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239 official Google answers to common SEO questions

Google's Matt Cutts answers SEO questions

Matt Cutts works for the search quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues. He is well known in the SEO community for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spam.

Search our Q & A database to find official answers to your SEO questions. Watch the videos in which Matt Cutts answers questions or read short summaries of the answers.

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The 10 most popular questions:

	Question	Views
1.	Does Google use the "keywords" meta tag?	1,020
2.	Will SEO still exist in 5 years?	687
3.	Organic link building, according to me is one of the most difficult tasks for SEOs of SMEs. Can you please list 5 effective ways of organic link building other than building great content?	607
4.	More than one H1 on a page; good or bad?	575
5.	Is over optimization bad for a website?	510
6.	Underscores vs. hyphens in URLs, does it make a difference?	481
7.	How much weight does the number of years a domain is registered have on your ranking?	467
8.	Improving website performance with Page Speed	461
9.	Does the position of keywords in the URL have a significant impact. example.com/keyword/London is better than example.com/London/keyword ?	451
10.	Can you verify that Google is putting more weight on "brands" in search engine rankings?	443

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The 10 newest questions:

	Question	Views
1.	What role does being in DMOZ play in rankings?	189
2.	Is there a limit to how many 301 (Permanent) redirects I can do on a site?	54
3.	How can I get my business to become known online?	332
4.	How does Google handle ligatures, soft-hyphens, interpuncts and hyphenation points?	247
5.	How does Google determine domain age, and is it important for ranking?	278
6.	Can I tell Google not to display the date in my site's snippets?	229
7.	Why doesn't the clickthrough data in Webmaster Tools match what I see in Google Analytics?	174
8.	With a lot of my potential clients, the first words out of their mouth when building a site is "Can you make my site #1 on Google?	204
9.	In GWT you can see subscriber stats. Can you all make a widget to display this number?	172
10.	How active is WMT (Webmaster Tools) monitored by Google, specifically when there is a system error (such as the recent error in reporting the number of pages indexed)?	264