SEO Tip #90: Does the Number of Subdirectories In A URL Affect Its Ranking?

Matt Cutts: The answer is there is virtually no difference what so ever. Think about things in terms of PageRank; usually the root page of your site is what has the most PageRank. That is where everybody is linking to. That’s the thing they all care about and usually link to. So if you take a page on your site and you link to your root page directly that page
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SEO Tip #89: Does Google See Automatically Generated Content As A Bad Thing?

Matt Cutts: Let me start with the second question. I even have a little bit of a problem with how you are phrasing the second question; “If I publish uncopyrighted content.” At least in the United States whoever writes stuff it’s copyrighted. You don’t have to go to the copy right office and get the proof that it’s copyrighted. Within the United States, as soon as you write it you basically
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SEO Tip #88: Why Does Google Give SEO Advice?

Matt Cutts: Let me take a step back and sort of rephrase what I think Borislav is trying to ask. I think he is saying, “if everybody has really bad SEO and they can’t rank the way that they want then they have to buy ads and isn’t that a good thing for Google?” I think that’s kind of a short-term view of things and Google tries to take the
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SEO Tip #87: Is It Still Important to Offer A Sitemap to Users?

Matt Cutts: Well that depends. Do you want good search engine rankings in Web 2.0? Because I think you do. Site maps are not just good for users. Site maps, even on the page, even HTML site maps can also be a fantastic way to distribute PageRank throughout your site. One of the best ways to test out how crawlable your site is is to click around within your site and
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SEO Tip #86: How Long Does It Take For Rich Snippets To Appear?

Matt Cutts: That’s a good question. I didn’t know the answer so I had to ask our rich snippet team. They literally just got back to me and said not to be surprised if it takes a month or two right now. By the time you put something through the RICH Snippet testing tool, if it looks okay, do the submission form, it still might take a month or two
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SEO Tip #85: Does Google Use Data From Social Sites In Ranking?

Matt Cutts: Yes I can confirm it. We do use Twitter and FaceBook links in ranking as we always have in our web search rankings. But in addition we are also trying to figure out a little bit about the reputation of an author or a creator on Twitter or FaceBook. Let me give you a little bit of background on that; I filmed a video back in May 2010 where
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SEO Tip #84: Does Webmaster Tools Have an API?

Matt Cutts: Good news, we’ve always had the ability to, for example with backlinks, to download things in a CSV form. In fact many different features within Google Webmaster Tools provide the ability to download things and comma separate a value, or CSV file, or various text files and things like that. However, we also have an API. If you search for Google Webmaster Tools and then GData, as in Google
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SEO Tip #83: Which Types of Webmasters Tools Errors Should I Report to Google?

Matt Cutts: You’ve essentially asked the engineering equivalent of: did you fart? Because if you ask at Google do you monitor for errors, that’s a little bit kind of impolite. It’s almost like, well of course I monitor for errors. So just to be safe I pinged the Webmaster Tools team and I said, “Hey we track these errors and keep an eye on them right” and got back just
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SEO Tip #82: How Can I Explain to Clients That Rankings Cannot Be Guaranteed?

Matt Cutts: It’s a fair question. I think one thing you can do is send people to the page we have on Google about search engine optimizers and how to find a good search engine optimizer because I think we say directly no one can guarantee a number 1 ranking on Google. So you can say, “Right from the horses mouth, right from Google, no one can guarantee a number
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