Matt Cutts: The short answer is not right now. Now let’s give a little more color.
Of course if a site takes so long to load that we can’t even fetch it, Googlebot can’t get a copy of it, then that will have an effect on your rankings because your site is essentially timing out. If your site is taking 20 or 30 seconds to respond to requests that could be
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Matt Cutts: It does make a difference. I would go with dashes or hyphens if you can. If you have underscores and things are working fine for you I wouldn’t worry about changing your architecture.
A while ago I said we were looking at underscores as separators and the reason we typically never talk about stuff in the future is that gives us the freedom to change our mind. In fact
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Matt Cutts: We always try to maximize the relevancy and accuracy of our index. And you’d want to make a distinction between crawling and indexing because sitemap submission does not guarantee that we will crawl the URLs on that list.
It is helpful to help us discover new URLs or to make canonicalization decisions, but we don’t guarantee you that if you submit a sitemap we’ll go and crawl it.
There have
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Matt Cutts: The “link:” operator is accurate. It only shows you a sub-sample of your links. My preferred way would be to log-in to Google Webmaster’s Tools and we will show you a very exhaustive list of all your backlinks, pretty much all the backlinks that we know of in Google’s Webmaster console.
The nice thing is other people can’t spy on that, so your competitor can’t look at your backlinks.
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Matt Cutts: Well, I’ll give you the same answer, regardless if it’s real estate or any other industry. I think there are a couple things to bear in mind.
Start with a small niche. Don’t just say, “Ok I’m going to rank number 1 for blank real estate” or whatever your trophy phrase. It’s probably better to concentrate on individual neighborhoods or individual markets.
Maybe going for the consumer market is a
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Matt Cutts: This is an interesting question and the example give was excessive use of no follow. First off if it is your website you can use no follow all you want. You don’t need to worry. There is no penalty for excessive use of no follow. You are not going in trouble because of that.
On the other hand, let’s look at over optimization. There is nothing in Google that
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Matt Cutts: In a sense I’ve answered this question in the past but since enough people are curious to ask I’ll do the spiel again.
Whenever we look at whether a directory is useful to users we say, “ok what is the value add of that directory? Do they go out and find entries on their own or do they only wait for people to come to them?
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Matt Cutts: That’s been the heated area of controversy over in Google because sometimes we have that real time results where they actually scroll upwards. That’s not something that you would typically see on the search results pages. Some people think that the real time search results are too visible when they are scrolling.
So the nice thing is that Google tends to have an open mind.