Matt Cutts:I can think of at least a couple so I will start with those and then I will fill it out with some other misconceptions. The biggest one that makes me want to bang my head against the wall was the idea that somehow if you do negative things towards your customers so they complain on customer complaint sites that those links automatically count. That’s a dangerous idea because
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Matt Cutts: Here are the things to be aware of; number one let’s sketch out the bad side first. The bad side is if your dropdown is 1 pixel long and 1 pixel deep and the thing that gets revealed when you click on it is 8 pages filled with keyword stuffed anchor text and things like that it’s going to look pretty bad.
If however you are fitting within the
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Matt Cutts: This is a great question. Let me back up a little bit to answer this by talking about algorithmic vs. manual. We have confirmed that Google’s Web Spam team is willing to take action manually, for example if we get a spam report for off topic, porn, and things like that. But of course we also take that data and try to improve our algorithms.
So the engineers write
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Matt Cutts: Okay, it’s a little bit arbitrary but if you have an HTML site-map and for whatever reason you don’t want Google to actually return the site-map itself. So maybe you have a couple hundred links on that page and you’re worried Google might think it looks spammy but you want users to see it just fine.
In theory you can have a NOINDEX meta tag so that wouldn’t be
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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
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Matt Cutts: I’m really glad that somebody asked that question. The original reason for recommending 100 links per page was pretty simple; at one point Google would only index 101 kilobytes per page and so we needed heuristic to say, “Don’t make a page so incredibly long that we’ll truncate it and not index the words at the end.” So we said 100 kilobytes and 100 links is a pretty
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Matt Cutts: That’s a good question. Just as a refresher on the NOFOLLOW, it’s a general mechanism introduced in 2005. Essentially when we see a NOFOLLOW link going from one page to another page we say, “This page won’t flow PageRank and it’s dropped out of our link graph so it doesn’t flow any anchor text as well.” So essentially it doesn’t contribute anything in search engine rankings.
Now I think
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And does Google have a spider to even crawl from foreign IP addresses anyway?
Matt Cutts: Google does not, right now, crawl any non US IP addresses so that’s one thing to know about. Right now we only crawl from the United States. And so we want to be treated just like a American United States visitor would be so treat us like you would a visitor using English, Internet
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Is Google public DNS tracking all the websites we visit while using it? Google is going to get a heck of a lot of data.
Matt Cutts: As I recall they don’t track or after some very short finite period of time they either get rid of the data or minimize it very comprehensively. But the main thing to know is I believe Google public DNS has promised not to share
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