You & A Keynote with Matt Cutts (SMX Advanced 2010)

Everything is better with Caffeine, right? Oh good. The metaphor joke series begins.

• Google Caffeine is officially live: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
• Now your URLs are immediately processed by Google’s index
• Caffeine is roughly the same size as the current index, but it gives Google the ability to go bigger and quickly!
• Caffeine allows Google to process data on the order of 100 petabytes.
• Fundamentally: As soon as a document gets published, it can be indexed.
• Annotation: Attaching meta data to objects. For example, PageRank, FB Likes, and other meta data and just plain data. New signals.
• Twitter introduced an Annotation API. A tweet has a lot of extra associated information. So does a document on the web. Google Caffeine will use all of that associated data when processing an object.
• Faster indexing, bionic speed and the ability to attach meta data to objects!
• Matt: Think about it like a car that running down the road and trying to change the engine while the car is running. It will take some time, and they are just now getting to look at a lot of the related data.
• Mayday algo update. Ranking change. The big talk of May.
• Matt says his team had nothing to do with the MayDay update.
• With MayDay, Google raised the bar again. In order to get over that bar, you have to NOT be webspam.
• But….in 2010, we look at the web as it is. We have to look at the challenges of the web as it is in 2010.
• Maybe it’s not spam, but it’s not as good as great content.
• Less webspam and more about the quality of the content.
• It sounds like Cutts and his team have gone after content farm.
• Danny is bating Matt into talking sh*t about Mahalo and/or DemandMedia.
• What is the level of quality of these sites?
• Danny just called out eHow on a content-free article. F’n hilarious. (Convert FLV to images)
• Google will be looking at video sitemaps more. So get those live.
• Crypto-404 or a soft-404. Where the page returns a 200, but Google thinks nothing is found.
• Cached page link doesn’t get a lot of clickthrough. How can Google make it a better page and a better experience. Like where a snippet came from.
• Danny calls him out on the DMOZ descriptions. “Just buy DMOZ and fix it.”
• How about HTML5 and Caffeine? HTML5 is completely unrelated to Caffeine. You don’t automatically rank higher if you do W3C validating. However, Google is updating it’s parsing.
• Matt: It doesn’t help your rankings if you buy ads in Google.
• How to determine if you are getting traffic from real-time results? No plans in the works right now.
• The guy who manages Google Webmaster Central is in the room. What’s his twitter account?
• Speaking of paid links: It seems that Google has decreased the PR of some major sites that are selling links. However, the pages keep ranking high in the SERPs.
• Matt: If we drop the PR of a site we’ve caught selling links, the people who are buying the links are not getting their value because those links don’t work anymore.
• Matt: We have been taking strong action on paid links. In fact, we have a lot of cool new tools that let us do a lot of cool things when we find paid links. We make sure paid links don’t work.
• There’s always news. Maybe Danny should start doing the Daily Searchcap again.
• NoFollow: Is it completely out of our control to tell Google our most valuable pages?
• Matt: The most important pages are the ones you link to from your homepage. It’s the pages that you submit in your sitemap. It’s the pages that you tell Google about.
• Put a link to your most important pages at the top of your homepage.
• Google has improved their ability to discover links in javascript, and that goes for paid links, too.
• 3-pane thing on Google? It’s working out well for Matt Cutts. Glad to know he likes Google products.
• Matt Cutts polls the audience on Browsers. 1) Firefox 2) Chrome 3) Explorer
• Matt’s theory of Buzz: How many people got on Twitter just because and really had no idea what to do or how to use it? Danny created Matt Cutts twitter account as a joke and then gave it to him. With Buzz, Matt is finding out more about how he wants to use it. Much like it was with twitter in the beginning.
• How does Matt react to accusations that Google is only promoting its own products in the SERPs? His response: Bing is worse. A lot of engines just want to show you the pretty stuff. Who’s that? A lot of engines? You mean the other 2! Brilliant. Comedy at its best.
• Is Google favoring YouTube? Matt Cutts went to the YouTube guys to find out. The YouTube guys claim no, and they say they bend over backwards to not favor YouTube.
• Now Matt is plugging the new preview pane in Bing where you can watch videos in the preview.
• When will rich snippets be available for everyone because right now Yelp has an advantage? Matt says they are re-working how they use rich snippets. Time wise, look for it in the next few months. (I’m happy about that!!!!)
• Rich snippets are great for users and clickthrough. I’m excited.
• Bing is buying free drinks tonight, right?
• Do we need separate flash sitemaps? No.
• Google can determine sentiment analysis, but they don’t use that as a ranking signal.
• Bounce rate and Google analytics are not used in general ranking alrorithm.
• To the best of Matt’s knowledge, the Google guys don’t use bounce rate on their search rankings.
• Sounds like Matt is wishy-washy on this question about bounce rate.
• If paid links are bad, why are paid directories helpful? It’s the editorial discretion they provide.
• Can you take Wikipedia out of the top 10 for 24 hours? Nevermind.
• Put Wikipedia in the corner, so the rest of us can show up.