SEO Tip #54: What’s Your Take on AddOn Domains?

Matt Cutts: Well first off let’s talk about what addon domains are because a lot of people haven’t heard that term before. Suppose I have this site, mattcutts.com. An addon domain might be something that your webhost would offer you where it’s basically related; maybe it’s all part of the package deal where you can get matt-cutts.com. Typically an addon domain might have a connotation of being a separate site. So, let’s
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SEO Tip #53: Will Using Google Analytics have a Negative Effect on Ranking?

Matt Cutts: The answer is no. Webspan does not use Google Analytics. A while ago I went and checked and search quality in general does not use Google Analytics in ranking. So you can use Google Analytics or you could not use Google Analytics and it won’t affect your ranking within Google search results. Now just to cover, in case you’re very very curious, one tiny corner case, which is: what
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SEO Tip #52: Why Aren’t Breadcrumbs Displaying in Search Results for My Site?

Matt Cutts: Great question and I wasn’t sure so I asked the breadcrumb team or folks who work on breadcrumbs and I’ll tell you what my theories were and tell you what they said back. I said my guess would be either: A: Bad markup B: It takes a little while to process the stuff and see it and incorporate it into our index C: We might not necessarily have that much trust in
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SEO Tip #51: Will We See Realtime Results from Site: Queries?

Matt Cutts: I think Google is getting better and better at returning fresher results. In fact 2009 was a real area where we concentrated on fresh and real-time results. So whether it will work with “site:” I don’t know if that will happen, but that’s not something that most regular users type. Something that regular users do care about is how fresh their regular search results are. So if you want
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SEO Tip #50: What Signals Are Used in Ranking Other than PageRank?

Matt Cutts: I am happy to say that yes PageRank, while it’s one of the more important of the 200 signals that we have, it is still only 1 of 200 different signals that we do in ranking. People shouldn’t be backlink obsessed, they shouldn’t suffer from BO as I like to say. PageRank does matter but it’s not the only thing that matters. As far as the other signals that
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SEO Tip #49: Is There Such a Thing as Building too Many Links?

Matt Cutts: I wouldn’t worry about that really. There is no such thing as building too many links as long as you’re doing it in a great organic way. Let me give you a couple of examples. Think about sites like Twitter, FaceBook, Digg, and sites that people go to every day, all day long and spend lots of time there. People link to those sites because they find cool things
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SEO Tip #48: Can You Give Us an Update on Rankings for Long-tail Searches?

Matt Cutts: Fantastic question! A lot of webmasters have been talking about it so I’m glad I have a chance to address it. This is something that Webmaster World called “MayDay” and it sort of happened April 28th through May 3rdish. That’s why they had been calling it MayDay. It is an algorithmic change and it does affect long tail searches more than head searches. It is deliberate and it’s a quality
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SEO Tip #47: Why Doesn’t Webmaster Tools have Multiple-Country Targeting?

Matt Cutts: It’s a great question. I can see at least a couple possible answers to this. The answer that I would give you first and foremost is that I always worry whenever you give someone the option to say, “I’m relevant to country A, Country B, Country C, Country D,” all the way down to Country Z, that at some point they say, “You know what? Yeah, I’m relevant
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SEO Tip #46: How can I make sure Google reaches my deeper pages?

Matt Cutts: Well it’s unclear whether you’re asking about how many levels deep it is in terms of directories or how far it is from the root page. One way that you can make sure that Google reaches those pages is link from your root page, your main page, directly to the deep pages that you want to be crawled. So we tend not to think about how many directories deep
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