Vidyo!

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.

96 Responses to Vidyo! (Leave a comment)

  1. These are very helpful Matt, I really enjoy watching them! The commercial bit was rather humorous to say the least. You seemed really cheerful though which sort of frightened me. Cut that out! πŸ˜›

    Session 8 was probably the most helpful or informative for me and I think it will answer a lot of questions that people have been asking, though I doubt 4 minutes and 40 seconds can answer all of the questions.

    Great job πŸ™‚

  2. Matt,

    Great stuff.

    Have you had Hollywood acting scouts email you yet?

    8 short films in a few days – are you shooting for The Duke’s record?

  3. Hey Matt, Thanks for sharing all the information… and doing it in Videos was a really smart idea… keep them coming πŸ˜‰

  4. How many more of these do you got up your sleeve? πŸ™‚ :

  5. Good morning Matt,

    Thanks for a great inspiring introduction to the subject “What’s the difference between an index update, an algorithm update, and a data refresh?”

    I’m giving Session 8: Google Terminology the five starts it deserves * * * * * πŸ™‚

  6. So Diet Sprite Zero is the Google secret sauce? I always thought it was.

  7. Matt,

    The download option is only visible on your disclaimer from my side of the universe….

    Regards,
    JD

  8. Matt goes Hollywood, hehe

  9. I can not see the video.

    what should i do? And anywhere else I can see the content ?

    This is what google said:

    Thanks for your interest in Google Video.
    Currently, the playback feature of Google Video isn’t available in your country.
    We hope to make this feature available more widely in the future, and we really appreciate your patience

  10. Matt,

    I have to say that I’m very happy about how you make it a personal project to instruct and communicate with webmaster’s via your blog and now VIDEO. Now that I have a face and a voice, it makes the Google world a little smaller and a little easier to understand.

    Comprehend? That’s another thing altogether. LOL.

    But from a little guy, here in Miami, FL. Thanks. I, and I’m sure alot of us little webmasters, are really trying hard. We’re doing our best to bridge SEO and the user experience. Sometimes we get it, sometimes we don’t. At the very least, we can say that Google is a little less of a mystery.

    I guess, in a way, I’m proud of your attempt to communicate to us. It makes sense too, because Google’s business is Search Results, and we, as site owners and Webmasters, have the content you want to present to your users.

    Again, I say Matt, we’re trying really hard. Please keep up the communication to us little guys who are trying our best. Please keep up the effort to make both our site and Google’s representing of our site usefull to the user. If your kind enough to keep us informed, we’ll try even harder.

    Best Regards,

    RobG. (LOL, the 250lb little guy)

  11. Hi,

    I would just like to say, you make me laugh… And, because of that, you make the videos extremely enjoyable… I even have the urge to show these videos to my wife, and she is DEFINITELY not into the whole web, etc…

    Anyway, 1 quick question, who/what do you keep looking at to your right behind the camera?

    Thanks, and PLEASE carry on doing these. They make eating breakfast very enjoyable and informative. Something that would otherwise be a waste of time.

  12. Great stuff Matt, thanks for your time you invest in making these videos.

  13. Very useful to get clarification on topics that would otherwise be left to speculation and best guess. Good effort!

    MG

  14. These are brilliant.. only thing is: I’ve got to write the answers up now because reading a blog is ok at work, but no-one else is happy watching a video…

    Great :Β¬|

  15. That “aah!” sort of reminded me of Orson Welles trying to do commercials: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5LkDNu8bVU

  16. Thanks Matt really enjoying the videos, they are helping me allot to learn about how SEO works and the aspects of the SEO world.

    You are the best “face” of google for me.

    Cheers again.. and cannot wait for the next ones to come out.

  17. Please explain how you use Page Rank, specifically if I have websites which still have the same page rank, then why would two of the sites suddenly drop from Page One (for years) way down to page eight or worse?

    (Note: these are quality, non-commercial sites, with rich content etc. My name above links to one of them)

  18. These videos have been awesome Matt, I hope they become a regular thing for your webmaster questions posts.

  19. Hello Matt (and hello to the rest of the folks here)…

    Plenty of information there, but mainly things many already know. How about a spicy issue like what you are planning to do with sites using 302 redirects and the sites that have been severely affected by “referral spam”, “sneaky redirects”, sitess copying quotes from others which make them rank higher than the original site, and other black hat seo tactics which were being discussed around the seo forums?

    There are several sites hit by this situation, and although you say that there have been algo improvements for better search results, non “generic” keywords do not always yield good results.

  20. Do you have a Welsh background Matt?
    Vidyo is the phonetic spelling of video in a Welsh accent.

    Oh yes …the vids are as helpful as ever …ahem.

  21. There have been suggestions (http://tinyurl.com/nomgo) that re=”nofollow” links might actually count against the site which is being linked to.

    Can you confirm or deny this for us?

  22. Hi Matt,

    – When does Google detect duplicate content, and how wide is the range?

    I have one question on this and if you could clarify and suggest your point of view, I would appreciate it.

    What if you have pages that cover different topics, but are relevant with each other in one way or another and these topics all have a product description that is basically the same? Is that going to get a page or site dinged?

    Example, say you are a widget manufacturer, and your widget has hunderds of different uses and you write unique content for those hundered different uses on a per page basis, but each page also has a general widget product descripton so the person that is reading about a specific use for a widget may also be aware of the other uses the widget has to offer.

    If that could cause a ding with algo’s. What do you suggest people do about that? I have considered using an image with the product description for each page. Would you advise this?

    Thanks,

    Michael

  23. With regards to adult content, what about the META NAME=RATING? Surely if it says it is adult, that makes sense to use? (obviously other way round isn’t trustworthy)

  24. Thanks for all the video answers!

    I have a question about near duplicates: detection.

    The other day I came across two web sites that were 51% duplicates, ranking number 1 and 3 for a very competitive keyword phrase. Is this simply a case of slipping through the net or would it be fair to say that a 50% duplicate is a non-duplicate?

  25. Dear Matt

    Thanks for the great videos. I’m sure everyone even remotely in SEO-business appreciates the effort you make to enlight us a bit on the way google sees and/or likes webpages.
    Unfortunatelly i fail to find where i can add my own question(s). So i post them here in the comments. πŸ™

    1# Your top reply to any question about organising/implementing sites is always that you should optimise for users and not for bots. One of my problems with that is, that my has content organised by towns. While users can perfectly use a SELECT-box, google can’t. In order to give google the ability to choose the town(or category,or brand, or whatever) as well, i add subpages with links that serve the same purpose as the SELECT-Box. In my understanding this is called a doorway page and google does not like them. So what is the best way to let google browse my entire site, if my site needs a preselection of a town/ category/ whatever?

    2# One of my competitors is buying pages with high PR, then removes the content and puts 1 to 5 fake content pages there. All with a link to their main site(s). Does google realise if a page content changes entirely? I’m asuming that this behaviour is not welcomed by google, so are there measures to prevent stuff like that? Spamreport does not feature a category for that behaviour.
    Or do i have to start buying pages too to keep up with them?
    I’m not posting examples of these bought out domains, but feel free to contact me if you would like a list πŸ˜‰

    thanks
    Sebastian

  26. Matt,

    Great stuff! Especially the info on the “index update, an algorithm update, and a data refresh”. Now I understand why Google referals always change in the weekends. Taking out the user factors (for example school started again this week and on one particular site that resulted in a 20% drop in traffic) I always see traffic changes during the weekend. Sometimes up a bit, sometimes down a bit, but pretty much always during weekends.

    Since you’re going so deep into the algorithms, I would like to ask you a question about what I would like to call “link flux”. I don’t remember the word you guys used in your patent, but it’s about the number of backlinks a site gains over time and the number of links a site looses over time. How does Google treat link flux. I am sure it is to be expected that a normal active site constantly gains and looses backlinks naturaly.

    On top of that, What does Google think of article syndication? Naturally, new article in article sites show up pretty fast in Google. But with new articles being added constantly, articles in article sites tend to sink deeper and deeper into the site and eventually drop out the Google index, unless the article gets external backlinks directly. This seems to me pretty natural behaviour.

    My question is: What does Google do with links in these articles during the time that the article is indexed?

    Thanks and keep up the videos. Perhaps a weekly show would be a great idea! πŸ™‚

    Peter

  27. Matt,

    These three sets of videos are really great. Thank you very much for doing them. I have the scary feeling they might become some of the most popular videos on Google Video πŸ˜€

    I have a question for you I’ve been pestering you for in comments before πŸ˜‰ which is about IPs and country-specific Google’s.

    Question follows:

    We know that having an IP in a specific country helps make it more relevant to those countries, but what happens the other way round? If I have a site on a UK or Canada IP does it do worse in the US, or in other countries?

    Thanks Matt. By the way, your cat has got to work quite hard to compete against the antics of other cats in Google Video πŸ™‚

    ps: The videos do have a kind of ‘dear agony aunt’ feeling to them πŸ˜€

  28. See this URL for Google terminology by some ex-Google employees.

  29. Once again Matt,

    Top notch stuff! Thank you.

  30. Matt,

    Just found these videos (I know, I’m slow) and would like to add my thanks to all the others. It certainly helps us to provide a better service as webmasters if we know a little more about Google’s inner workings.

    Thanks

  31. Hi Matt,

    Really quick question for you. I know that in the webmaster resources area of google it says to avoid ‘&id=’ in urls. Is that the same for ‘?id=’ do you know?

    I only ask as I’ve done my whole site using urls like http://mysite.com?id=1234 and it is quite well spidered now so making a change would mean losing all my pages in G

    Cheers
    B

  32. That was certainly more interesting than reading, I’ve watched all eight straight off. I don’t know how many more that you are going to do but the questions were great and answers I don’t think anyone else could have answered in that way.

    Hope to see some more vids – how do we get to ask questions for your next video?

  33. Thank you very much Matt. I know it is difficult to talk about some of these things… as you say you don’t want to give out the “secret sauce”. I also understand that every webmaster wants their site to rank #1 and thinks their content is the best.

    With that said, can you suggest how we can communicate to the appropriate Google team when “bad things happen to good sites”? I can imagine how someone reading the general feedback messages at Google could see a message that says “I’ve lost my rank and shouldn’t” would be ignored or be emailed back a FAQ on how rank is constantly changing. (And most of the time that is probably what should happen.) Can you offer any advice on how to provide feedback on a slightly deeper level?

  34. Thank you. Session 8 was very informative!

    I only wish this post makes it through your screening! The few times I tried to communicate an idea it never happened. I am nonetheless a loyal reader. I’d like to know which medium is best to forward inquiries, provided you are taking any new questions. I may have missed this.

    If this is the place, here I go. My apologies if not.

    One concern is how to adapt to the *big* changes Google has performed recently -those changes you refer as minors (data refreshes) which actually end up creating largely different serps. Words as ‘check your sites’ and ‘exceeding overoptimization’ come to mind, but if we were to ‘check our sites and say, underoptimize’ we will very likely be out of the index having found guilty of spamdexing…

    Last year, I noticed an HTML error on some pages I copied from a word document. A double mark quotation that translated differently on HTML. After fixing this to the proper quotation marks and uploading the correct pages, all the site went down and never recovered. Only change made in 2 years… I am now afraid of even searching for them or trying to improve other pages.

  35. Hi Matt:

    Good as always!

    About duplicate content:

    We have a lot of articles on our site. A lot of these are ripped off by well meaning people. I can usually get them to remove our content with an email or a call.

    There are a bunch of spam sites that take paragraphs from my site. They offer no way to ask for removal and have Private listings.

    Does Google have a good way to throw out this stuff or should I be hiring private detectives to hunt these spammers down?

    Cheers,
    Ted

  36. ο»ΏHey Matt,

    The videos are great!

    But, it looks like you have been avoiding the SPAM issues.

    You don’t have to give away the farm, but how about giving some of us that are being hurt by all the SPAM in the SERP a little hope, you know toss us a bone.

    I received a message yesterday from a well known and respected Webmaster (top in their nitch) stating that this person was about ready to give up their online business after being online for over ten years, all because of this javascript redirects/cloaking and I know this is not the only person that is fed up and ready to give up.

    A lot of ‘bad things’ are happening to a lot of sites… most of these folks don’t have a clue that it is the SPAMMERS that are driving their sites down in the SERP and out of the ‘money’.

    The good Webmasters are being driven away, please don’t allow google to let this happen.

    This Javascript SPAM is getting out of hand, they are only hitting some areas now, but because what they are doing works and works well it is going to spread and spread…

    Sorry to sound so angry, but this is how I pay my bills and put food on the table and its getting stolen from me by a dirty little SPAMMER.

  37. Thanks Matt. Very insightful sessions so far. Looking forward to the real deal at SES in San Jose. Here’s a question related to Session 7’s question “Does Google Analytics play a part in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages)?”:

    How does the Google TOOLBAR play a part in SERPs? Does traffic to websites from browsers with the Google Toolbar installed play a part in the scoring/ranking of sites?

    Thanks again and keep up the vids.

  38. Session 8 => 4:20 seconds in…

    “…that goes into our secret sauce…”

    Still laughing…… Google SecretSauce? A new venture perhaps? lol

  39. That fake commercial thing was Wayne’s World kinda creepy. But that’s what made it cool. πŸ™‚

    “It’s like people only do things for the money!”

    You had the coolest job in the world at one point. You got to look at porn and you got paid to do it!!!! This leads to two questions:

    1) Why did you give this up?
    2) Where can I submit my resume?

    πŸ˜‰

  40. Great stuff Matt. I especially enjoyed the meta tag answer to the safe search question.

    About duplicate content:

    Several websites swipe every post I publish on one of my blogs. Even FURL competes with my posts – I have a few FURL 302 redirect pages pulling traffic whereas the original page is nowhere in the index. How is Google deciding which page is the original?

  41. …Now, if I worked at Sprite zero I would see big potenital here… ONE day I’ll be in the right place at the right time, meanwhile I’m off to the fridge, weird urge for carbonated liquid refreshment πŸ˜‰ , but seriously – you do the video thing like a natural, you’ve got great stage presence – you know the topic like, well …..more than anyone on earth – so yes there’s a small authority factor, and you actually look pretty comfortable,so pleeeeeease will you consider doing more… (not being irritating or pushy or anything…)

  42. Hi Matt,
    Just reminding, it would be really cool if you could talk about “SmartPricing”.

    I specifically want to know, should I just sit and trust that the adsense ago will do things right? Does the adsense algo get better at displaying adds etc. as time passes and it gathers more info? So should I just not touch it, sit back and concentrate on my content. Cause that is what I want to do…

    Thanks

  43. Hi Matt,

    I really liked session 8 thanks.

  44. Wow. Totally cool. Thanks Matt!

  45. Whoa.. there’s another Ryan here…

    You’re confusing me… you should pick another name πŸ™‚

    the 6:45 AM post wasn’t me…. I didn’t even know 6:45 am existed.

  46. Hi Matt, and everyone else

    Matt Please remove this if you do not wish to have it here

    I found a lot of people asking for written versions of the videos

    Reasons include:
    Not understanding your accent
    Ease of translation to another language
    Somewhere to refer to

    I have now wrote up all videos, they can be found Here

    The exact location for you guys to put in your head is http://www.viperchill.com/matt-cutts

    Nice and simple πŸ˜‰

    Take care

  47. Matt,

    Thanks for the information. I know of several folks that will be helped by your videos.

    Would you also mind speaking on the AdSense program?

    In particular the custom formating program.

    Cheers,
    David

    PS:Dave, Matt has an accent? Surely ye jest.

  48. Heh. I like the fake commercials. Remember Truman’s wife in The Truman Show?

  49. Any chance of more cat videos πŸ˜€

  50. These videos are awesome and very helpful for understanding some very common misunderstandings.

    Keep them coming – I’m hanging on the edge of my seat…

    Tony

  51. David

    I told people about the documentation of the videos on digitalpoint forums, and a lot of people thanks us due to the fact that they couldnt understand matts accent

    So…guess thats why i put the reason there πŸ™‚

  52. Oh..and my question is

    Matt, is there ever a chance you will start an SEO Forum πŸ˜‰

    You have enough people here to register on the forums, and the amount of blog comments you get show that your forums would be active

    Maybe a cheeky question to add to the end of your next video? :p

  53. Nice video series Matt!!

    I was hoping you could address my question for me in one of your videos. I am in the process of creating a extensive buyers guide site (business directory) where I will be categorizing companies based on the products they sell.

    My question is, does google prefer a nice fanned URL structure such as:

    http://www.ebg.com/saddle-pads/CompanyA.htm

    (many sites use this method)

    or

    saddle-pads.ebg.com/CompanyA.htm

    (allrecipes.com uses this method quite successfully .. egs:appetizer.allrecipes.com, barbeque.allrecipes.com, seafood.allrecipes.com )

    cheers
    Frank

  54. SEM kid, either that or (for me) diet Red Bull. Gotta watch my figure, ya know. WebHostWatchdog and Laura, I’ve got a couple ready for tonight. You’ll learn what the logo is on that blue T-shirt. πŸ™‚

    I see. Thanks, JD. I think video.google.com must reindex every few days, and I hope that when they do that, people should be able to download the videos. Thanks for checking.

    Thanks, RobG. I’ll keep trying on my end.

    James, I hook the video camera up to my Dell LCD monitor. So I can watch myself on the monitor. After I do a video, I switch from composite to the computer and upload the video.

    webecho, it turns out that vidyo is not just the Welsh phonetic spelling, but also the Kentuckian phonetic spelling. πŸ˜‰

    Mike, I’d try to make the pages different as much as possible. If the only text content on the two pages is one paragraph, and the paragraph is the same, you’d be more likely to raise eyebrows.

    Ian, when last I looked at it (admittedly six years ago), the meta tag wasn’t really used at all, so it wasn’t worth it.

    Sebastian, I’d do it with a site map at the bottom of your page. In essence, you’re just providing a page that links to the important parts of your sites. For #2, I’d enjoy hearing more. Maybe I can get Adam to drop you a line?

    Well said, Ian. http://xooglers.blogspot.com/2005/11/word.html is a good page, dazzindonna, to read more about Googler terminology.

    RAubin, I do keep an eye out for persistent questions from several people. So it might be a good idea to talk about IP/geolocation, for example.

    Tim, forums aren’t the best place, because typically people can’t give out specifics. If you’re willing to go public, you could blog it. If not, you could email Google support. Sometimes we put out calls for feedback, and you could keep an eye open for that. I’ll chat with Adam; I’d like us to provide more ways, but with billions of web pages and only thousands of Googlers, we’ve got to come up with ways to do it without getting swamped.

    Ted Z, if someone is copying your content, you can look into a DMCA complaint. google.com/dmca.html is where to start reading.

    lots0, I need some JavaScript spam as test data right now anyway. Do you mind if I ask Adam to email you?

    The Adam That Doesn’t Belong To Matt, you wouldn’t think so, but porn gets awfully monotonous after a while. I did quite a few words writing SafeSearch, but I was ready to do something different after a few months.

    Khoj Badami and David, ads and SmartPricing is way outside my expertise at this point. Believe it or not, I spent a year in the ads group at Google. But that was in 2000-2001, which is practically the Paleozoic era at Google. πŸ™‚

    Thanks, Dave. If I asked someone to pore over viperchill.com, they’d find only whitehat stuff, yah? Thought I’d give you advance notice before I asked someone to drill down. There’s already a lot of great forums (WMW, SEW, DP, IHY), so there’d have to be some value. You might check out the Sitemaps group; I know Vanessa Fox stops by there, and other engineers do too.

    Philipp, what should I do a commercial for next? Whitehat laundry detergent? πŸ™‚

  55. Yes Matt

    Happily check it out for yourself, theres around 10-12 articles on there, none of them advise on anything other than white hat SEO

    Plus i wouldnt chance it since im aiming to rank for one of the hardest terms in the industry πŸ˜‰

    Give the site a nice run-down hehe

    Not sure what you had in mind, but if it doesnt meet your high standards, then dont mention it πŸ˜‰

  56. Just letting you know you can freely use the content regarding the text if you wish, and edit it how you wish.

    I will not hold any action against it what-so-ever, you can post on your blog without a backlink or anything i dont mind, i did it for helping others not for links πŸ™‚ (well, not from you anyway πŸ˜‰ )

    Take care

    Cheers,

  57. I just want to know what Matt’s accent is. He sounds pretty normal to me.

  58. Well, its definitely american english for starters πŸ˜‰

    And i suppose it could be difficult for people who stuggle with english

    Link to the comment: Here

  59. Thanks for the videos. I have only created a dozen or so web sites and know little about SEO. I don’t even know what questions to ask ! Your videos are a great help and learning tool for us novices.

  60. Matt-
    Why can’t Google incorporate a “Report This is Spam” link next each search result? There are numerous times that I click on a search result and find that it is nothing but a spam site for Ad Sense clicks. Why not empower your users to report spam right on the spot and figure this into your Algo?

  61. From the ViperChill writeup on Session 7: “So if you put it in your meta-tags, or even in comments, it won’t be indexed by Google very much at all. We should be able to detect that that is porn in that way.”

    Which implies that Google actually does provide some (implied small) weight to *COMMENTS*

    I recall some tests where they don’t show up in the SERP’s, but your statement implies that comments are used from an indexing point of view – really?

    P.S. Don’t mean to be a nitpicker, but I know you corrected yourself on [b] versus [strong] – just seems wierd that comments (totally non-visible content to users) would be a factor as this would be totally ripe for spam.

    PPS. Next commercial: How ’bout Google Drano – washes the black-hat sites down the drain! πŸ˜‰

  62. Many thanks, Dave. I’d link over–I just didn’t want to pull you into the spotlight if you wouldn’t be comfortable there..

    “very much at all” was hedging in case I’m stale, alek. I don’t believe that comments receive any weight at all in scoring.

  63. Thanks Matt,

    I was wondering what the best way to submit a question for your Q&A sessions…

    Email or Comments?

    Today I had a strange experience with Google Analytics, normally I do not really look at visitor traffic as much as I should. I more concentrate on the conversions per keyword more than anything. However today I ran a report from Google Analytics and a Log File analytics program and found a huge gap in data for the month of July 2006.

    What is the reasoning for the difference between the results with both reporting methods and is there a way to determine if maybe the code is configured wrong or if Google analytics is just not collecting all the data?

    Thanks

  64. Wow the data refresh video cleared alot up!

    Still seeing people complain about dropped pages here recently. We have noticed that many pages from our site dropped. Comparing those dropped pages to pages that have stuck there seems to be a PR correlation. If PR is calculated continuously why are these pages being dropped and not having internal PR distributed? I have noticed the trend of mini refreshes from recent crawls will add the pages back in. Larger refreshes take them back out. Many times a little more will stick on recent larger refreshes than previous refreshes. At this rate it will take years to see recovery. The site gets crawled on a regular basis and that is no problem (use G sitemaps and on-site site map). Plenty of incoming links (lots of scrapers – and other theives – goes with being popular). We did have a structure change using 301’s but that has seemed to roll over real well (don’t know if links are carrying through). Got the debatable www non-www redirect in place to eliminate any duplication that way (Problems occured soon after the redirect was put in place and yes it is correctly done). The site is multi topical so we have incoming links to the home page coming from different topics and whatnot plus tons of links to deep content. We cleaned as much as we can clean unless we go through and micro clean. What else can we do?

  65. William Douglas

    These videos are great. Was getting a little worried that my question may have slipped through, but video 8 pretty much answered it.

    Much appreciated.

  66. We have pages that get indexed by google and then they slowly drop off out of the index, what would cause this? Does it mean we have a problem with our site? I see other people commenting about pages dropping off and wondered if you could elaborate on why that keeps happening.

    We recently (a few months ago) changed a lot of our url’s from php to html. I see the 301’s worked for most pages but some of the php pages are still in google stuck at supplemental. My question is how long should it take for 301’s to be fully implemented on google. some of the pages that the 301’s don’t seem to be working on show both pages in google, the pagerank has been transferred to the html page, as have some of the internal links, but not the information on the pages similar too. That data is only on the old php page.

  67. [quote=Matt]lots0, I need some JavaScript spam as test data right now anyway. Do you mind if I ask Adam to email you?[/quote]
    Please do. I have a bunch.

    Thank You and I mean that.

  68. Hi Matt. On the ‘links in the option tag’ question/reply. I tested this within the last year for a thread at SEW, and, no matter where I put the links, I couldn’t get googlebot to crawl them. So, unless things have changed since then, the answer to the question should be a straight no, rather than “you can, but it’s best not to”.

  69. Matt,

    Great vids! I love the concept and hope to incorporate on my personal sites as well.

    Question on duplicate content – How does Google determine duplicate content with affiliate sites? Meaning retailers that have affiliates and the affiliates using the same description of the product on their pages.

  70. I just found this site.and added it to my Yahoo page.

    I saw on one of your videos that adding good content is the way to get rankings. My question is this – you get a good ranking but add some relavant information for your visitors and – many times you drop. It seems like the best thing to do is leave alone a page if it ranks high – even if you might have some good information to visitors.Yep – speaking from personal experience but it makes you wonder what to do when your site does get up there and you really want to give some more info – on that page – not another page.

    This seems to go against what I would think the purpose of search engines is. I find it frustrating to find a great site – forget to bookmark it and type in the keyword again – only to find it is not there again.

    What’s your thoughts on that? Rank high – leave it alone? Which really translates to working your site more for the search engines than for your visitors.

    Oh yes – I left off my url because I am afraid to offend Google. πŸ™‚

  71. Matt, perhaps you can talk in general, inspecific terms about how interested Google is or may be in semantic indexing and related technologies. That might put to rest one of the stickier debates in SEOdom.

  72. Hi Matt…

    A question for your next video series that may interest more than a few of your global coterie…

    We have clients in the US, UK, France, Hong Kong, Switzerland and Chile (yes, Chile…don’t ask) plus lots in Australia where our servers are located…about half are dot com and the rest dot com dot local domain names…does server location really influence results or is that another myth to bust?

    KP

    PS…you can have some great fun making up words or acronyms from your random security code…today’s was FWNNMK!

  73. Matt, these videos are getting really tedious and repetitious. You say everything twice or three times, and you don’t say very much. A paragraph with the same information would take ten seconds to read thoughtfully. Nice of you to help out Google Video, but please go back to writing and posting text.

  74. Hello,

    If you check the spam reports submitted in the past week, I’ve done over 15 I think with examples of such sites which are in Google’s index.

    Basically I have found an IP with 780,000 domains hosted, all with hundreds if not thousands of subdomains and subfolders with redirect scripts which have hammered one of my sites.

    This is a problem which contradicts what you say in your first videos that you would be worried if you had so many domains on a single IP.

    I have not checked if all the 780,000 domains are indexed by google, but all the ones I randomly did a site:spammer.com I got results in google and over 10,000 pages indexed by a particular domain.

    I’d love to expose them… Basically did provide an example in your first video post. I can provide the IP in question here as well as some others which i found with a different script, but not sure if it is wise to do so really…

    It is really strange, although I have yet to find a keyword which they rank high, that those sites have ALL the characteristics you tell people to avoid or worry about. But the clue is that they seem to be indexed fine…

    On those scripts, when you visit the page you stay there, but the browser keeps loading urls. You don’t get to visit them, but they do redirect with 302…

  75. Matt,

    Not to undermine the opinions of vintner and other anti-video commentors, but now that I’ve watched seven video casts, I can say that I very much appreciate them. Through body language and inflection, you can actually communicate more clearly through speaking than writing. If I were in a huge rush, I might prefer text bogs, but I am not in a hurry. Keep it up

    – Ken

  76. Dear Matt,

    Google video session are incredible and it is a great start. I have a question not sure where to send to so I’m adding it here…

    My question is PageRank. Is there a duration for a website moving its pagerank from PR 4 to 5 to 6 and what changes need to happen organically apart from buying paid links from higher PR sites. Is their a Avg time limit or is it based on certain parameters?

    If this could be covered up in your next Google session that would help lot of webmasters and small business owner. I appreciate your help.

    Regards
    InfoSource

  77. I can’t thank you enough for these videos. They are really putting things in the proper prespective for me on my quest to learn SEO. Matt, you da man!

  78. Really awesome… thanks a lot Matt. Please keep doing things linke this at least once a month… Thanks for answering my June 27 question, that day my site came back from death and a lot of friends site died.

    Please keep doing this… PLEASE!

    Thanks again πŸ™‚

  79. Hey Matt,

    Taking lots0’s idea and a suggestion from another post and joining them together, will Google at any point in the near future provide the ability for users to search for code within web pages itself?

    For example, I may want to know how many people use Dynamic Drive javasscripts. That doesn’t show up in the output, but something along the lines of code:Dynamic Drive might generate results containing Dynamic Drive javascripts with the credit lines commented.

  80. Whoops…forgot to mention the tiein (not a good day for me).

    The tiein, for those who didn’t quite get where I was going (and to be fair, I didn’t explain it) would be that sites could be found containing some of various cloaking methods (e.g. the sneaky redirects) as well as other such things (e.g. popups) and provide Google with queries, submitted by end users, to remove algorithmically en masse. So everyone wins. Google has queries submitted by end users that can allow them to remove spam in large chunks (pending their approval of course), and end users can help control spam in potentially large short-term quantities (although they would presumably shrink in the long run.)

  81. Hi Matt,
    Good series of videos. Learning a lot.

    Question: Can Googlebot see iframes?

    Thanks. Regards, Hugh Gage

  82. The Adam That Doesn’t Belong To Matt, your server is having a bad night, seems to be down right now.

    Sorry for hijaking your thread Matt.

  83. Wonderfull job, I love the way u do it.

    Know u have an Italien Seo new supporter… keep it up.

    Simone

  84. Weird. It was up for me.

    Probably had something to do with the stormy stuff going through the Great Lakes/northeastern Canada/US area.

    Thanks, though.

  85. “There’s already a lot of great forums (WMW, SEW, DP, IHY),”

    Hey Matt, you forgot to mention Search Engine Forums, one of the original search engine forums out there–way before SEW, IHY, etc. etc..

  86. Oh dear,
    don’t you have subtitles for this videos?

  87. Matt, sometimes you erk us, but most of the time we love you. But I find it very difficult to take your explanation for June27, July27 serious since you basically blamed US the webmasters for the problem. In fact last weekend when we we’re all trying to figure this out, your site disappeared. You blame it on over-optimization, yet your site disappeared for a several days. So did Technorati. Ive noticed as of posting this, yours came back, but frankly alot of us our genuine hard working individuals, who have been killed by the July 27th thing. We’re not black-hatters or in any way trying to spam Google. Theres alot of people canceling preschool for our kids because Google did a 180.

  88. I don’t know, but wouldn’t it be easy for Google to give site owners a heads up when, for example, Google find duplicate content?
    Since Google seems to find what they say is duplicate content, there is something that triggers this in the algo so if you have a sitemap account it would be easy to cross check and put up a warning in the sitemap account.
    This would be a great addition to the sitemaps account!

  89. While reading this I guess beth posted a great post as far as sites disappear.
    I am not sure why this is happening but the site command seems all weird now also. I did one search for a site of mine without a site: command and Google said it didn’t find anything. So, I did a site: command and there it was. Another thing that is weird is that he main site, domain.com doesn’t show up as the first listing.
    Then, my site was hit on June 27th very hard (lost 80% of visitors and Google AdSense) and then again on July 27.
    I am NOT a black hat seo and neither a white hat seo. I create my web sites and that’s it! I don’t get it πŸ™ What REALLY disturb me is that sites that take content from my site are listed higer in Google and they don’t have any supplemental pages while mine does… Life sucks right now, and it’s because of Google and their inconsistency πŸ™

  90. Hi Matt,

    I have to echo what Beth posted above (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/vidyo/#comment-63480).

    I’ve tried my best to avoid doing SEO and instead focus on developing high quality content that has been good enough to attract links from .GOV sites (e.g. CDC & NASA), .MIL sites and official department pages for universities I could never hope to gain entry in. On July 27th I disappeared from Google’s search results overnight and lost 80% of my traffic. This has resulted in a devastating loss of revenue that is creating very real financial hardships.

    Since July 27th, my focus has been almost entirely focused on trying to figure out what possible things I did to deserve such punishment and resolve those problems. This means I am not focusing my energies on generating new content for users as I normally do. The July 27th incident is forcing honest, hard working web publishers, like myself, who normally avoid SEO into doing SEO so that our sites don’t look like they have been SEO’d — this is perverse.

    I feel like I have been tried and convicted of being an SE spammer without even knowing what the evidence is against me or having anyway to defend my self.

    Many of us really can not wait a few weeks let alone until the end of the summer for a resolution to this problem — the financial impact is just too great. For me personally, I’m about to go into my highest traffic highest revenue time of the year. Telling me I have to wait four weeks to see things sort themselves out is like telling a toy store they have to wait a month to have their power and heat restored three weeks before Christmas.

  91. I loved what you said about data refresh Matt …Gooogle is the tops!

    What about all the rumors that you are banning sites that include a directory. I understand that a site putting up a directory may raise a flag with Goooogle on going after more keywords than the site deserves,
    But?? What about a site that covers a niche well and has a directory about that subject? How does Gooooogle determan a ban like that?
    As we see directory niches loosing out search engine placement by news related searches and bloggers?

  92. Hello Mr. Cutts,

    Thank you for your thoughful and informative videos. I learned a few things, and you’re doing a great job of interfacing Google with the masses.

    My comment is essentially to add my voice to the comments above, our site also experienced a huge drop on July 27th, and most terms we were doing well with are buried very deep in the SERPs now. Most of our pages had a PR of 0 for a long time, and now since the problem began we have had reassignments to PR4 and PR5, which is great however now the pages can’t be found anymore with any of the product based keyword searches that used to put us on the first page – eg “fm band expander nz”

    Can you please elaborate on what’s happened? Sitemaps shows no problems, and the site (link provided as post URI) is a legit e-commerce site without any nasty SEO tricks going on. I hope you can help and I appreciate your time in tracking down what the issue could be.

    Many thanks,
    Mike Glaser

  93. We license some medical information content, that I know is on several other medium to large medical sites. How do I avoid being penalized for having that duplicate content? It is branded to our site, but the text is going to be the same.

  94. Vrey good,Thanks, though.

  95. Thanks for the great vid Matt.

  96. Matt, Matt here. How does it? Could you tell me if you any advice on usability/convertibility vs. compliance with Google best practices? I know that Google are moving towards embracing Flash and Ajax etc. but I have a hard time convincing site owners to strip down their sites in the initial set up phase so as to improve crawler readability.

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