Matt Cutts #2: Some SEO Myths
Here’s the second in the series of videos posted by Google’s Matt Cutts to Google Video over the past year. These are important for every web developer to see. Please see Matt’s first!
Transcription
Alright! Well, I am trying to upload the last take to Google Video, so we will see how it looks. While I am waiting, why don’t I do few more questions and see if we can knock a few out. I am realizing that with this video camera that I’ve got, I can do about 8 minutes worth of video before I get 200 megabytes and then I have to use the client upload or so. I’ll probably break it into chunks of 5 to 8 minutes each.
OK. Ryan writes in.
He says,”Can you put an end to some myths about having too many sites on the same server or having sites with IPs too similar to each other or having them all include the same java script of a different site”.
In general, if you are an average webmaster, this is something that I wouldn’t really worry about. Now, I have to tell a story about Tim Myer and I have been on the same panel together and somebody said, “you took all my sites out” and he said, “both Google and Yahoo did. I don’t really have that many”. And so, Tim Myer asked, “Well, how many sites did you have?”. And the guy looked a little sheepish for about a minute and then he said,”Well… I had about 2000 sites”.
So, there is a range, right - there’s continuum. If you’ve got two, three, four or five sites and they are all different themes, stuff like that, you are not in the place, where you really need to worry that much. If you have 2000 sites, you need to be asking yourself, do I really have enough unique value add content to support 2000 sites? Becuase the answer is probably not. But if you are just an average guy, you’ve got a few sites, I wouldn’t worry about them being on the same IP address, I definitely wouldn’t worry about them being on the same server. That’s something that everybody does.
And the last thing Ryan asked was including the same Javascript off a different site. Well this is a very common idiom. People use Javascript trackers. Google Adsense is Javascript included off another site. So this is something that a lot of sites do on the web, I wouldn’t necessarily worry about it at all. Now again, if you have 5000 sites and if you are including the Javascript that does the sneaky redirect, then you do need to worry. But if it is just a few sites or if you are doing something that is entirely logical with your Javascript, I wouldn’t worry at all.
Alright! Erin Shear writes in. Its kind of an interesting question.
He says, “I am having trouble understanding the problems that we face every time we launch a new country. Typically, we launch a new country with millions of new pages at the same time. Additionally, due to our ambitious PR Team, we get tons of link from our network of sites as well as press, during every launch.”
So he is saying that the last time they did this, they didn’t do very well in French and they lost a site in Australia that didn’t do very well at all.
Erin, this is a good question, primarily because the answer has changed somewhat since the last time we talked. Somebody asked me this question at SES Conference New York and I said, ”Just go ahead and launch stuff. Don’t worry about it. It may bring more scrutiny but in general you will be fine.”
I think if you are launching sites with millions of new pages, you want to be a little more cautious, if you can. In general if you are launching with that many pages, its probably better to try to launch a little more softly. So, a few thousand pages and then add a few thousand more… stuff like that.
It could be… Millions of pages is a lot of pages. I mean, Wikipedia is only, how many, 5 or 10 million pages. So if you are launching millions that could be attracting scrutiny and you want to make sure that they are all good pages. Otherwise you might find yourself, not doing as well as you had hoped for.
Alright! Quick question.
Classic Nation writes in and says, “I am wondering what the status is on Google Images and if we can expect to see an update on the indexing technology of the future.”
Actually there was a word on this at the Web Master World. We just did an index update, (just I think last week end) of our index for Google Images. And, I was talking to somebody on the Images team and they are always working hard. So a lot of that stuff you may not see, it may be as simple as bringing in new infrastructure that the main web index has, but they are always working hard to make Google Images index better.
Transcription thanks to Peter T. Davis
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