Matt Cutts: Great question. So first off let me just remind people that Google announced this year that we do use site speed in our rankings but it’s not a huge factor. So maybe one out of 100 queries, which would correspond to 1 out of 1000 sites, might be affected. So it’s not the case that if your site loads just a few seconds slower than your other sites
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Matt Cutts: There is a team of people who are working on being able to crawl and index AJAX and index JavaScript and parse and execute JavaScript as well as other types of rich content. The trend in 2011 is going to be the same as it was in 2010, which is improving our ability to understand JavaScript, improving our ability to index AJAX, improving our ability to index rich
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Matt Cutts: I’m going to take your question and answer the question that I want to answer, which is some people seem to think, “Oh how much PageRank do I lose or how much link juice do I lose if I do a 301 redirect.” You lose just a tiny little bit, not very much at all but if you didn’t lose any then there would be some temptation for
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Matt Cutts: Let me give you the general answer, which might seem a little unsatisfactory but is the correct answer is to go the forum mentioned at Linked to called Google.com/webmasters. If you have something that is really visible like that where you can take a picture and say, “Hey this is being treated as if it’s a video result and it’s a regular webpage” and you can click through
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Matt Cutts: Great question. Whenever rel canonical was first introduced we wanted to be a little careful. We didn’t want to open it up for potential abuse so you could only use rel canonical within one domain. The only exception to that was you could do between IP addresses and domains.
But over time we didn’t see people abusing it a lot and if you think about it, if some evil
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Matt Cutts: Unfortunately that’s not quite how it works. What we do is we crawl the web and as we discover new links form pages that we already know about we’ll follow those links.
You can submit a URL to Google so we have, Google.com/addurl.html where you can submit an individual page to Google but in general what works best is if we find the links ourselves as we are crawling
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Matt Cutts: There is this spectrum where on one side a site w3c validates, it’s very clean and I encourage it but you don’t get a ranking boost. On the other end of the spectrum there are people who make really, really sloppy errors. They are coding a site by hand and might not close their tables, they might have lots of nested tables.
So what we try to do, we
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Matt Cutts: Just to go back in time and give a little context on this we used to have in our Webmaster guidelines something like, “It is impossible for a competitor to hurt you.” And Then if you look at the history of, for example, Sex.com people would even send in a fax and pretend to be the domain owner and get the domain from someone else and then use
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Matt Cutts: In general I love when new search engines launch. It’s always cool to run a few queries and see how do they score things differently than we would score things. There is Blekko. There is also a slightly smaller search engine called DuckDuckGo if you guys haven’t checked that out.
So I think it’s fantastic to have a lot of competition. I think it’s good for
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