Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

Okay, people always ask me about weather updates and what’s going on with data centers at any given moment. I recorded this summary last week as an overview of the various software infrastructure changes that have happened this year, and some meta-insights about data center watching.

Session 15: Data center comments

A combination of review and weather update for datacenters as of August 23rd, 2006. Some comments on:
- data refreshes on June 27th, July 27th, and August 17th 2006
- Bigdaddy
- Supplemental Results
- Infrastructure that improves quality and gives more accurate site: results estimates

Plus a short reminder that
- results estimates for site: are just estimates, with some reminders of their limitations (I mention too-high site: estimates in middle of the video, in the context of the “5 billion page” spammer whose best domain actually had <50K pages on it).
- watching individual data centers may not be the most productive use of your time.

As a bonus, at the beginning of the video I review some some schwag from the recent SES San Jose conference.

I recorded this last week and I’m just now getting around to pushing it live. If you didn’t get to attend Search Engine Strategies San Jose, I’ll mention some of the stuff I saw.

Session 14: Recap of SES San Jose 2006:

A short review of news from SES San Jose, and some educational or funny moments.

Includes:
- Industry news
- People I got to meet and didn’t get to meet
- Some of the changes happening to people or companies recently
- Fun moments

I only talk about the high-order bits, but I hope you get a little bit of a feel for what the conference was like.

At this point, I think Google’s webmaster console offers enough useful features that every site owner should try it on a site. If you haven’t checked out Google’s webmaster tools recently, I’d highly recommend taking another look, especially for the brand new “pick www vs. non-www” feature.

Session 13: Google Webmaster Tools

google.com/support can answer general user questions.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/ provides tools to
- tell Google that www.domain.com and domain.com are the same
- test out robots.txt files
- discover crawl errors that Googlebot saw
- see some spam penalties

All this is happening as Sitemaps is renaming itself and tackling a wider scope: all of webmasters. There’s even an official Google blog for webmasters now at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

By the way, I wanted to send shouts out to folks that have been transcribing the videos:
- Dave at ViperChill was one of the first to twig to transcribing as a linkbait idea, and has transcribed many (all?) the videos so far.
- Philipp Lensen has been among the most meticulous. Philipp also prodded me into thinking about what the copyright should be for these videos. Based on the talks we had, I’m placing the videos under a non-commercial Creative Commons license. So as long as you don’t charge for it, feel free to mash up the videos all you want.
- Poor Rebecca Kelley is stuck transcribing for SEOmoz and is starting to ask me not to do any more video answers. Sorry to have to disappoint you, Rebecca.

In this video, I give some tips to suck the marrow from SES San Jose (e.g. sit in the back of the room, and then if someone is boring, you can duck out to try out one of the other three sessions going on at the same time). I also mention a few panels that will be must-see for me. Of course, what you want to attend will depend on your background: marketer, SEO, advertiser, and what your interest and experience level is. In fact, you probably want to check out this post by Thomas Korte, a fellow Googler. Thomas provides the entire SES schedule in Google Calendar format, along with recommended sessions if you’re a newbie, a Google fan, a web designer, a marketing manager, and so on. Pretty cool stuff–he’s even got the parties listed.

Session 12: Tips for Search Engine Strategies (SES) San Jose 2006

- What tips and tricks do you recommend for Search Engine Strategies (SES) San Jose?
- What sessions do you definitely plan to attend?

Okay, here’s a new video. This is pretty much just a short update to my reinclusion request howto post to mention that our Google Webmaster Tools (formerly known as Sitemaps) has a web form for reinclusion requests. In the video, you get to see my other cat Emmy for the first time–that’s why my voice is softer and the lights are darker. Even though the video is informal (I had just finished playing hockey at the Googleplex), I still wanted to make sure everyone knew about the web form. It’s been there for quite a while, but I figured that it never hurts to remind people about it.

Session 11: Reinclusion requests

Matt and Emmy answer Google Questions:
- How do I do a reinclusion request?
- What should I put into a reinclusion request?
- What does Google need to know before it reincludes a site in its index?

Two trivia tidbits: 1) you can see my brain spin a little because I recorded this last Thursday, and I knew that on Friday, the Sitemaps team was rebranding to Google Webmaster Tools, so I wasn’t sure what to call it: Sitemaps or Google Webmaster Tools. 2) In about the middle of this video, right after mooning the camera, Emmy gets interested in something off-screen and jumps down. She was actually seeing herself on an LCD screen, so she wanted to go check out that other cat.