SEO Answers on Google Video

If you follow Matt Cutts’ blog at all, you would have seen his SEO Answers on Google Video series here, here, here and here in response to questions asked here.

It’s an interesting way to promote Google Video, as well as to touch on video blogging, but if you’re like me and think the videos are a waste of time, check out SEOmoz for a nice text wrapup that you can zip through a lot quicker than the videos: here, here, here and here.

Some highlights:

• Do updates in Sitemaps depend on the page views of a site? No.
• What are some general guidelines and recommendations to increase a site’s visibility on Google? Make them crawlable.
• What about the cleanliness of code (ex. W3C)? Any chance that the accessible work will leak into the main algorithm? He recommends that in general it’s a good idea to have your site validated, but he wouldn’t prioritize it as the most important thing to do to your site.
• Does Google treat dynamic pages differently than static pages? Page rank flows to dynamic URLs in the same way they flow to static URLs. Matt provides a more detailed answer as well. The example the question asker gave had five parameters, and one of them was a product id with “2725.” Matt maintains that you definitely can use too many parameters. He would opt for two or three at the most if you have any choice whatsoever. Also, try to avoid long numbers because Google can think that those are session ids. It’s a good idea to get rid of any extra parameters.
• Does Google Analytics play a part in SERPs? I’m not gonna categorically say we don’t use it anywhere in Google
• When does Google detect duplicate content, and within which range will duplicate be duplicate? There are different types of duplicate content. There’s certainly exact duplicate detection. So if one page looks exactly the same as another page, that could be quite helpful. But at the same time, it’s not the case the pages are always exactly the same. So we do also detect near duplicates, and we use a lot of sophisticated logic to do that.
• Ah, I get to clarify something about strong vs. bold and emphasize vs. italic. Google does treat bold and strong with exactly the same weight.
• [What might be some of the topics] in the Duplicate Content Session of SES? The best advice I’d give is to make sure that your pages that will have near the same content, look as much different as possible [coding, templates, etc.].
• Does Google index or rank blog sites differently than regular websites? Not really. Somebody else asked about links from .govs and .edus, and whether links from 2 level deep .govs and edus, like .gov.pl, were worth the same as .gov, and the fact is we really don’t have much in the way to say, “Oh, this is a link from the ODP, or .gov or .edu, so give that some sort of special boost.” It’s just that those sites tend to have higher Page Rank because more people link to them and reputable people link to them. So, blog sites, there’s not really any distinction, unless you go off the blog search, of course, and then it’s all constrained to blogs. In theory, we could rank them differently, but, for the most part, just the general search, the way it crawls out ends up working out okay.

There’s also a lot of fluf in there. If you keep up on the industry, there’s not much you learned from these videos. But it’s nice to have things reaffirmed every once in a while. Cheers, Matt. And kudos to Rebecca for getting the videos into text.