SEO Tip #45: Do dates in URLs determine freshness?

Matt Cutts: I think dates in the URL or the content can be very useful but people can also try to optimize that and say they are always ten minutes old. So we have our own measures of how fresh pages are; for example the first time that our crawler saw a page. We also look at revisiting pages how much the content changes. So I think it’s a good idea
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SEO Tip #44: What if a search for my business triggers “Did you mean?”

Matt Cutts: Not that I know of, at least not right now. There’s nothing where we have a form that you can fill out and say, “This is bad.” You could try finding our various help or Web forums and report it in there. But the hope is that over time we learn that sort of thing automatically. So we have data pushes of content and then we try to iterate and
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SEO Tip #43: Will a “coming soon” page negatively impact my site?

Matt Cutts: No. I think a coming soon page can be pretty smart. I think it’s good for users so that they don’t just end up on a black hole page that it doesn’t resolve or something like that. If you have some content that’s coming out I don’t think there is any harm from having a coming soon page and then as you get more content you can put that
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SEO Tip #42: What impact does “page bloat” have on Google rankings?

Matt Cutts: I wouldn’t jump to conclusions. You know back in the early days of Google we used to truncate out about a hundred kilobytes, and so if you had a “page bloat” back then I could imagine that your content might get snipped off halfway through where you wouldn’t see all of it. But Google does a much better job of seeing the entire page now. We don’t truncate at
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SEO Tip #41: Does the size of a website affect its authority in Google?

Matt Cutts: I think the answer is basically zero. It’s not the size of your website that determines the authority in terms of the number of pages that you have indexed. Instead the authority is typically determined by the links that we see coming into those pages and the links that we see in the PageRank will determine how much of a website that we’re willing to crawl. You could have a
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SEO Tip #40: How many pages can Google index from a single site?

Matt Cutts: Wow, good question. Not that I am aware of. We will index millions of pages if we think a site is sufficiently good and has a sufficient amount of content. You are very unlikely to bump up against a limit in our index. It’s purely how useful we think your pages are, which is determined in large part by how much PageRank you have, how many people link to
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SEO Tip #39: How can new pages get indexed quickly?

Matt Cutts: Well the simplest answer is to get more links. We can index a page within second, certainly within minutes, if we find, for example, that CNN is linking we’ll crawl that very, very quickly. So we can find new content quite quickly. If you have a blog or something like that we’ll come back pretty often and check for it. But the best way is to make sure that you
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SEO Tip #38: More than one H1 on a page: good or bad?

Matt Cutts: Well, if there’s a logical reason to have multiple sections it’s not so bad to have multiple H1s. I would pay attention to overdoing it. If your entire page is H1, that looks pretty cruddy right? So don’t do all H1 and then use CSS to make it look like regular text. We see people who are competitors complain about that. If users ever turn off CSS or the CSS
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SEO Tip #37: Why is the @ character ignored in search queries?

Matt Cutts: Well, historically, that was a deliberate choice because we didn’t want to index an email address, at least I think it was a deliberate choice. You don’t want somebody scraping Google to find a bunch of email addresses. So it’s kind of nice not to index the @ sign. It depends. I could imagine us over time starting to treat that differently but at least for the time being
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