SEO Tip #122: Is There Any Advice That You Want To Change From What You’ve Said In The Past?
Matt Cutts: So this is great in that someone, or I’m saying, is there anything that you have said over the past several years that is now obsolete or that needs to be updated? I can think of two things off the top of my head.
The first one is I did a video back in May 2010 that said we don’t use places like Twitter at all in our rankings other than as a normal web page and the links are treated completely like normal web pages. There has been a new article, Danny Sulivan did the research and we worked with him to make sure that it was accurate, that says in some cases we do look at how reputable a particular person on Twitter might be and we can use that in our rankings in some ways. That’s one thing to be aware of.
The other thing to be aware of is really esoteric but since people might be interested safe search, whenever I wrote the very first version way back years and years and years whenever you’re not able to crawl something, for example if it’s blocked by robots.txt.
Since people have deliberately said I would like a family safe version of Google we would say, “Oh if we haven’t been able to crawl it then we don’t know whether it’s porn or not so we are not going to be able to return it to users.
So the Library of Congress or WhiteHouse.gov or Metallica at one point and Nissan had blocked various pages from being crawled in the search engines. And so to be safe we said, You know what we don’t know whether that is family safe or not so we won’t return it.
Luckily the safe search team has gotten much more sophisticated and better and more robust since I wrote the original version so now that is something that we might change. If something is forbidden from being crawled but for whatever reason we think might be safe now we will start to return it from within our search results.
That’s just one thing to be aware of. Those are a couple changes that have happened that I know of where SEO is an always changing field and it takes a lot of research to keep up on all the latest trends. I just wanted to highlight those two things because those are two things that have changed since the last time someone asked me about it.
Thanks very much for the question.
About the Author
Andy Johnson has been on the Internet since the its dawn(ie his first computer program was recorded on cassette tape) and his first hard drive cost about as much his current MacBook. His first byline was in 1993 for a local newspaper rag he eventually helmed, and his last “real job” was at a computer start up which ended when it ended. Throughout it all he’s freelanced and blogged. Now he is mesmerized by Search Engine Optimization forever trying to “rise to the top” for the right reasons. He’s been married to his wife Julia for as long as he can remember and has two lovely, wonderful children. He looks forward to sharing the latest in the technical best for all the online entrepreneurs.