Thursday, January 14, 2010 at 9:16 AM
Webmaster Level: All
You asked and Matt Cutts answered. It's time to answer the latest round of Grab Bag questions! Here's the first answer, complete with Matt's new hairstyle:
We have a lot of videos ready to share, so we're not currently taking new questions for the Grab Bag. If you have a question that you would like answered, your best bet as always is to head to our Webmaster Help Forum, where you'll find plenty of knowledgeable webmasters, including some Bionic Posters!
To be kept up-to-date on our latest video releases, you can follow @googlewmc on Twitter, where we'll announce new videos and blog posts as they're published.
21 comments:
Thanks for sharing great idea and answer all questions.
http://esungdo.com
Great haircut, Matt :)
http://getabest.com
Matt,
Still answering the basic questions I see. How about a real issue that google completely misleads to webmasters on your "Moving your Site" webmaster help guide?
It funny how google states:
"help you retain your site's ranking in Google's search results"
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105
While Google offers this by using a 301 redirect and stating no loss is completely false. I don't understand why you don't state it's a 6 month process and you will lose ranking until all is updated.
Your statement above is misleading and 301 will result in loss 1/2 to 2/3rd quality traffic and major loss of business until google decides to release or update. You want the webmasters to be transparent but google doesn't seem to be transparent to back.
Webmasters BEWARE!!
Good post, that basically clears up all the hype on social media SEO and etc.
I hope you don't mind me turning your video into text for those who don't want to watch a video.
1. Does links from social media like FB, twitter matters? (how much does it matters compared to traditional links)
The short answer is "we treat all links the same", we look at PR of the backlinks and reputation. It doesn't matter where it comes from, .gov or .edu.
But links from FB might not pass any juice because it's a private page so Google can't fetch them and most links from twitter are no follow.
Source: http://affiliateredemption.com/matt-cutts-new-qa-video/
Nice haircut Matt! I've only just found your site but will be looking to garner lots from it. Circumstances have me trying to help an NGO in Thailand which got ambushed by their last web developer (pretty much destroying their existence online so that said developer could start up a competing organisation) and I'm pulling out all the stops to try and make it better.
I've been putting time into Twitter but saw you say that most are no follow. How can you get a follow or no follow on a Twitter link?
Our site is mundoexchange.org in case that can help.
On a complete sidenote your comments box is very thin. 11 characters across...first time I've seen anything like that.
Looking forward to more vids (and watching the old ones!)
-Scott
How about nofollow links passing some degree of trust, like wikipedia. Is this confirmed?
Matt,
I just read this post from Google yesterday...
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66353
My question is... Is my site in jeopardy of being punished for using these types of approaches for accessibility purposes. Often times there's supplemental text or navigation on the page for our accessible audience, but this information is hidden/move or disguised using some of the CSS techniques mentioned in the post.
Not sure if this is the right place to report about Google indexing, but here goes. If you search for "EARTHQUAKE HAITI facebook", you get the facebook site http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=wall&gid=245712178935
instead of this facebook site http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=wall&gid=252988675717
This is so wrong as the indexed site has 14,000 members while the not indexed site has 212,000 members. All this because Facebook screwed up by allowing two sites to have the same name EARTHQUAKE HAITI.
I can't reach Google and Facebook to report this, so anyone knows how to reach them, please let them know this is causing confusion and seekers will not find their missing persons if they thought there is only one EARTHQUAKE HAITI facebook site, but there is actually two. Thanks.
Thanks for sharing good information
- Blogger's Guide
Vegetable Fruit Carvings
Good answers
Odd that Matt was so adamant about TLD's not making a difference.
I agree, TLD's may not directly matter; however, indirectly we care about .gov and .edu links because the majority of them have good PR.
Thoughts? Objections?
Hey, I would like to be able to search google easier. And I like googles search engine a lot better than yahoo. After I get a search results page, either I am going to click on a link or go to the next page. It gets old having to navigate my mouse down to the tiny buttons at the bottom of the screen to go to the next page. I was wondering if it was possible to make the whole white part of the screen a button to go to the next page. A huge invisible button. Got a few other ideas...
Last week we upgraded our website (http://www.locopoc.com) and as a solution to compensate the differences between old and new URLs we used a LINK tag with rel="canonical" attribute at the header of our pages.
Unfortunately, because of a programming mistake in the software cache, the value of this tag were not put correctly in some important pages such as the home page of the website. We've noticed the flaw and corrected it today. The problem is that our page rank in Google was decreased from 4 to 0, and we guessed that the cause was the wrong LINK tags.
Now we are wondering whether the problem was only that, and whether Google would restore the old rank to our pages?
Regards.
Mahmoudzadeh@gmail.com
Hello. I don´t know if this is the place where i should post this but just in case is the right place: i would like to know about changing my site to friendly urls and don´t lose the ranking of my site. Thanks
hmmm as this video seems a few months old, hasn't this changed now that google does indeed have access to twitter firehose and adds the tweets to it's index in the new "latest" onebox (which rules by the way)? yeah, as twitter links are mostly nofollowed they do not get pushed to the discovery - but with firehose its a completelty new deal. it would be indeed stupid to not give these URLs the crawling, indexing and finally ranking treatment - as google pays good money for this kind of data and want to make search more real time.
i think this video is a little bit missleading, yes, twitter links are nofollowed, FB is a walled garden, but now there is a new component to it, the latest onebox and what google makes out of this information, this new aspect is not adressed in this video. and even though it is another ballgame this video will lead to future uncertainty.
if the nofollow links do not pass PR to other sites,
Then why are they stated on the webmastertools links to my site,
does anyone know ?
Why are the nofollow links show up on google webmaster tools then ?
Hi Matt, thanks for your always informatiave comments and videos. I had a question from the grab bag regarding recrawls and new content understanding on the part of the Googlebot. If, for example, you happen to have one page on a website that you own and see that Google has found a particular word that really skews the purpose of your website, and you remove that word completely and then simplify that webpage, using words that are more to the topic of your website, how long will it take the Googlebot to recrawl and then understand and replace the old content with the new content, thereby improving Google's understanding of the topic of the website and hopefully also improving that website's ranking under the relevant search term? www.HomeArchitects.com
I miss not being able to eliminate bad sites? Why was that option removed? Observation about two years ago you never had to go through 2 pages of come on, rip off sales,off topic or con pitches to get to good results what in the world is going on? The same is true on You Tube, awful videos trying to capitalize on a headline.I dont like the way the pages flow on You Tube they tend to stray off topic and then you have to back track All and all still a big fan of Google but your starting to worry me.
Hi everyone,
Since over a year has passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Central Help Forum.
Thanks and take care,
The Webmaster Central Team
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