Interviewing Matt Cutts

Some excerpts from Aaron Wall’s interview with everybody’s favorite GoogleGuy, Matt Cutts:

Is all SEO spam?

Absolutely not–I need to do a post about this on my blog sometime. Lots and lots of search engine optimization is white-hat and not spam at all. Things like making a site more crawlable, tweaking the words on a site based on what users type in or what you see in your server logs, and gathering links by coming up with creative ideas or services that make people link to you naturally. To me (and Google), spam is search engine optimization that is outside our quality guidelines–things like hidden text, hidden links, doorway pages filled with gibberish words that do a sneaky JavaScript redirect, and so on.

Some SEO firms cold call saying they can rank people in first place. Can they guarantee this?

Not on Google. No one can guarantee this, not even Google, since our ranking algorithms are often updated.

As a webmaster how do I minimize the chances that my site may be the baby thrown out with the bathwater in the updates?

Make a great site, and try to make sure that site is recognized and thus earns organic links. To be safe, pick a stranger and ask them whether the site is great–sometimes you’ll be surprised. If Google doesn’t return a reputable, great site for a query, then we’re going to be working to figure out why and fix it.

What would be the best ways to integrate the link popularity [between a main site and a blog]?

I think having a main site with a large feature like a blog somewhere near the main page is actually a pretty good structure. If you run a blog, it’s good to spend some effort to have one main url for each post so that there’s a single well-known permalink. I haven’t been as nitpicky about that on my own site, but if you do SEO for a living I’d pay a little more attention to that.

When does it make sense to use one site or multiple domains?

If you’re a whitehat, I’d almost always go for one site. Promoting multiple sites and keeping them distinct is a lot more of a challenge.

If I got a site banned what is the procedure to get it re indexed?

This is boilerplate that we’re sending out to some site owners as a pilot program if we detect spam, but it’s the most current info:

“If you wish to be reincluded, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When you are ready, please submit a reinclusion request.

You can select “I’m a webmaster inquiring about my website” and then “Why my site disappeared from the search results or dropped in ranking,” click Continue, and then make sure to type “Reinclusion Request” in the Subject: line of the resulting form.”

Do most sites that ask for a reinclusion get reincluded? If not, what are the common problems?

We don’t discuss the reinclusion ratio, but if you’re a mom/pop site with a single domain compared to an SEO site that had industrial-strength spam, I would request the reinclusion. Check your own site for spam before you request reinclusion! Look for hidden text on the home page. Do a site: query and check a few random pages. If you were doing a weird link scheme, stop it. That’s the biggest problem we run into–the site isn’t really cleaned up.