Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

Okay, two more videos ready for you:

Session 9: All about datacenters (and find out about werewolves vs. unicorns!)

- Can you tell us a little bit about Google datacenters?
- Should all datacenters on the same Class C block be roughly the same?

In the middle of that session, I talked about the frustration that modern data center watchers will encounter these days (because there are often slightly different things at different places) and I mentioned a slide from Boston Pubcon. Here’s the slide I was talking about:

Can you imagine trying to monitor that, especially when the same IP address can query different data centers for different people? It wouldn’t be my preferred hobby.

Session 10: Lightning Round!

- Is it possible to search just for home pages?
- News Flash: you can use strong and em instead of bold (b) and italics (i) !
- Will we ever see kitty posts again?
- What are Google SSD, Google RS2, and all those other things Tony Ruscoe found?
- Does Google rank blog sites any differently than regular websites?
- Does Google treat .gov.pl links with the same weight as regular .gov links?

And I have to say, I’m kinda tired of talking to a video camera. So I’ll probably take a break from videos for at least a few days.

Here’s a couple more videos for you:

Session 7: (in which I start out with a fake commercial)

- Does Google Analytics play a part in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages)?
- When does Google detect duplicate content, and how wide is the range?
- I want to mark my page as porn in SafeSearch--what do you recommend?
- Is it okay to make hyperlinks in option elements?

Session 8: Google Terminology

- What’s the difference between an index update, an algorithm update, and a data refresh?
- I also discuss these definitions in terms of June/July 27th as much as I can.

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.

Okay, I took at stab at answering several questions on Google Video. Here’s what I did in chronological order:

• First, the 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 1: Including qualities of a good site.
• Session 2: Including some SEO Myths.
• Session 3: Should you Optimize for Search Engines or for Users?

As you can probably tell, I shot these videos at home this weekend. I wanted to make a video so that I could give a little more detail and nuance than you’d get from reading a sentence or two. My video camera has an internal hard drive so when you connect it to a computer with USB, it looks like a hard drive with mpeg2 files. All I did was upload the files directly to Google Video from a web browser. The videos are rough because I didn’t do any editing; I just shot single takes and copied the files up.

Let me know if these are helpful, and if they are, I’ll try to make more.

I was rooting around on my bookshelf today and noticed the book that I enjoyed the most last year: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon.

Most fun movie? I’m picking a black horse this time: The 40 Year Old Virgin. It surprised me by being better than I expected.

Most entertaining video game? I’m going to go with Guitar Hero (see my earlier post), but if I’d discovered Katamari Damacy or We ♥ Katamari, it would have been very close. Just when you think every genre of videogame has been invented, along comes fresh new ideas. In the Katamari series of games, you roll a ball around; as you roll up more things, your Katamari grows larger, until finally you’re rolling up islands and countries. It’s so much fun that I’m ordering the Katamari soundtrack.