Caydel’s SEO Blog

Here’s the third 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!

See the rest of the videos!

Transcription

Alright! Lets try a few more.

By the way, I showed my disclaimer to somebody from the Google Video team and he said “Matt, it looks like you have been kidnapped”. So, may be I have to get some sort of rocket boom world map or something back there (pointing to the wall behind). I don’t know, you guys care more about the information than, you know, how pretty it is I’m guessing.

Alright! Todder writes in.

“My simple question is this. Which do you find more important in developing and maintaining a website, ’search engine optimization’ or ‘end user optimization’?” and then he says, “I will hang-up and listen”.

Todder, that’s a great question!

Both are very important and I think, if you don’t have both, you don’t do as well, because if you don’t have search engine optimization, its harder to be found and if you don’t have end user optimization, you don’t get conversion. You don’t get people to stay and really enjoy your site and post on your forum or buy your products or do anything else.

So, I think you do need both. The trick in my mind is to try to see the world such that they are the same thing. You want to make it so that you are user’s interests and the search engine’s interests are as aligned as you can. And if you can do that then you will usually be in very good shape, because you will have compelling content, reasons why people want to visit your site, it will be very easy for users to get around and for search engines to get around. And you won’t be doing any weird tricks, anything that you do that’s good for search engines, you will also be showing to the users. So, I think you have to balance both of them.

Ted Z writes in with a couple of interesting questions.

“Can you point us to some spam detection tools. I would like to monitor my sites to make sure that they come-up clean and have a valid way to rat out my no-good spamming competitors.”

Well, if you are sure they are spamming, some tools you can use, first off in Google we have a lot of tools to detect and flag spam. But most of them are not available outside of Google. One thing you could look at is Yahoo site explorer, which shows you backlinks on a per page or a per domain basis I think. That can be pretty handy. There are also tools out there to show you every thing on one IP address. Now, if you are going to share a virtual host, you will get a ton of perfectly normal sites. But, sometimes, somebody might leave a lot of their sites on one IP Address and if you want to spam, you could find more sites that way. You just have to be careful that you don’t automatically assume they all belong to one person. As far as checking your site to make sure that it comes out clean, I would certainly hint sitemaps or webmaster’s console that will tell you of any crawl errors and other problems that we found.

And then the second question that TedZ asks I think is very good is,

“What about the cleanliness of the code, for example W3C? Any chance that the accessible work will leak into the main algorithm?”

People have been asking me this for a long time and my typical answer is, normal people write code with errors. It just happens. Eric Brewer, one of the cofounders of Inktomi, has basically said, 40% of all HTML pages have syntax errors. And there is no way that a search engine can remove 40% of its content from the index, just because somebody didn’t validate or something like that.

So I think there is a lot of content, especially content that is man made, students on .edus and things like that, that’s very high quality but probably doesn’t validate. So, if you had asked me a while ago, I would have said, yes, we don’t have a signal like that in our algorithms and its probably for a good reason.

That said, now that T.V. Ramen has done this work to do the accessible search, you know somebody might look at using in a possible signal. Any signal we use to improve quality will have to pass through rigorous evaluation and stuff like that.

In general, its a great idea to go ahead and have your site validated. But I wouldn’t put it at the top of your list. I would put making compelling content, making a great site at the top of your list. And then once you’ve got that, you want to go back and dot your ‘i’s and cross your ‘t’s and make sure that you got good accessibility as well. Well, you always want to have good accessibility. But validation and sort of closing off those last little things usually doesn’t matter that much to search engines.

Lets go ahead and pause here.

Transcription thanks to Peter T. Davis

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