For those of you who do not know who Matt Cutts is, he is the head of Google’s Webspam team. He helps determine what gets into Google’s search results and what gets left out. He runs the popular Matt Cutts blog where he discuses gadgets, Google and SEO. The blog has become a must read for most people who are into SEO and are trying to learn how to get their website ranked higher in Google.

Matt was interviewed at the search engine conference SMX Seattle recently and I thought I would share some of his quotes that shed some light on to how Google ranks webpages:

On links that go out from your site:
“I think it’s good for your users, and therefore it’s good for search engines but I’m not going to say we have a signal that measures that.”

On how to improve your PageRank:
“PageRank is based on hyperlinks.”

On how to outrank your competition:
“A lot of these companies are savvy - look at what they’re doing. You can learn a lot from competitor analysis.”

On the Googlebomb algorithm:
“The Googlebomb algorithm is completely algorithmic. My understanding is that the algorithm was not changed. It doesn’t run every day. It runs every 2/3/4 months.”

On how to get your pages out of the Supplemental Index:
“Pages in supplemental can come into main index if they get more links. Supplemental index is not a penalty. We parse and index pages differently in supplemental. We may not index every word and every phrase if the page is in supplemental. We have to compress pages to store them in supplemental. If I had my way, we’d take the label off.”

On whether click through rates impact rankings:
“It can affect personal search and we won’t confirm or deny if it affects general search. If we were to use it, it would be very noisy. Historically, I’ve been leery of using it because of the attempts to spam/game it.”

On whether owning one bad website will impact your rankings on other sites you own:
“If you have spammy sites, it’s fair game to consider that when reviewing all your other sites. If you have 200 spammy sites, shouldn’t that be a signal when we look at your 201st site?”

Matt closed by asking what the audience wanted to see from the Webmaster Console. The responses were: Penalty reports, real time information, accurate reports, errors without having to go into each domain, spider traps, shared logins, RSS, 404 referrers, more data on a query.

Evan Carmichael

Evan Carmichael
YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager

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