SEO Tip #36: What impact does server location have on rankings?

Matt Cutts: Well, way, way back in the dawn of Google it was funny because people would rank in different countries based only on the tld, .fr meant you were French but that’s all that they knew. Back in 2001-2001 type time frame we started to look at where a server was located, it’s IP address to say, “Well it doesn’t end in .fr but it is located in France according
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SEO Tip #35: Are CSS-based layouts better than tables for SEO?

Matt Cutts: Frankly I wouldn’t worry about it. We see tables, we see CSS, and we have to handle both. We try to score them well no matter what kind of layout mechanism you use. Frankly I would use what’s best for you. A lot of people these days tend to like CSS because it’s easy to change your site. It’s easy to change the layout. It’s very modular whereas tables
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SEO Tip #34: Will domain registration changes ding me in Google?

Matt Cutts: My answer is no, probably not. Certainly people need to change their information. Sometimes they change registrars. That’s completely normal. That’s completely expected behavior. The only times that we try to really keep an eye on that is if we think someone as a spammer might be trying to buy someone’s domain only for the links or buying an expired domain or something like that. But there’s plenty of times
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SEO Tip #33: Can the geographic location of a web server affect SEO?

Matt Cutts: Yes it does because we look at the IP address of your web server. So if your web server is based in Germany we’re more likely to think that it’s useful for German users. That’s not the only country we’re going to return you for and we also look at the TLDs. So we look at .de, .fr, and all those sorts of things. You can also specify in Google’s
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SEO Tip #32: What are your views on PageRank sculpting?

Matt Cutts: Well I wouldn’t say it’s unethical, because it’s stuff on your website you’re allowed to control how PageRank flows around within your site. I would say that it’s not the first thing that I would work on. I would work on getting more links, having higher quality content, those are always the sorts of things that you want to do first. But then if you have a certain amount
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SEO Tip #31: Star Wars or Star Trek?

Matt Cutts: Star Wars! Sorry Star Trek folks but there’s like 50,000 movies. Admittedly, Clone Wars, okay well I can see both sides. I’ve always been a bit of a Star Wars fan and I don’t even know all the Star Trek trivia, but there are good points to both sides.

SEO Tip #30: Should I tweak my titles and descriptions to improve my CTR

Matt Cutts: You want to think about rankings and then you want to think about maximizing your click through, which means making your title and your snippet very, very compelling. Not deceptive but something that invites users to click on it because they know they’ll find what they want. Then you want to think about conversion rates and you want to get good ROI. So title and description tags absolutely can
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SEO Tip #29: Is Google putting more weight on brands in rankings?

Matt Cutts: I’ll try to give a pretty complete answer to this. I was planning talking about it a little bit more at PubCon in Austin in just a couple weeks. Inside Google at least within the search ranking team, we don’t really think about brands. We think about words like trust, authority, reputation, PageRank, and high quality. So the Google philosophy on search results has been the same pretty much
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SEO Tip #28: Does anchor text carry through 301 redirects?

Matt Cutts: Typically anchor text does flow through 301 redirects, but we don’t promise that that will always happen. So the question is does it carry through all? Not necessarily. We reserve the right to score not only in links and how we determine the weights and the trusts for links and also the trust we have for redirects. I can tell you that if your sole method of link building
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