SEO Tip #72: How Are Site links Generated?

Matt Cuts: We’ve covered this a little bit before but the fact that you asked means that not everybody knows so let’s do a quick review. Those are called site links and we show site links whenever we think they might be especially helpful for someone who’s already doing that navigational query. So for example, you mentioned the query LinkedIn. If I do that I’ll see things like groups, open jobs,
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SEO Tip #71: Is It Better to Have Keywords in the URL Path or Filename?

Matt Cutts: If you were falling asleep during that question I’ll try to make it a little more concrete. Would you rather have stuff in the path name or would you rather have stuff all together at once in the filename? To me the answer is that it doesn’t really make that much difference. This is a perfect example where you can do some questions; you can do some experimenting and
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SEO Tip #70: How Do PageRank Updates Work?

Matt Cutts: This is a good question and let’s talk about PageRank updates in general. Just as a review PageRank is Google’s opinion about how reputable a page is. It’s something that is typically computed continuously. We have a bank of machines that’s always looking at new links that we discovered are in the crawl and continuously updating. So we have very fine grained notions of PageRank within Google. Outside of
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SEO Tip #69: What Is A Good Way To Kick Off A New RSS Feed?

Matt Cutts: No it’s not desirable to do something like that and I’ll give you a couple reasons why. First off Google tends not to index or really look at RSS or atom feeds all that much. So just because you have a feed showing up in Google Reader doesn’t mean it’s going to affect your search rankings or really have that much of an impact. The sort of things that
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SEO Tip #68: Are There Any Plans to Implement a Negative keyword Meta Tag?

Matt Cutts: This is a very good question. My guess is most people do not want to tell the search engines, “Oh no please you’re sending too much traffic. Go away, I don’t want you to show me a lot more users and visitors.” So honestly it’s not a request that we have really heard that often. I don’t know that I remember anyone ever asking for that before. We have
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SEO Tip #67: Where Do You See Google in 5 Years?

Matt Cutts: Well let’s talk a little bit about the philosophy of Google. I think of Google as an advocate for our users. So, I hope that in 5 years people, including me can still see Google as an advocate for our users. That we’re making the right long-term decisions that make users happy so that we get their loyalty so that they come back to Google. I think I would
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SEO Tip #66: Should I Remove Widgets that Increase My Sites Load Time?

Matt Cutts: My rough answer is do what’s best for the user. That’s what’s first and foremost because that is what’s going to attract more users, more loyalty, more buzz, people linking to you, people talking about you, that’s the main thing you want to care about. Whenever Google talked about using page speed or site speed as a relevant, possible signal in our scoring results a lot of people went
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SEO Tip #65: How Can A Photographer’s Image Focused Site Gain PageRank?

Matt Cutts: That’s a fantastic question because Google really doesn’t understand the content of images yet. We’re getting better. We have Google Goggles that can take a picture of a landmark and recognize it as a landmark, but understanding in general what an image is, is one of the hardest problems in computer science. The advice that I would give is look at ways you can incorporate data around the image.
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SEO Tip #64: What is the Benefit of Using the Change of Address Tool in Google Webmaster Tools?

Matt Cutts: This is a really good question. Certainly you can leave the 301’s in place but there are a couple differences between the change of address for and 301 directs. The first one and the biggest one is that the change of address form is at the site level. Whereas the 301 redirects are at the page level. So for example what if you move one directory to another directory?
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