SEO Tip #34: Will domain registration changes ding me in Google?

SEO Tip #34: Will domain registration changes ding me in Google?

Matt Cutts: My answer is no, probably not. Certainly people need to change their information. Sometimes they change registrars. That’s completely normal. That’s completely expected behavior. The only times that we try to really keep an eye on that is if we think someone as a spammer might be trying to buy someone’s domain only for
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SEO Tip #33: Can the geographic location of a web server affect SEO?

SEO Tip #33: Can the geographic location of a web server affect SEO?

Matt Cutts: Yes it does because we look at the IP address of your web server. So if your web server is based in Germany we’re more likely to think that it’s useful for German users. That’s not the only country we’re going to return you for and we also look at the TLDs. So we
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SEO Tip #32: What are your views on PageRank sculpting?

SEO Tip #32: What are your views on PageRank sculpting?

Matt Cutts: Well I wouldn’t say it’s unethical, because it’s stuff on your website you’re allowed to control how PageRank flows around within your site. I would say that it’s not the first thing that I would work on. I would work on getting more links, having higher quality content, those are always the sorts of
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SEO Tip #31: Star Wars or Star Trek?

Matt Cutts: Star Wars! Sorry Star Trek folks but there’s like 50,000 movies. Admittedly, Clone Wars, okay well I can see both sides. I’ve always been a bit of a Star Wars fan and I don’t even know all the Star Trek trivia, but there are good points to both sides.

SEO Tip #30: Should I tweak my titles and descriptions to improve my CTR

SEO Tip #30: Should I tweak my titles and descriptions to improve my CTR

Matt Cutts: You want to think about rankings and then you want to think about maximizing your click through, which means making your title and your snippet very, very compelling. Not deceptive but something that invites users to click on it because they know they’ll find what they want. Then you want to think about conversion
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SEO Tip #29: Is Google putting more weight on brands in rankings?

SEO Tip #29: Is Google putting more weight on brands in rankings?

Matt Cutts: I’ll try to give a pretty complete answer to this. I was planning talking about it a little bit more at PubCon in Austin in just a couple weeks. Inside Google at least within the search ranking team, we don’t really think about brands. We think about words like trust, authority, reputation, PageRank, and
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SEO Tip #28: Does anchor text carry through 301 redirects?

SEO Tip #28: Does anchor text carry through 301 redirects?

Matt Cutts: Typically anchor text does flow through 301 redirects, but we don’t promise that that will always happen. So the question is does it carry through all? Not necessarily. We reserve the right to score not only in links and how we determine the weights and the trusts for links and also the trust
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SEO Tip #27: Is excessive whitespace in the HTML source bad?

SEO Tip #27: Is excessive whitespace in the HTML source bad?

Matt Cutts: We really don’t care that much. We’re pretty good that anytime we see white space, we’ll separate stuff and we can ignore white space. It really doesn’t cause us a lot of harm either way. The only thing to really pay attention to is where I have seen some really sneaky people who will
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SEO Tip #26: Has Google changed the relevancy it awards to social media?

SEO Tip #26: Has Google changed the relevancy it awards to social media?

Matt Cutts: We tend not to think about just links from social media sites just like we tend not to think too much about brands or things like that. We tend to think about links and whether they are useful or whether they are not useful and so we use the ad as our litmus
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