Posted by on June 5th, 2010 View Comments
Posted in SEO - Search Engine Optimization |
Matt Cutts Interview In an interview last March 14, 2010, Matt Cutts, Google’s Software Engineer and Chief of the Webspam Team, shared to the online community his practical tips on how to apply search engine optimization effectively and brilliant techniques to improve a website’s visibility in search engines. By implicitly sharing the secrets of how the powerful Google search engine really works by highlighting the SEO basics, Cutts has made life quite easier for web developers, bloggers, and optimizers.
Beefing up the PageRank He revealed some secrets on how webmasters can practice SEO effectively without inadvertently affecting a website’s visibility in a negative manner. Cutts elaborated on the basics of SEO by starting off with the importance of putting many relevant links on your website. He emphasized that the more links your website contains, the more pages you will get crawled, indexed, and interpreted. This is because of the direct relationship between your site’s PageRank and the number of links it has. A search engine is more inclined to crawl within a website and index its pages if it has a better PageRank. The PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that measures crawl depth and assigns the weight of a website’s relevance in the Internet. To increase PageRank, a webmaster has to create more pages or secure more relevant links for the site.
Duplication Issues Duplicating page contents from other sites or within the website is a no-no; this could distort the site’s PageRank. For example, creating a product description in your business website and resorting to copy-paste methods to distribute it to other venues online like various blogs, forums, and affiliate websites would not improve its PageRank. Duplicated page contents would be repeatedly ignored by search engines and would not help in increasing your site’s search rankings. It would also cost your PageRank if a certain page were also linked to its duplicated page; your website would suffer from link attrition. For instance, putting the product catalogue with the exact product descriptions in the main Products Section of your website and linking it to the About Us section where you have also decided to put the exact same content about your products is not advisable. This is what webmasters call “canonical conflict.” To reduce canonical conflict, it is advised to use a rel=canonical tag on your website when duplicating content so search engines could index the pages without problems.
The Importance of Inbound and Outbound Links Moreover, putting links from affiliate sites within your website would not do any good to your PageRank. According to Cutts, what would beef up the PageRank are the relevant inbound and outbound links that lead to the most significant and commercially valuable pages of your website, the ones that you would want to have better rankings in search engines, such as the site’s home page. After all, search engine optimization is about integrating the appropriate links throughout the website.
Getting the Best Quality Cutts also shared to us another golden rule in page creation: the more, the merrier. The more quality content you put in a page, the more searchable it would be. Ensure your website has enough content; it is always better to have more texts in a page so the search engines could have more content to crawl and index. But of course, do not just put any random material in your pages or spam too many links; make sure they are of high relevance and quality. Other quality criteria that one should not overlook would be the bandwidth, server speed, and the website’s loading time. Factors like whether your website is being hosted on a shared or a private server play important roles. Websites being hosted on shared servers are usually slow, thus the speed and scope of the pages being indexed might decrease. Having a dedicated, private server for a website would deliver faster loading time with more bandwidth at your disposal.
301 Redirect Cutts also pointed out that 301 redirects do not have the same PageRank power. What precisely is a 301 redirect? In HTTP protocols, a 301 redirect is a command that causes the Internet browser to go to another web location. There are also other status codes beginning with “3” that indicate different methods of redirection. A 301 redirect denotes moving the page to a new location permanently and shows the new address of the changed location.
Through the 301 redirect, a webmaster can move the page by changing a part of the page’s address, putting it in a new directory or changing the entire domain name of a website, while leaving a forwarding address. This status code moves a page to another location within a site or a website to an entirely new domain without breaking the link flow to the new address and without dropping the page from the search engine’s index. This also allows search engines to update their records for a page/website, thus transferring the PageRank and inbound links of the original location to the new one. However, Cutts revealed that doing so could not guarantee the page’s PageRank and incoming link preservation. Using 301 redirects from old pages could cause minor decay in PageRank and could break some of the link flow directing to the new destination page.
Proper Site Architecture and Navigation According to Cutts, their search engine prefers to index websites with proper site architecture and navigation. Visible web content should be easily crawled and indexed by search engine spiders. It means that the site possesses qualities that increase PageRank and search engine visibility; such as,
To create highly searchable content, one has to first research on keywords that are relevant and are a commonplace in your industry.
The Don’ts During his interview, Cutts did not encourage the use of JavaScript links since their search engine could not execute JavaScript completely, therefore, if you created some links using JavaScript, Google could not index them. He suggested a tiered approach that Google would recognize, where you take your page’s PageRank and guiding it to pages that are more effective. Moreover, using paid links or advertisements in your page would not help increase its search ranking. Google and other search engines detect paid links, but at the same time they filter them out to make the playing field fair and square.
