Google I/O 2010 – SEO site advice from the experts
Matt>>: All right, so we're gonna spend the
next hour doing site reviews. The week before we put up a forum, just on my personal blog,
and did one tweet and said hey, submit your sites if you'd like to get your site reviewed. I was thinking maybe 20, 25 people would sign
up, put their sites up there. We got 500 sites. So we're gonna send, spend about six seconds
per site [ audience laughs ]. No, not really. So we went through and I pulled out some fun
ones. And we're just gonna look at them. And by the way, all of us are gonna stay around
a little bit afterwards.
So if you get, want to get like a little bit of one-on-one advice,
stuff like that, we'll all stick around a little while. Let me introduce my colleagues.
We have Greg Grothaus who's also on my team, Tiffany Lane, also on my team, and Vanessa
Fox former Googler. Vanessa>>: Not on Matt's team. [ laughter
] Matt>>: But author of Marketing in the Age
of Google, which is a very good book.
Okay, so let's go ahead and start jumping into it.
The very first site that we got submitted was this one. Phoenician Stone, since 1943.
Okay, the main reason I wanted to show this site was because so many people submitted,
"Oh tear us down, we're awful, Our SEO's horrible," Right? This site has no text on it. Okay? It looks
like it has text on it. It has no text. Oh, each resurrected piece of, no that's not text.
[Audience laughs] Resonates with over a thousand years of humanity in it. No, that's not text.
Where's the text? There's like Phoenician Stone and that's it. Vanessa>>: Yeah, there is text on the page.
It's in the title tag. Matt>>: Yes, exactly. Vanessa>>: And he wants to rank for antique
fireplaces.
Matt>>: Yes. Vanessa>>: And his title tag says Phoenician
Stone. Matt>>: Right. So, so here's the tricky bit.
Literally the only text on this page is in what are called meta keywords. That's only,
just about the only place that Google doesn't index that text. [Audience laughs] Okay? We even did a video, because people will tend
to sue each other and say like, "Oh, you copied the name of my business. I'm Grecian Stone,
and how dare you put Grecian Stone in my Phoenician Stone website." And so people get really up in arms about
this. And what we discovered is, believe it or not, some people will stuff keywords on
a Web page. Hard to believe, I know. I know. Your eyes will be opened by the end of this
session. And so we don't trust the meta keywords tag. Now, if you look at the rest of the text on
this page, you'll find that there is none[Audience laughter]. All right? So that's, that's a
little bit of a problem. So the simple advice is put some text on your page [Audience laughter].
That's, so we'll start out and we'll build on that.
First off, you got to have some text on your
page. Now, I'm being a little bit harsh, but there's a lot of stuff that this guy can do.
For example, his title tag, as Vanessa mentioned, is Phoenician Stone. If you're looking to buy a, an antique fireplace
or reclaimed biblical stone. Has anybody ever searched for this stuff? Any of these words?
Antique terracotta jars. Maybe not. No? No, no antique. Oh yeah you're, we have one antique
terracotta jar specialist over here. She's a real fan. Vanessa>>: It's her site. Matt>>: Yeah, it might be her site. [Audience
laughter]Since 1943. So the trick is, we have a free tool called the Adwords Keyword Tool.
There's a ton of free tools out there. If you search for keyword tool, just click number
one. You can type in like antique fireplace and you'll get related words that people type. So tip number one, put text on your page.
Tip number two, think about what users will type when searching for your services, and
put those words on the page. Because I guarantee you – it's okay, I've pre-labeled everything.
By the way, this, this WiFi is powered by Bluetooth, so we have a keyboard over here
and, I, I can't imagine anything would go wrong with that, right? [Audience laughter] Vanessa>>: No, these are loading great right
here.
Matt>>: Yeah. >>: Use the other box. >>Matt: Yeah, I'll just switch it to the other
box. It's totally fine. [Audience laughter and clapping] That's why I prelabeled all
my tabs. On the other hand, people did get free phones today. So that kind of balances
out. [Audience laughter] That's, use that for good, not for evil. Okay, so I think we've made enough fun of
Phoenician Stone.
And, and really there's not fun to be made of Phoenician Stone so
much as there's some education here, which is number one — put text on the page. Number
two, think about the words that users are really going to type. Okay. Another one, rodsbot.com. First off,
if you just heard the word rodsbot.com, [audience laughter] what do you think they specialize
in? What kind of a website do you think rodsbot.com is? It sounds like robotic sex toys to me.
I don't know. But[Audience laughter] in fact rodsbot.com
is weird sites on Google Earth. That's kind of cool. In fact, it's kind of addictive.
Twenty hours ago this guy's market worse than marijuana was. So maybe all the sheriffs are
keeping an eye on this. Here's this face, evidently it's somewhere in Turkey. Here's
a ghost plane, whoa, Oceanic Flight 814 or whatever. So the question is, how do we make this site
rank higher? Well, I'll put the question to you guys. What, what's wrong with this page?
I'll give you a hint, we, it sort of relates to the last site.
There's not a lot of text
on this page. And in fact, the person who asked about it understood that. They said,
"I'm having problems getting text to a content." So how do we solve this? >>: [Inaudible]. Matt>>: Descriptions, yes. You can write the
content yourself. Now let's do the jujitsu where you try to make other people do the
work for you. >>: [Inaudible]. >>Matt: All text. Yes, yes. But you're still
doing the work yourself. >>: User reviews and comments. Matt>>: User reviews and comments, thank you.
User generated content. Why do the work when you can get someone else to do the work for
you, right? So in some cases all you have to do is add the ability to add comments,
and people will, they'll show up and they'll leave the comments for you. So they'll say, "Whoa, that's a weird face
in Turkey. That plane looks like it's not even real." And suddenly you'll get all these
sort of keywords and you haven't done the work.
So that's one simple way to do it. So level one of understanding is okay, I'll
type it in. Level two is I'll open it up so that other people can type it in for me. And
then probably you want to think about throwing it up on Twitter, Facebook, something like
that. Promote it a little bit. Vanessa>>: Yeah, 'cause what are people searching
for where they would get to the site? Matt>>: Yeah, that's tough. Vanessa>>: Like he may want to even have a
blog where he talks about- Matt>>: Yes. Vanessa>>: -thinks about things that people
are searching for that would care about interesting geological phenomenon or something. Matt>>: Yes. Vanessa>>: 'Cause I don't think anyone's gonna
be searching for Turkey face. I mean maybe, I don't know.
Matt>>: They're probably not gonna search
for Rodsbot either. >>Vanessa: No. Matt>>: So, or if they are you don't, they
want something different than what this guy's offering. Vanessa>>: Yeah. I was really disappointed
when I got here [laughs]. Matt>>: It was like I was looking for a different
kind of Rodsbot. So, so yeah, you want to probably, you can see a little bit of text
down here. And in fact, it's a little weird. As fast as a rods, rodsbot.com. I don't, I
don't think of rods like cheetahs, turtles with rockets on them, greased lightning, rods. I don't think of rods as like whoa, they're
super fast. Oh my gosh. So, and it's not like the domain is so great that you couldn't come
up with a slightly different domain name or brand it a little bit differently. Now I'm being a little bit rough, but that's
partly because this guy has multiple sites.
He's actually got like five or six sites.
And, and one piece of advice I would like to leave you with is if you can put more work
into a single site as opposed to not very much work into 50 sites, that can make a really
big difference. Because sometimes you can build up one really
good site instead of like five or six that are not quite as finished as they could be.
Does that make sense? Okay. >>Vanessa: Matt? Matt>>: Yes? >>Vanessa: What do you think of the friends
page? I can't actually get it to load. Matt>>: Yeah, friends page. I, I believe this
is, a, a couple of these might be his sites. Yeah. You want to always think about your
linking strategy. These things don't especially suit like news websites about Internet TV,
movies and games seen from France. Don't seem to have a whole lot to do with Google Earth
weird places. On the other hand, weird face in Turkey.
That's kind of cool. Okay, so next
up androidandme.com. [pause] Matt>>: What's the very first thing you notice
whenever you're looking at this page? Tiffany>>: Where's the content? >>: [Inaudible] Matt>>: Grab it. [laughs] Tiffany's saying Tiffany>>: Where's the content? Matt>>: Yeah. Tiffany>>: You can't see any content.
Matt>>: Right. So on a lot of browsers the
actual content is gonna be below the fold, right? And that's okay. It's okay to show
a banner ad. That's not the end of the world. Hey, I hear this is a pretty good product.
It's not bad to show cool things that are being shown up. But maybe you don't need this username and
password, maybe you don't need two levels of these things. Because if you think about
it, if you have to start clicking down below to get to the content, not everybody's gonna
click through.
Now let me give a little bit of love. Whenever
you view source, I don't know if you guys can see it but they are running WordPress
Version 2.9.2. Does anybody know what the current version of WordPress is? >>: [Inaudible] Matt>>: At last I checked it was 2.9.2. Now
it may have been updated in the last 36 hours or something like that. But this means that
they're running the current version of WordPress. If you run WordPress, and I do and I love
it, you have to keep it up to date. In fact, I would recommend using an .htaccess
file to whitelist the IP addresses that can access your wp-admin directory. And not to
harsh on WordPress, because it also applies to Drupal, Jumula – Joomla, all this sort
of stuff.
If you run a content management system which is a stock content management
system, and that's usually a good idea because it comes built in with relatively good SEO. WordPress is great as far as SEO goes, but
you have to keep it patched otherwise you'll get hacked. So by using WordPress, Android
and Me has actually done a fairly good job of making sure that SEO is in good shape. For example, look at this particular thing.
Froyo is now officially Android 2.2 (Highlights).
Right? Good keyword text. It's not spammy,
it's not stuffy and it's right there in the URL. That also applies in the title. Little
things like URL, keywords in the title and the URL can make a big difference. And WordPress
is just built to handle that naturally. So that's really, really good. Now here's one thing that's kind of strange.
If in Chrome I hover over something I'll see the title. So the title of Android and Me
is Android and Me. Is that the optimal title? No, no.
So if you view source on Android and
Me, Android and Me covers all the latest Android news, phone launches, app reviews, software
updates, Android hacks and phone accessories. Great. Perfect. Put a little bit of that in the title, right?
And you don't, and you don't want to put all of that in the title. But you can say the
latest Android news and reviews, right? Stuff like that can make an actual difference on
how stuff ranks.
So I have to give a little bit of hard time
for the title, just because in most ways Android and Me is actually in pretty good shape. And
it was sort of fun because they were like, "Yeah, beat us up. Give us a hard time." And
I was like, "You know you're actually doing pretty well. There's not that much to beat
you up for." Now one thing I would say is how many people,
just at the drop of a hat, know the difference between Android and Me, Fandroid, Andronica,
AndroLib, AppBrain. How many people know the difference between all those? Okay. A lot
more of you actually know the difference between all of those. But they have the tendency to
blend together a little bit. Think about, think about a site like TechCrunch.
M.G. Siegler writes these crazy headlines.
I can pretty much read a headline and know
M.G. Siegler wrote it. So you want to think about branding. You want to think about how
can you differentiate yourself. How can I stand out from the crowd a little bit? And if everybody's got Android communities
or Android Central or Android whatever, that's a little harder to do. Now it's good for people
who are searching for Android, but you don't have to have Android in the name of your site. Boy Genius Report, people heard of Boy Genius
Report? It's a pretty known mobile site. Nothing to, it doesn't say mobile phone anywhere in
there. But it's actually a little more brandable because it stands out from the crowd. It doesn't
just have the same kind of name as everybody else. So when you're thinking about buying a new
domain name, it doesn't have to be Android whatever or cheapest car, online rentals,
discounts, stuff like that. It can be something brandable. So that's something to think about. Oh, yeah, somebody submitted Google.com. [Audience
laughs]And their comment was, "I would like to know the backlinks of it.
[Audience laughs].
Ah okay, they want to know the backlinks of Google.com. Well luckily I'm prepared. In
one point font I printed out the backlinks of Google.com. These are the links from all
the sites that begin with AAA. [Audience laughs] Matt>>: Now I'm kind, I'm kind of joking,
right? It turns out Adobe and Google and Apple, these are some of the most linked to sites
on the Web. But the reason for that is because they offer something of compelling value.
So again, distinguishing or differentiating yourself from the crowd. What can you do that
is so excellent, that is so cool that people want to link to your site? Then you get this kind of level of links.
You don't have to fight for each individual one. You don't, you're not swimming upstream.
You're sort of coasting downhill with the wind behind you. So, joking on Google.com but, now if people
wanted to follow along the next site we're going to look at is Surprises Galore. Do not
go to this site. Stop. I, I see you.
I see you, you're gonna type enter. Don't do it.
Don't go there. He's- Vanessa>>: Let him do it. Matt>>: No. Why, why would you not want to
go to Surprises Galore? Well I saw this. By the way, whoever submitted a bondage site
for a public URL review, [Audience laughter]funny but I'm not gonna show that, right? So I saw the URL Surprises Galore and I'm
like, "Is this another bondage site? Let's find out." So I click on Surprises Galore
and it's a completely normal, gourmet gift basket, all this sort of stuff. So why do
I want to highlight this site? Well, if you view source on Surprises Galore there's this
right here.
And it's a little hard to see, but it's holasianweb/oo.php. And I apologize that I can't scroll it up
further, but it's the very bottom of the page. But I can click on that, and that will bring
up this page. This is a script written in PHP sort of stuff. All the way at the bottom
of one page. And it's setting and doing cookies. And then it's doing this thing rubid, ruboidmon-64tld.
Anybody guess what's going on with Surprises Galore? >>: [Inaudible] Matt>>: You all got it, Surprises Galore has
been hacked. Okay? It's built such that the first time you visit the site you get one
of these scary fake malware warnings.
Like your computer has been infected with a virus.
Here, pay us $99.95 and we'll take it off for you. And click here to disinfect. And in fact, when you click to disinfect you're
actually installing the virus and then you will have to pay $99.95 or reformat your hard
drive to get rid of it. So this goes back to the fact that out of the 500. I didn't
look at all 500 sites, I looked at about 40. That, rough odds would mean like 1% or 2%
of all websites are hacked. Now, I'm not gonna give any names but there
are two Google employees, none of these people, but actual Google speakers at Google I/O who
the very first time I met them I googled them. I said oh, type in their name. And they were
selling Viagra. [Audience laughs] Matt>: It's like, that's kind of weird. I
mean, that's a strange side business for a Googler. You don't want to sell Viagra, right?
And it turned out they were hacked and they didn't know it.
So a really scary trend that's
happening. I'll, I'll just give you like the projection when you're out. Personal computers are getting better about
security, right? Vista, Windows 7, actually pretty good about making sure you don't get
hacked, don't get infected. So where are the hackers gonna go? They're gonna go to your
Web server, right? So if you haven't done security audits, if you use stock software,
if you haven't patched it, they will hack it.
And they'll do stuff like this. -I've seen Donald Trump's site hacked. I've
seen Al Gore's site hacked. All sorts of stuff. And they get sneakier and sneakier. They do
things like they only show the hacked site when you come from a Google search results
page. Or they'll only show you the Malware warning once. All sorts of stuff like that. Vanessa>>: Yeah, the best one was when I got
hacked. Matt>>: You got hacked? Vanessa>>: Yeah, a couple years ago because
I hadn't updated WordPress- Matt>> Yeah. Vanessa>>: And when I went to the site it
looked fine, but when the Googlebot went to the site it was full of Viagra [laughter].
But I could never see it. Matt>>: Yes.
Now there are tools to help you
with that. And Vanessa, do you want to tell them about any of the tools to help with that? Vanessa>>: I would love to tell them about
some of the tools available. How many of you have heard of a tool called Google Webmaster
Central? Matt>>: Please raise your hand, please raise
your hand. Vanessa>>: All right. Matt>>: Even if you haven't, please raise
your hand. Everyone should- Vanessa>>: Just pretend. Matt>>You were, you were literally negligent
if you have not registered your site at Google Webmaster Central. Vanessa>>: Yeah. So this is, this is available
as many of you know at Google.com/webmasters and one of the awesome things that it does
is if you log in and you verify your site it will let you know if your site has malware
on it. So, and it gives you all the steps to, of
what to do about it. Because Google will if they, if they see that your site has malware
they'll block it in the search results so that they're not sending searchers there as
well.
And so, yeah, so this is a great tool for a variety of reasons. Matt>>: Um-hum. Vanessa>>: But certainly the malware detection
is one of them. And I don't know who did that tool, but gosh.. Matt>>: Vanessa was the product manager on
Webmaster Central before she left Google. [Vanessa laughs]There's a lot of great.. Tiffany>>: I also got hacked. Matt>>: Who got hacked? Tiffany>>: I did. Matt>>: You got hacked? Tiffany>>: I also didn't keep my WordPress
up to date. [laughs] Matt>>: Okay. Greg, have you been hacked yet? Vanessa>>: Have you ever done that? Greg>>: I'm a blogger. [laughs] Tiffany: I also, one thing that Webmaster
Tools has is it tells you your most common keywords on your site. So under normal circumstances
when I look at Webmaster Tools I see photos, photography, Tiffany.
These are good words. Matt>>: Um-hum. Tiffany>>: Then when I was hacked, I was checking
Webmaster Tools and I see Viagra and Cialis and that's not supposed to be in my content..so Matt>>: Yeah. Vanessa>>: Yeah, so that's one way. Another
way that that report is helpful, is I've been in site reviews like this where people get
really mad, right? They're like the tool's totally wrong.
I looked at this report, it
said my site's about Viagra. I don't have Viagra on my site at all. And it's because they have a guest book or
they have comments that they don't moderate. And so there's been so much spam that's been
added. And they have no idea and they just let it go. One was this guy that had this
guest book that it must have been, I mean it was like five miles long. One page of guest
book just full of Viagra spam [laughs]. Matt>>: Yeah. Vanessa>>: So it, that, I, I, I, I think that's
a great report for this kind of thing. Greg>>: Um-hum. In addition to that, prior
to getting hacked one of the things you can do is Google released this tool a few months
back called Skipfish.
And Skipfish is something you can point your development server before
you launch it in the real world. And let it run and crawl your website and
look for vulnerabilities that you've, you've created by, as a developer or via third party
apps or anything like that. So check it out. It's all one word, Skipfish. And that's pulling
up now. Matt>>: And if you haven't heard of Google.com/webmasters,
it's at Google.com/webmasters. Pretty easy to remember. One more tool in that tool set
that I'll mention is called Fetch as Googlebot. And what that does is you prove that you own
your site.
You have to like either edit a meta tag or make a DNS entry, something to
show that yeah, you really do own that site. That way you can't claim whitehouse.gov and
start doing weird stuff with whitehouse.gov. But once you've proven that you own that site,
you can tell Googlebot, and it's something like 50 times a week, come fetch any page
on my site and show me exactly what you saw including any redirects, any server headers,
anything like that.
So if you've been hacked you can say okay
Google, fetch the page, show it to me. Am I still hacked? Dang it, I still am. Okay,
ah, fix it up, patch the servers again, Fetch as Googlebot. Okay, now I'm clean. So it's
a very handy tool. I would recommend everybody check that out. It's free and all that sort
of stuff. Okay, not to dwell on hacked stuff too much.
So I'll let Surprises Galore off the hook now. Okay, so now the next site that I wanted
to look at is called The Hook Up. Vanessa>>: All right. [laughs] Matt>>: I love these URLs. And the URL is,
I believe it's… Vanessa>>: Thehookupsite.com.
Matt>>: Yes, thehookupsite.com. Anybody want
to guess what The Hook Up site does? >>: [Inaudible] Matt>>: It gives you the hookup on the best
car audio. [Audience laughs] Vanessa>>: Woo-hoo. Matt>>: Wait a second, what were you guys
thinking? [Audience laughs] Matt>>: Get your head out of the gutter. Oh
my gosh. Okay, so this is an interesting site. It's a local site in Kansas, but the problem
with being on the Web spam team, is once you see spam and you learn how to recognize it
you can't unsee it, right? So here's what looks like a pretty good CD
mp3 player. And then it's got a list of parts stuff in the owner's manual. And then it's
got white marine speakers. What's going on here? And then it's got car component speakers.
This seems a little strange.
Is, is this the sort of stuff that regular people normally
write on their blog? [pause] Not, not so much [laughs]. So what this guy's actually doing is he's
taking press releases and just syndicating on, on his site. The problem is that's not
really original content, so you won't tend to rank very highly. So you can put up a website,
right? Props to anybody who wants to put up a website. But if you don't have something
original to show, it usually tends not to rank as highly. Now there is some original content on this
site.
He has a photo gallery. And I have to say, this is a really blinged out '83 Chevy,
24-inch dubs, or is it 24-inch dub-dubs or just dubs? I always get that mixed up, I don't
know. So it's kind of neat. They say submit your site and we'll pimp it out and stuff
like that. So this, this is a real site. There's a real
person, you know, Shawnee, Kansas who's looking at this. The problem is you're not putting
enough core attention on just the basic stuff of building up original content. Original
content can make a huge difference. People don't get in love with a site like this, right?
There's no loyalty. People don't come back to it. Think about the things that make people come
back to a site. It's typically not a press release that's just thrown up on the Web.
Okay. Next up is Kathy Toth, who is a real estate agent in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Now,
there's some interesting stuff going on here. This is, she has original content. In fact,
quite a lot of original content. But she's also part of a sort of real estate
network, Pro Step Marketing.
And they basically step out from the ordinary. We'll make your
real, realtor site step out and look different than anybody else's. The problem is, it doesn't
really look all that different. In fact, if you look here and do a sample analysis it
goes to marketsnapshot.info. And you look here, oh, did you guys see yesterday
Google announced the Google font API and Google font director. Really, it's, it's a good idea
to put text in actual text, not in images. Because here's the text, Ann Arbor real estate
experts, and there's no way for Google to see it because it's embedded in an image. So we have joked about it, we have said, "Why
don't we crawl the entire Web and run OCR on all images on the entire Web," right? And
be like, "That says Ann Arbor real estate experts, so we'll help Kathy Toth.
We will
add that text to the page. But we haven't done that yet. And the Web is pretty big.
So I don't expect us to do that any time soon. So in the mean time, that's the kind of thing
that you can just put right on your page. You don't have to have it embedded in an image.
There was also, this is a little bit strange. If you click on blog, it goes to AnnArborTalks.com. And I just want to drill this point home again.
Okay, so here's a listing of a real estate site.
This is supposedly a blog. "Ann Arbor
foodies want to get fresh at the produce station." It turns out this content is not original.
It appeared someone else, somewhere else first. This one I love. I don't know if you guys can see it. It's
an application to marry my daughter [Audience laughs] in Ann Arbor. Okay? And it starts
out pretty simple, like boy scout rank and badges, tattoos, earrings. It gets down to
"in 50 words or less what does don't touch my daughter mean to you?" [Audience laughs].
"In 50 words or less what does abstinence mean to you?" [Audience laughs] All right. So I swear all this is truthful. Otherwise
water torture, red hot poker and the Hillary Clinton kiss torture. [Audience laughs]I kind
of missed that until now. [Audience laughs]Okay, so number one this is amusing. You want your
blog to show your human side, but there's such a thing as too much information, right?
[Audience laughs]If you happen to be in a blue state, the Hillary Clinton kiss torture
that might be a little offensive.
Right? So it's, it's a delicate sort of needle to
thread. You want to show a little bit of your human face, but you don't want to be like,
"I think Hillary Clinton sucks." And then you fall off the edge. Right? So ask yourself,
"Is this the right place for my professional blog?" Maybe you want to have a personal blog.
Maybe you want to do this on Facebook, somewhere a little more private, something like that. Vanessa>>: I have a minor point that you,
I don't know if you noticed about the site. Is she had said that she has a Web design
firm that's good at SEO. Matt>>: Um-hum. Vanessa>>: But I noticed that at the bottom
of the page her Web design firm links to themselves for Matt>>: Yeah.
Vanessa>>: different times with keyword rich
anchor text. Matt>>: Yeah. Vanessa>>: So, they perhaps are good at SEO
for their own site.[laughs] But I mean, you really want to watch for that, because you
don't want whoever does your website to use your site as a link farm back to their site
with a bunch of different sets of keywords. Matt>>: Yeah. Vanessa>>: And not that this is a link farm,
but four links to them in the same little block of text seems a little, a little bit
suspicious. Matt>>: Yeah. It's a little bit overboard
to say powered by Pro Step Marketing, Pro Step Marketing, Real Estate Web design, Real
Estate Marketing Services. What are you really doing? You're really giving your anchor text,
your page rank, to the person who made your site.
And it should be your site. And so to the extent that if some of this
is a little bit cookie cutter, you have to be a little careful about that. If they end
up just making a ton of sites. And by the way, a lot of these individual resources whenever
you click through and do searches and stuff, they tend to be other sites. So that's the sort of thing to be a little
bit careful about.
A lot of this is like mlsfinder.com. So you want the value on your site. You don't
just want to be framed in someone else's site, if that makes sense. Greg>>: So Matt, can I point out one thing
that this person's doing really well? Matt>>: Yeah. Greg>>: If you go to maps.google.com and search
for Kelly Toth, or Kathy Toth, sorry, in Michigan. Kathy is a very local business, basically
a realtor, so she's got a owner verified listing in, in Google Maps, which gets her some extra
points for certain kind of queries that show up for people locally. And also gets a lot
more information than, there's actually some good content there that isn't even on the
website, so- Matt>>: Yeah. Greg>>: -that's a big plus. Tiffany>>: I just did a blog post maybe a
month ago about local business SEO, and I talked a lot about ways you can optimize Google
places.
So if you do have a local business that might be something to check out. Matt>>: Yeah. So many people get focused on
I have to be number one for Ann Arbor real estate, right? They have a trophy for it,
is they have one thing they want to rank for. I want to rank number one for Android apps.
I want to rank number one for Viagra online. Whatever you want to rank for. And the problem is people don't type that
in. They type in thousands of different phrases. So instead of paying attention to the one
trophy phrase that's the most contested, the most competitive, the hardest to rank for,
look at what is in your server logs. Look at what people are already typing. A lot of
the times you might check those keywords in your own page too. And if you put the phrases
just once or twice more in a natural way, you can move up to page one.
And the points that these guys are making,
which is a very good point, is that it's not just the Web. You can make videos. You can
make business listings. You can submit stuff to, to Picasa Web and Flickr and all this
sort of stuff. You can participate on Twitter and Facebook, where a lot of traffic is these
days. So it's not all about getting number one on
a particular phrase.
It's about looking at where all the people are online and trying
to go to them. Does that make sense? Vanessa>>: Hey Matt. Matt>>: Yeah. Vanessa>>: You're saying you could check your
server logs to see the stuff you may rank on page two or three or four. But I feel like
there's a tool that shows you when you're ranking on page two Matt>>: Yes. Vanessa>>: or three Matt>: Yes. Vanessa>>: And it shows you the Matt>>: Yes. Vanessa>>: click through rates Matt>>: Yes. Vanessa>>: on the search results >>Matt: Yes. Yes. Vanessa>>: and I think, we might have mentioned
it even earlier at Google Webmaster- Matt>>: Yeah. Vanessa>>: -Tools. Matt>>: I don't want to oversell it, but yes,
you can find out the kinds of things that you ranked for. Google Analytics Vanessa>>: Well, I mean it's Matt>>: is also great for that.
Vanessa>>: It's especially great though when
you're, when you're ranking on like the third page or the fourth page, because you probably
would never know that. And you might not even see that in your analytics. But it's really
interesting information I think to see those, that, those reports that show you that stuff. Matt>>: Yeah. Vanessa>>: And that was launched well after
I left so Matt>>: Yep [laughs]. So, another person submitted
the site called Forchan. I don't know if anybody's been to that. [Audience laughs]The, the comment
was, "How can I optimize this site which has fresh content?" I hear Forchan does have fresh
content [Audience laughs].
And keeps changing frequently, also true. Or is it a moot point?
[Audience laughs] Dude, come on. You think we don't know about
Moot? Moot's a cool guy. We're not gonna look at Forchan because I don't want to get sued.
So, moving on. [Audience laughs]Sheesh. Okay. Okay, this one's great, SEOpackages.net.
So we have a search engine optimizer. So we're gonna give the secret to search engine optimization.
Number one, get a good hosting plan [Audience laughs]. Do not let your bandwidth be exceeded
[Audience laughs]. I was all set to try to give constructive
advice to this guy, right. And he's just, sorry I'm not alive on the Net anymore. So
okay, we'll move on. So make sure to have good up time. Oh should we, okay do people
want to do fun, evil, sort of spammy sites or more constructive positive advice? >>: Advice.
>>: More positive. Matt>>: More constructive positive advice,
okay. Good deal. And I'll, I'll check the Wave. We'll get to a few of these questions
too. There's not that many, there's only five questions on the Wave right now. So if people
want to submit, just do Google/IO Sessions, go to the session, click on the Wave, submit
a question. And we'll do, start a little questions toward the end as well. Okay, so here's a question from AppBrain.
It's really two. One is they make extensive use of the Google Web Toolkit, and does that
hurt their search results? And number two, how do you get Google to recognize their sort
of breadcrumb structure? Because you want that to show in the search results. So this is actually a really good question
Let's take Shoot U!(LITE). AppBrain is a very cool site. If you guys haven't tried it, I
recommend it.
So AppBrain has 15,000 results indexed. What does that mean? That means GWT, the Google Web Toolkit, is
not really hurting them. And in fact, if you look at the sort of URLS that they generate,
they're perfectly natural, good looking URLs. You can use a period as a separator, you can
use a dash as a separator. I would prefer a dash over an underscore,
because whenever you have two terms like A_B, Google tends to index those as one term. If
you have A-B, we'll index them as two different terms. And most people type, tend to type
A B, not A_B. So I wouldn't change your site if you've got
something that already works for you. But if you're making a brand new site, I would
use separators though like dashes or periods or something like that. So the URLs are actually pretty good. Here's
Shoot U!(LITE). GWT is not hurting you in this case, as far as I can tell. Now there
is a little bit of design advice for this site. If I'm interested in this app, am I
gonna be more interested in change logs or am I gonna be interested in user reviews? User reviews, obviously.
So why are the change
logs above the user reviews? There's no good reason for that, right? So just swap the order
of those. Think about the layout a little bit. This while interesting is not really
all that useful to people. So I'd put that more towards the bottom of the page. But it is doing a good job. It's having some
normal text. It's got images. So AppBrain is doing a relatively good job of having all
this sort of content, useful stuff, right up front. Related Android apps, critical. Why is related
Android apps critical? How are people finding this site? You're probably searching for one
specific Android app, right? You land on it and you're done, and you close the window
and you go off and you start work. Or you see related Android apps, and suddenly
you've lost half an hour because you go, "Oh wow, Space Light. I've never heard about that.
Okay, Bazooka. Wait a second, Bazooka Rabbit Demo." And suddenly you've lost 40 minutes
sort of surfing through all this kind of stuff.
YouTube gets an incredible amount of traffic
from its related videos. It might be more than from the homepage. So people come in
on a specific video and then you know what? If they had the time to watch a five minute
video of a cute kitten, maybe they have time to watch another two minute video of a dog
on a skateboard. And then maybe they have time to watch another seven minute video of
something else. And before you know it, the whole afternoon's gone [Audience laughs]. Now you as the developer want that whole afternoon
to be gone on your site, so show these related contents.
Show these related apps. It's actually Vanessa>>: Did you, did you look at their
meta description tag? Because the meta description tag, unlike the keywords tag that Matt was
mentioning earlier, can be really valuable, particularly in the search results. When someone's
skimming the search results to figure out which one to click on. And for this one I would think if you're looking
for a particular Android app and you're looking through the search results, you might use
the meta description to really figure that out. And they're just populating it based on the
first part of the text from the page, which is good and then it gives them something that's
unique for every page. But it causes everything to be sort of cut off oddly, 'cause it only
takes a certain number of characters.
So that meta description that shows up in
the search result tends to be very awkward for users because it just randomly cuts off
in the middle of a sentence. So as a developer, if there's a way, if you're going to automate
that try to automate it in a way that's a little bit more Matt>>: Yeah. Vanessa>>: easy to read Matt>>: Absolutely. Vanessa>>: and it's useable. Matt>>: So what do you really want? You don't
want search rankings, you want traffic. And you don't really want traffic, you want conversions.
So you really want interested users who are kind of prequalified.
You have already said
this is what my site's about, and they still chose it. So here's AndroidLib for example. The snippet
is Shoot U! was developed by Camel Games, package name com.camelgamesshootu. That's
not that handy, right? Whereas go down to AppBrain and they're saying hand drawing style
physics game. That's pretty good. All you need to do is shooting the little guy to hit
the stars, simple, we'll see who it cuts off in the middle. Putting a little bit of work into trying to
craft the right meta description, and you clearly have the text, because it's on the
main part of the page, can entice users to click more often. It is really worth the time
to try to get a good meta description, especially if it's automatically generated like this.
And it's not spamming it's just, it's relevant.
For each page there's a meta, a different
meta description. If you don't have a meta description, or you
have the same meta description on every single page, we'll try to pick out the best part
of the page to summarize the user's query. And we don't always get it right. A bunch
of Webmasters used to call them the ransom note style snippets. So we do a pretty good
job of highlighting where the words are on the page. But if you give us a good meta description,
we'd often prefer to show the good meta description. Now the second part of the question from,
from AppBrain was how do I get the breadcrumbs? This is what they're talking about.
This is
breadcrumbs. And I went ahead and I, I asked the team that worked on this. And the short answer is make sure that you
have the same sort of markup as everybody else. And then you have to be a little bit
patient. Typically it might take a month or more before a site gets processed and we realize
that you have something that's amenable to bread crumbs and we're showing breadcrumbs. So that's something to be aware of. They're
working on making it faster. They hope that by about the end of this quarter they'll be
able to make that much, much faster. So, if you can come up with something that's a relatively
clear structure then you might get a couple extra links. And sometimes this attracts more
click through than something like /app/comgames, stuff like that. Okay. Let's move onto a new site. Okay, airportcarparks.co.uk.
I'm just gonna be really kind of snippy real quick.
Because I think a few people like the
sang froid and some people like the constructive advice. If you have good text, don't hide it under
a bushel. Check out this text. Oh man, oh man, oh man, ohhhh. Is this written for users?
No, it is not written for users. Oh, right. Okay, so right here is where I can tell you're
scraping content. Right? Because you didn't escape Britain's correctly. Somebody typed Britain's in Microsoft Word
which used a non-standard apostrophe which went up on a Web page which someone copied.
It showed up here, and now it's a question mark character. I know it's not the original
content, because they didn't put it up the right way. And in fact, if you search for
this phrase it appears on some other Web page. So scrapers, there are lots of ways that you
can spot them. And usually you can tell whether something is inorganic. Do these comments
look organic to you? I don't know if you can read them. I'll read a few.
F. Adams, R. Rushworth,
D. Anderson, T. Quigley and G. Foyles. Do most people sign their comments with G. Foyles?
Usually they use either some weird handle like hacker elite or their full name, right?
Not D. Anderson. And it's, it's a little strange. Airport, airparks for Gatwick Airport. Jet
Parks for Manchester Airport. And did you notice they use six stars instead of five?
[Audience laughs]Right? You don't understand, five stars wasn't enough to convey how great
these sites are. You need six stars to get across how, this one goes to 11. Okay, so
don't just reuse content. Don't just make up sort of things that look inorganic. Okay,
back to constructive a little bit. Vanessa>>: Although that is, okay I know that
was a scraper site.
But the thing with the text scrolling at the bottom. Matt>>: Yeah. Vanessa>>: Now that I don't work at Google
anymore, people sometimes are a little more honest with me Matt>>Um-hum. Vanessa>>: than they were when I worked there. Matt>>: Um-hum. Vanessa>>: And I'll talk to people and I'll
ask them, "Why do you have a bunch of text at the bottom of the page? Do you really think
that this is useful for people?" And they say to me, and they don't mean it in a bad
way at all. They go, "No, that's for search engines, 'cause I heard that search engines
like a lot of text on the page." And people really think that this is a good
strategy. And they're not trying to spam necessarily. They just think that's the way to get enough
content on the page for search engines to like it.
So of course what I always go back and tell
them is what search engines want is the same thing that users want. And so that content
has to be useful for the visitors to your site for the search engines to value it as
well. So Matt>>: Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, here's
a quick one, growinstyle.com. The question is, they have unfriendly URLs, how much is
that going to hurt their SEO? So the URL is item.axpx item id=67. The fact is, if everything else on your site
is pretty good, don't get that worried about your URLs. If you're making a brand new site,
and you can make it have keywords in the URL – not crazy stuff, but like three or four
keywords like WordPress does go ahead and do that.
But don't beat yourself up or like
do an eight month project to completely change your content management system if you can't
get exactly the URL that you want. Search engines work with the Web as it is.
And Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Ask all the big search engines try to cope with syntax
errors, people that don't have keywords spreckled all over their page, all that sort of stuff.
So I wouldn't, I wouldn't worry about that
at all. If you can put a URL in, put a keyword in the URL that's good. But you don't have
to go overboard and you don't have to worry about it if you can't do it. It's a relatively
quick one. Okay, jimdantona.com. This one's interesting,
because it's a little bit savvy and a little bit naïve.
On one hand, Jim Dantona is fighting
for Ventura County. On the other hand, does anybody know where Ventura County is? >>: [Inaudible] Matt>>: Okay, a few people do. You're probably
from Southern California. As I understand it, Ventura County is like near Bakersfield
or something like that. >>: [Inaudible] Matt>>: What? What? What? What? Okay, hold
on. [Audience laughs]Maps. Hold on, oh, oh, oh, okay. The mere fact that we can disagree
about this is interesting. Okay, so the area code is 805. So if you do this query 805,
area code Bakersfield. That's why I was saying Bakersfield. I apologize. Matt>>: So, okay, so maybe, the mere fact
that we can disagree about this means put the address on the page. Right? Nowhere on
here does it have the address. It has a phone number. So that's the sort of thing you need
to have on your page. Because some, people are going to type county clerk California,
county clerk Santa Barbara, county clerk Bakersfield, wherever you are. Vanessa>>: And this happens a lot with restaurants
in particular, where they only put the address but they don't put the city or the state.
Because they just, of course I'm in Seattle.
But you're not gonna be found when people
do restaurant in Seattle. Mark>>: Yep. Here, here's one more trick.
Now this is, this text is again not text. If I click on this, check out the URL. It
becomes default.htm. The easiest links you can possibly get to your website are your
own links. Making sure that your internal links point
to the same place that you want it is one of the easiest things to do. If you shoot
yourself in the foot by saying okay I have default.htm, I have index.html, I have index.php,
I have it without any of those.
Suddenly your page rank and your links and your anchor text
can be divided four ways. And you might not rank. So there are simple ways to handle this. Just
make sure that everything is consistent. You usually don't want to have extra stuff on
the end. It just gets in the way of the mind of your users. If you can get rid of it, there's
a tag called rel="canonical". And if you just search for rel="canonical",
it's incredibly simple to set up. All you do is you say in fact I'll use our help page
about it. I even made a video, which I don't want to play.
All you do is you say where
would you like this URL to point. For example, my canonical might be jimdontana.com/, that's
it. So even though you might have these different
URLs out on the Web, if you can't fix it yourself use rel="canonical" and you can sort of unite
the page rank, the trust to the anchor text. All that stuff into one place. And that can
make a really big difference. Tiffany>>: Just to add to that, so like Matt
was saying they have the default, they have index, multiple versions of the home page.
They also have the dub-dub-dub version versus non-dub-dub-dub. Matt>>: Um-hum. Tiffany>>: It's a really common thing. You
can just redirect one to the other. Vanessa>>: So they've got eight versions of
their page. [laughs] Matt>>: Yeah.
Tiffany>>: All the combinations of dub-dub-dub
and default. Matt>>: Right. You, you don't really want
to be the Octomom with your URLs. You don't want to have eight different versions of your
URLs out there. You want to have an only child. All your page rank, all your anchor text should
be pointing to one place. Another thing is there are a lot of good things
about this site. He's got testimonials, he's got text.
If you click on this it starts to
play a really cool video of like, stuff's flying around and voting and all sorts of
cool stuff. I would argue this video would be a much better
thing to show than this tired slide show. Right? Because I just happened to click on
this, and I watched the video all the way through. I'm not gonna watch this slide show
all the way through. So think about your resources and your assets. And sometimes you want to
match stuff up differently. Okay. Vanessa>>: He did a good job on the title
though. Matt>>: Hmm? Vanessa>>: In terms of Matt>>: Yeah. Vanessa>>: primary election county clerk recorder
and his name, even though Matt>>: Yeah.
Vanessa>>: it doesn't have Matt>>: Yeah. So check out the title. Excellent
title. This is the sort of title that works really fine. Vote June 8, 2010, right? He's
managed to get June and 2010 in, so if somebody searched for election or June 8 or 2010 he
might show up for that. This is totally fine. None of this seems like
keyword stuffing. It's a little on the long side as titles go, but he gets useful keywords
in there and nothing in there is at all spammy. So yeah, good point. Excellent title. Okay, so we can do a couple things.
We can
start to go into a lightning round. We can start to take some questions. Strong preference
either way? >>: Questions. Matt>>: Questions, okay. I'm going to close
these out like super fast. This guy also has duplicate content troubles. You can build
a website on Google sites. It is possible. Discount plus size dresses. As soon as you
click it's a JavaScript link and it goes to a completely different domain name. Why would
I even bother? Tiffany>>: It's not even the same dress. Matt>>: Yeah. Tiffany>>: That's impossible to buy the dress
you like. Matt>>: Yeah. Give me the plus, give me the
two-in-one dress. Where is it? I can't get it from this site? So make sure that you actually
have the stuff. Nextsprocket.com is pretty cool. It's a marketplace
for open source tools. So if you want like an open source tool you can pay $30, $50.
Is Next Sprocket in the, in the room? Maybe they're shy. Their question was, how can we
get more links? The answer is come up with a cool idea.
I
think this is a cool idea. I might find a couple Chrome extensions. So get the cool
idea and then think about marketing it. Get on Twitter, get on Facebook, submit it for
a site review, that sort of stuff. We'll skip on that one. Oh yeah, we don't
need. Ah, we'll talk to Sarah Science later. Okay, let's do some, oh, oh, okay.
One last one. There, there is a trend where
some people think that they need a lot of links. And so rather than develop the links
out of merit or because your site is excellent, they think, "I'll just take the shortcut,
I'll just buy a bunch of links." That is really not a good idea. You tend to
get links from sites like this. Syriaalaan.com. You get, get term life insurance quotes for
free, banking, freshwater fish and aquariums, Nike football kits, cheapest hotel rates,
Himalayan salt lamps to ease asthma. These are not really targeted useful links.
If the user lands on this page they're not gonna stay to read about the Himalayan salt
lamps. So this is the sort of stuff that makes spam fighters see red.
We want to find every single one of your back
links, we want to go over them with a fine-toothed comb to see what's going on. This is the sort
of stuff that you definitely want to avoid. So if you can, I would definitely stay away
from this sort of stuff. Okay, questions. We'll alternate between questions
from the Wave and questions from the mic. We'll sort of go back and forth. Please use
one of the mics, don't just shout out questions. Then everyone's going this mic. We have one
over there too [Audience laughs]. You were first so go ahead. >>: Can you talk a little bit more about GWT
and SEO? Matt>>: Yeah, absolutely. GWT, the Google
Web Toolkit, is a fantastic package, because you can do like really fast interfaces. You
can write your stuff in Java, compile it down to JavaScript. Historically, AJAXy type stuff hasn't been
that crawlable, right? Which is a real problem. Now, if you're just doing something like Adwords,
Adwords is written in GWT whenever you're using that interface on the Web. So you can
make fantastic applications.
But it historically hasn't been that crawlable. They've introduced
a new standard and Google supports it, I think Facebook is already adding this to some of
their URLs. Vanessa>>: And it's built into GWT now. Matt>>: It is built into GWT, where basically
if you want something to be indexed instead of just having the hash mark you can do hash
mark bang, and exclamation point.
And that will tell search engines this URL can be indexed.
So we're already indexing a lot of content from Facebook that's doing this. Anybody else
that wants to use GWT. If you, if you search for… Vanessa>>: No, there's a little more to it
than that. [laughs] Matt>>: Yeah. >>: To actually generate the page, when you… Vanessa>>: Yeah, you have install a headless
browser on your server to generate static versions of the pages when google.com's it's
all documented and it's actually fairly straightforward, but you do have to do a few things for it.
But that does help your AJAX to get crawled that otherwise wouldn't be if you're using
something like the Google Web Toolkit.
Matt>>: Yep. So if you search for crawl AJAX
you'll find a page like this, making your AJAX applications crawlable. And the rough
idea is you want to introduce this sort of bang character. There's a few other things
to do. But at least now it's possible. It used to not really even be possible. Good
question. Okay, so let me take one question from the
Wave. MayDay. There were a bunch of people on Webmaster forums like Webmaster World.
They saw a, something go live that happened right around May 1st, so they called it MayDay. MayDay is an algorithmic change in Google
search results. We are looking for higher quality sites, especially more towards long
tail queries. And it's something that's been through rigorous evaluation. Every change
that we do goes through a ton of evaluation. We do over 500 changes a year so it's not
a mistake. This is something that is going to go forward. If you never heard of MayDay or it doesn't
affect you, don't worry about it at all.
But it is an algorithmic change. It's working
where we're trying to find high quality sites, and sort of show those a little bit higher,
which means unfortunately that some sites show a little bit lower. So that's just a
few seconds about MayDay. Yeah, question? >>: So I run a popular website that is currently
number one for our particular term. I, I got a lot of feedback from my users that wanted
features. So I added the new features and I put the links to those new pages in the
top level nav. Matt>>: Um-hum. >>: And instantly I fell in the rankings. Matt>>: Okay. >>: This happened during the busy time of
my company, so I had to revert those changes. And I instantly went back to number one. Matt>>: Um-hum. >>: So what is the, the best way to add new
features to the site and not fall in the rankings? Matt>>: Usually that doesn't happen.
Usually
just adding a link or two won't make a big difference. Were you adding like 20 or 30
links? >>: No, I added about three links to the top
level nav Matt>>: Okay. >>: and I fell to number three. Matt>>: Even though it sounds like a smoking
gun. You put it here it went down, you take it off it goes back up. >>: Yeah. Matt>>: Sometimes that still can be a coincidence.
Because when you've got tens of billions of websites, you take stuff on you take stuff
down, things can happen. The other thing that sometimes happens is
that sometimes a site is down or down intermittently and they don't realize it whenever they're
rolling out new code. Feel free to catch us afterwards to sort of show us the site. But
normally just adding two or three links would not make that big of a drop. Vanessa>>: Yeah. What did it drop to, from
one to what? >>: It fell to a three.
Vanessa>>: To three, and it was the same URL?
It was the homepage of those pieces? >>: It was the homepage, yes. Vanessa>>: Yeah, I… Matt>>: It can be that you're right on the
cusp. You know what I'm saying? You might want to make sure that if you're showing up
number one for a particular phrase, maybe put that phrase once or twice more on the
page, somewhere else on the page.
Because if you're right at the hairy edge,
then having that phrase one more time can make a difference. But normally adding just
a link or two wouldn't make that much of a difference. So we'd be happy to look at the
site afterwards if you want. >>: Great. Matt>>: Cool. >>: I'd just like to know the small business
blog that was referred to earlier. Matt>>: The small business blog? Vanessa>>: Oh, the blog post that I mentioned? >>: Yes. Vanessa>>: Oh, so my site is ninebyblue.com
and I did a blog post a couple weeks ago about local business. So you can find it there. >>: Nine by Blue? Vanessa>>: Yeah. >>: Thanks. Matt>>: Yep. And in fact, Vanessa's very fun
to read.
I like one of her posts, "Micro sites, a bad idea most of the time." [laughter] It's
sort of an underselling way to say don't make 500 different sites, concentrate more on making
one good site that has branding and stuff like that. It can be really handy. Yeah? >>: Yeah, I have a question about domain extensions.
It's tough to get good dot coms. Matt>>: Um-hum. >>: And just wondering if you guys have, give
preference over a dot com versus a dot info for example. Tiffany>>: Always go with dot info's, they're
awesome. [Audience laughs] Matt>>: No. Iím office mates with a guy named
Amit Singhal. Amit basically guides the entire search quality team at Google.
I'm, I work
on Web spam, so trying to catch the cheaters. He deliberately runs a dot info. He's at Singhal.info,
so then we can't say, "Well we don't know of any good dot info sites." Well here's one,
you know. So we try not to look at the TLD. There may
be parts, I'll automatically run parts within our system that say well we think this is
a little bit better or that's a little bit worse. But that's gonna be a small factor
no matter what. Until recently there was nothing like that. And there's no like super duper hand boost
for EDU or gov sites or anything like that.
It's just people tend to link more to EDU
sites and gov sites and stuff like that. So plenty, Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress,
his domain is ma.tt. >>: Hmm. Matt>>: And he still ranks number one for
Matt, which really annoys me. I'm like number eight or something like that [Audience laughs].
So he's just got so much value added to the Web. Rrrr. So typically I wouldn't worry about
it. If you can get the dot com, you can usually get dot org, dot net, dot name, all these
things can work pretty well.
Vanessa>>: I do think though that dot info
users tend to be a little suspicious, because dot info sites used to be free, right, so
there's just a lot, there's more of a percentage of spammy info sites. And so some of your
visitors might be a little hesitant, maybe is what I mean. Matt>>: Yep, cool. So let me take a question
from the Wave.
In Google.de I see more English results in the SERPs. SERPs stand for search
engine result pages. Why do these things, sites rank so high lately? Is this done to
promote the U.S. economy? [Audience laughter]Sometimes people in Germany get a little angry at us.
There are side effects from buying U.S. guns online so it's not good for users. So I think Google does a better job than most
at localizing the search results. So for example, if I go to Google.com and I type in bank,
I get Bank of America, Wikipedia, bank.com, World Bank, Wells Fargo. If I go to, let's
say Australia, and I type in bank I get Westpac, ANZ, Commbank]. If I go to Google.co.uk and I type in bank,
whoop, it'll say did you mean bank.
And I get Bank Fashion, Bank of England, Bank of
Scotland, Barclays, right? So we actually do localize quite a bit. And we can localize even knowing that some
of this stuff, for example, Lloyds TSB is a dot com, but we know that it's related to
the U.K. So we try to localize as best we can. If you have specific examples, feel free to
point them out.
So Torvall, if you want to submit the specific site that you think is
showing up that shouldn't be showing up, let us know and we'll take a look at it. Okay,
question from the audience. >>: Hi. I have two very short questions. One
of them is regarding accentuation in Spanish. So we have the English and Spanish where,
for example the word pronóstico and pronostíco] are two completely different words with two
completely different connotations. And how is, and when I put the hyperlink with
the accentuation mark in it, the way that Google reads it, I've seen with the fetch
bot, is the ampersand i-o, a bunch of code at the end to make the, the accentuation mark.
And I was wondering how we can work with this, correct this anyway.
Matt>>: Yep, absolutely. Punctuation is interesting,
because for example in Woodside there's something called Cañada Road. So you have the- >>: Yes. Matt>>: those sorts of things. And the trouble
is, do you index it as Canada Road or Canada Road. So typically what Google will do is
we'll try to index it both ways. >>: Um-hum. Matt>>: Not every search engine does that.
For example Ask for a long time didn't know how to handle anything except for ascii. And
I wouldn't claim that we'd get it right every single time. But what we essentially try to
do is we index the text >>: Um-hum. Matt>>: -and then if we think there are alternatives- >>: Um-hum. Matt>:: -then we'll index the alternatives
as well, but with a little bit less weight. Now I wouldn't claim that's perfect. There's
ligatures, there's interpunks, there's, there's weird stuff out there on the Web.
We try to
handle it as best we can. >>: Um-hum. Matt>>: But I wouldn't say that we're perfect
a hundred percent of the time. So any time you see something where you think something
should be indexed and it shouldn't, those are a great example to, tweet my way or show
up on the Webmaster forum and sort of point those out. Vanessa>>: And we did a post on the Google
Webmaster Central blog in late 2006 I believe, so it was from a really long time ago. And
I wrote the post. It's specifically has Spanish as the example, and it talks about the different
accents. And so if you go find that post, it goes through some specific examples of
way different accents are handled. So you might find that helpful also.
Matt>>: Yep. >>: Thank you. Matt>>: Okay, so let me do a couple from the
Wave. Dash versus underscore, we already talked about that. How bad is it to have more than
one H1 or no H1 on a page? We try to react to the Web as it exists and index it as best
we can. There was a study right at the beginning of
the Web, like in 2000, that said 40% of all Web pages had a syntax error. Let me say that
again, 40%. Now if Google throws out 40% of the Web, 'cause we say, "You didn't close
your table," what's that gonna do to our search quality? Chhhh, rip it out, throw it away,
right? Because there goes 40% of your potential answers.
A lot of great people [laughs] on student
blogs, they're writing stuff by hand. They don't do it correctly. We still have to try
to index that. So if, if you have an H1, great. If you don't have an H1, we'll probably handle
you just fine. If you have all H1, your entire page is H1,
then you might have a problem. There's no need for your entire page to be a headline.
That's the equivalent of shouting at the entire audience. It's like all caps, right. So if
you can avoid that, it's probably a good thing to do. >>: I was wondering if you had any comments
on link shorteners, like bit.ly. Matt>>: Sure. >>: My company is using them more and more,
and kind of using them permanently.
Matt>>: Yep. Absolutely. So URL shorteners
are fantastic for things like Twitter where you really need the extra characters. And
what I would look for in a URL shortener is that it does a 301, or permanent redirect.
Because that tends to pass page rank. There are a few URL shorteners that don't. So I
think- Vanessa>>: We use 302 in some cases, that's
what you want to watch out for. Matt>>: Yes. There is a great, Danny Sullivan
has a site called Search Engine Land. He's actually at this conference. And I think he
wrote URL shorteners, he did a review of like 70 different URL shorteners. So you can actually
see, whatever you do please don't use tweet burner or whatever. Whereas the ones that
use 301s tend to be a little bit better. >>: All right, that's great. Matt>>: If you can't Vanessa>>: We have 32 seconds. Matt>>: If you can get away from using short
URLs, long URLs are a little better because they don't break the Web, all that sort of
stuff. Really the only reason to use a short URL, if you're worried it might get truncated
in an email or in tweet, something like that.
Can you ask a question in 15 seconds? >>: Yes I can. Matt>>: Okay. >>: What are your views of changing in Webmaster
Tools, the location for different seasons or in a, in a SEO campaign? Is that okay? Matt>: Changing SEO Tools for… >>: In the Webmaster Tools. Matt>>: Yep. >>: Change the location by physically for
different… Matt>>: Yeah. >>: -seasons on a campaign, on a Web campaign. Matt>>: So we have a tool in Google Webmaster
Tools where you can say I'm not related to the United States, I'm related to Peru. Even
though I'm a dot com. Or I'm related to Israel. It tends to be more of a do it once kind of
thing. I would not set it per season. Like, "Oh it's fall, I'm related to Peru.
Wait a
second, it's spring I'm back to Chile." I, if you can avoid that I would probably avoid
that. Vanessa>>: Yeah, I would avoid that. Greg>>: That's not a good idea. Matt>>: Okay, so we're out of time, but we
will try to stick around if anybody wants to talk about their sites one-on-one. >>Vanessa: Thank you. >>Matt: Thanks very much. [Audience claps].
