Movies/Videos

I spoke at a few conferences in the second half of 2008, and a video interview from PubCon recently came out.

The always-charming Mike McDonald and I did a 10 minute video interview at PubCon a couple weeks ago. A few of the topics that this interview covers:

- how personalized search affects SEO and how ranking reports become less important over time as a result
- the fact that Google returns different search results by country, e.g. a search for [bank] for the United States returns different results than [bank] in the UK or in Australia. (Note: I had a brain freeze and said “Thomas Cook” when I meant to say “Barclays” or “Lloyds TSB” as an example of British banks)
- the broadening role of SEO and embracing the fact that SEO is a type of marketing
- we talked about Flash, and I pointed out that while Google has gotten much better at crawling and indexing Flash, you can’t just think about search engines; you also have think about the user experience, especially on mobile devices these days.
- we discussed 2009 trends in SEO, including: 1) expect many people to embrace broader view of SEO that includes marketing and social media such as Twitter, and 2) blackhat SEO will become even more malicious
- subdomains vs. subdirectories
- we also chatted briefly about the Kentucky basketball team (Go Wildcats!)

Check out the interview for yourself if you’re interested.

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If you didn’t attend Web 2.0, you can watch my ten-minute keynote about “What Google Knows About Spam” (and several other keynotes) on blip.tv. I’ll embed the keynote below as well.

The only thing I don’t like about conference speaking is preparing slides. When I use slides at a talk, I almost always make a custom presentation. That’s why I prefer Q&A sessions; making slides is too much work.

To make the process easier this time, I tried using Google Docs to create the presentation, and then saving my Docs presentation in PowerPoint (PPT) so that the conference could easily project the slides. The “Save as PPT” feature worked perfectly for me — go Google Docs team! Here are the slides in PowerPoint (PPT) form.

In case you want to see the slides yourself, here they are in embedded form:

In addition to simple PowerPoint exporting, it’s also easy to embed a Docs presentation on your own web page.

[Thanks to Tracy O for cc-licensing the "money" image that I used in the presentation.]

I’ve always meant to do a post to say that search engine optimization (SEO) is not spam and that Google doesn’t hate SEO, but I never seem to get around to it. This presentation gave me a chance to slip those facts into the minds of several thousand tech-savvy folks.

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Update: This post was an April Fool’s joke as well. I was hoping to catch people off-guard by doing a late-night post after all the other pranks were out there. Clicking on the video link just gets you rickrolled in a creative way.

Okay, I admit that my “I’m tired of April Fool’s” post was just a ruse. A couple people almost fell for the bait.

I did a couple April Fools posts this year; one about getting a Firefox tattoo (it was a temporary stick-on tattoo) and one joke about how the iPhone has the magical power to connect to almost anything.

To make up for playing pranks today, I recorded a brief movie about some of the signals that Google uses to rank web pages. We publicly say that Google uses over 200 different signals in our ranking algorithms, but we don’t always talk about them much. If you’re interested to hear more about the signals that Google uses, here’s the recording.

And I apologize for all the April Fool’s jokes — you just have to give yourself one day a year to have fun, right?

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If you want to get a Matt/Google/SEO video fix, you’re in luck. Interviews from PubCon are streaming in. Here are a few I’ve seen:

Audio Interviews

Stephan Spencer and I sat down and talked for about 30 minutes. You can read the interview transcript. That link also includes the MP3 if you’d prefer to listen.

I think Jay Berkowitz and I chatted just before the “Meet the Googlers Q&A” session. Download the mp3 of Jay’s podcast.

Video Interviews

I enjoyed chatting with Reachd TV to do an interview. This ten-minute interview is a great video introduction to SEO for small business owners or other people new to SEO. We also discuss how WordPress 2.3 is even more search-engine friendly than previous versions. Hat tip to Mark Jacquith for pointing out this one.

At the tail end of PubCon, I sat down to chat with Mike McDonald and Vanessa Fox. Mike also covered a few high points of the conversation.

Michael Dorausch posted a video excerpt of the search engine panel where I talked about a three-step method to build traffic to a site (Guy Kawasaki was a fun moderator). Michael also posted a partial transcript of the relevant bits.

Suresh Babu caught me in the hallway and asked me about TrustRank, how to tell if your visitors are arriving from Google Local, and what SEOs should focus on in 2008 (I think local and mobile are good ideas). He also asked me about what January 1, 1969 means to Google. Props to Robin Liss for taking the video on an unfamiliar camera at the drop of a hat.

Just for Fun

Just before playing Werewolf, someone walked up to me and pretended like he wanted to bribe me: $500,000 for a 1st place ranking. I turned him down, because no one can guarantee a #1 ranking — not even me. When he put the case down to shake my hand, we filmed a joke/blooper where I pretended to take the case and run. Watch the video to savor the hijinks.

There you go. If you start right now, you can listen/watch well over an hour of straight search engine optimization Q&A on audio and video. Enjoy!

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