A few weeks back Matt (Cutts) did a live Q&A and at the time I made some notes for a chat session at the (SEO) Dojo. Sitting here this morning, I thought to share some of the more interesting points with you.
Sure, nothing really earth shattering, but worth noting anyway.
Plus 1’s – “We’re still studying and if peeps are blocking it (trustable users) then they rolled into Panda. It’s promising, still looking at it though.” – Yuppers, they still aren’t (officially?) part of the ranking scheme and to me, they won’t be much outside of a personalized environment at any point.
Historical ranking patent ““ the length of registration not a biggie. Temporal ranking factors are based on query spaces/types. Older isn’t always better. This one also makes sense since some qury spaces are more temporal in nature. As always, ‘know thine query space‘.
- Historical ranking patent (for link builders)
- Spam detection from historical ranking patent
- Historcal ranking patent, general notes
Panda numbering – it’s silly. Don’t split hairs. They are continuing to adapt for ongoing iterations. Think about how many ads are on the page. Content above the fold V Ads. This is one that we’ve talked about privately (ads) and wasn’t mentioned a whole lot in the SEO world. Pay heed and be sure to try moving ads in content above the fold to seek Panda recoveries.
Meta-descriptions – if the snippet doesn’t suit the query, they will adapt on the fly. This of course is something we’ve been seeing over the last 18 months and in truth can often improve CTR (click through rates) as it bolds and uses the term being searched. No arguments from me here.
Rel Author and G+ – will it affect business pages? Not so much. But hey, how would we know? There’s been no sign of the business pages for G+ and no idea when they will hit. Meh.
Stolen content – If you have content being scraped, file a DMCA and spam report. Which was interesting because I hadn’t heard the advice of using GWT for this purpose. Hey, look, I learned something… YAY!
Double 301 – you can do it. 2 in a chain is OK, but pentagonal (aka 5 in a row)? Probably not good. Sensible advice on a few levels as there is certainly some loss from redirects. Apparently you can lose trust from Google as well as link equity.
Does google follow nofollow? – In general, no. Which of course sounds like fuel for the conspirators that believe they fully follow and pass link equity. Sigh. This answer was most certainly a non-answer…
Does TLD matter ““ in the past they said no, to elaborate he says that if one is really, really spammy (think .info or .biz) might be an issue. We have heard in the past that spammers tend to use cheaper domains such as .info and .biz. There is every reason to stay away from those as far as I am concerned. Beyond that, the only real roll the TLD (top level domain) plays is in geo-targeting.
Does Google recognize redirects via JS?– Yes they can detect that. They’re getting better all the time at seeing and reading JS. Don’t block JS and CSS because will make for crappy instant previews. Which of course is an interesting point I hadn’t thought of. Weeee…. learned a few things here.
And there ye go… nothing seriously earth shaking but it’s always nice to document some of the statements from Google for future reference. Besides, it was a slow news day. Here’s the video for those feeling adventurous (really wasn’t much beyond what I covered tho)
Thanks for the transcript Sifu