
Take care,
John
Is it possible to post the presentation? I like the post at climbtothestars.org but It would be nice to to see the real presentation!
@Matt,
I haven’t had time to read all the comments so apologies if this has already been covered (I did a few control F searches and didn’t find anything).
With regards to placement of the blog directory; e.g. in the root or in /blog/, I have been thinking about this recently and in the end came to the decision to put my blog in the root. At first I was going to put it in /blog/ but then I thought, the primary function of the site is a blog, so therefore the blog should be placed in the root and any secondary functions should be placed in secondary directory folders and linked to from the sidebar include.
I think that this makes much better sense for any website that is described as a blog primarily, such as this website. The clincher for me was the need/desire to make use of the functionality of the WordPress blog software on my front page.
Other than that — great hints here, thanks — I’ve now made a checklist of things to do (plug-ins to install, etc.) after having installed WordPress, with some of your included.
Thanks Matt,
Chris
Chris, if Matt Cutts does it then it must be true : )
As for the /blog directory, I think keeping the blog in root would be best if that’s the primary function of the site. As for the nice deep links to an inside directory (like /blog), well good posts get deep links too!
Thanks to John for posting that video. I love that you used the Alex Chiu website as an example! That website is hilarious…
But seriously, I learned a lot from your presentation. And, I might add, you are a very good public speaker… comfortable, funny, and very intelligent. Great work!