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248 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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All questions about the topic "Content":

Question Views
1. 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? 1,535
2. How much weight does the number of years a domain is registered have on your ranking? 1,214
3. Does the position of keywords in the URL have a significant impact. example.com/keyword/London is better than example.com/London/keyword ? 1,108
4. Can you verify that Google is putting more weight on "brands" in search engine rankings? 1,063
5. Does Google see automatically generated content as a bad thing (i.e. spam)? 506
6. Some people are under the impression that blogs are good for SEO only if they're updated frequently. How much does frequency play into PageRank for blogs and other dynamic sites? 492
7. Introduction to Video Sitemaps 482
8. How can I get my business to become known online? 480
9. How would a photographer gain any significant PageRank for his or her site when the subject that really matters-images-has no anchor text? 477
10. As Google's algo evolves, is it better to have exceptional links and mediocre content, or exceptional content and mediocre links? 471
11. Are product description pages on an e-commerce site termed as duplicate content, if the same product description appears on other sites? 466
12. How effective is Google now at handling content supplied via Ajax? 465
13. Is it good to put a "coming soon" page for new domains? 459
14. Can you think of any reason whatsoever to validate spending more than 5 minutes creating meta keywords? 459
15. What are your views on 'PageRank sculpting'? 458
16. Is there such a thing as building too many links, if you're following Google's webmaster guidelines exactly? 457
17. Does Google try to return results based on signals other than popularity? 449
18. There seems to be little impact on human visitors where in the site's structure a given page is, so: Is it better to keep key content pages close to root, or have them deep within a topical funnel-structure, e.g. food/fast-food/burgers/hamburgers.php 436
19. Is there a limit to the number of pages that Google will index from one site? 433
20. Since we're hearing a lot of talk about the implications of Page Speed, I wonder if Google still cares as much about relevancy? 430
21. An SEO suggested that I take all the content on my Twitter page and auto-feed it into a section on my website. Will this really help my site's PageRank? 429
22. Is a website designed with a CSS-based layout more SEO friendly than a table-based layout? 419
23. When will Google create a software similar to Web Position so that SEOs, spam fighters and regular webmasters can check rankings etc. without violating the guidelines? 413
24. What are your opinions on optimizing an e-commerce website where the main pages/products may not necessarily be rich content? 404
25. Is it a good thing to put 'nofollow' in links to a disclaimer, privacy statement and other pages like that with the internal PageRank in mind? 403
26. If you have a lot of blog content for a new section of a site (100+ pages), is it best to release it over a period of time, or is it fine to just unleash 100 pages? 402
27. How can linking remain a major part of a search algorithm when the majority of internet users are unable to post a 'followed' link on the World Wide Web? 400
28. How can Googlebot crawl and index pages that don't have any links to them on my website? 393
29. Many SEOs are obsessed about your speed comments, but I get the feeling speed will be a very minor component in ranking. Am I right, or should I be obsessing about load times as well? 393
30. I see so many people asking "Will this increase my PageRank? 389
31. In a blog, is it worth spending time creating tags and categories for SEO purposes? 388
32. Can you tell us: a) How many changes did Google make to their primary search algorithm in 2009 till date? 385
33. I'm trying to make my site faster, but I noticed that Facebook widgets slowed them down. Should I remove them? 382
34. Is there a way to benefit from content scraped from your site? 380
35. What is Google's thinking about links from article marketing, widgets, etc? 377
36. How does Google handle ligatures, soft-hyphens, interpuncts and hyphenation points? 375
37. I'm seeing Google PR for some Twitter profiles, even a PR of 4 for someone with less than 50 followers and 100 tweets, whereas for some more meaningful profiles there is no PR. Does PR of Twitter profile pages matter? 369
38. Do dates in the URL of blogs or websites help determine freshness of the content or is it largely ignored? 367
39. Does stripping file extensions from URLs (site.com/folder/page.html versus site.com/folder/page) have demonstrable benefit in the SERPs? 366
40. As far as big brands go, why is it that they seem to do well regardless of relevance, content or links when analyzing keyword placement in search engine results pages? 364
41. Say your index page has been cached by Google and then you change the meta description. How long does it take for a Google bot to recrawl that page? 364
42. How much does the size of a web site (# indexed pages/content) have an effect on its authority in Google's eyes? 354
43. Google announced page load speed matters for ranking. Should we be doing content-only pages for Google bots? 348
44. If Google crawls 1,000 pages/day, Googlebot crawling many dupe content pages may slow down indexing of a large site. In that scenario, do you recommend blocking dupes using robots.txt or is using Meta Robots noindex,nofollow a better alternative? 347
45. Should a "Sale Page" be in a robots.txt file to avoid duplicate content? 344
46. We still have old content in the index. We block them via robots.txt, use 404 and delete via Webmaster Tools, but Google still keeps it. What can we do to quickly delete content from the index? 337
47. What screen size do you consider to be the default size for "above the fold" content on a website? 319
48. What is the best way to serve different content according to user country IP (legal reasons)? 314
49. Any updates on "site hierarchies display in search results" (aka breadcrumbs)? 313
50. Will Google ever offer (through Webmaster Tools or an API) a keyword ranking report similar to what Web Position and various other scrapers do? 312
51. A question to non-intended duplicate content: If an online shop can be reached through several TLDs (like .de, .at, .ch) and the only difference is the currency (and necessarily the checkout process) does Google consider this duplicate content? 301
52. If we were to syndicate my written content (entire articles) to multiple domains then would we be able to use the imminent cross-domain <link rel="canonical" tag to confirm which site we would like to index for a given piece of content? 300
53. If search engines rely primarily on textual analysis, how can a site that focuses on audio, video, or other non-textual content improve its rankings? 280
54. Does PageRank take into account cross-browser compatibility? 278
55. Will DiggBar create duplicate content issues? 275
56. JavaScript and email addresses 262
57. I have a server-side script that automatically redirects visitors to a mobile version of a site if they are using a mobile browser. My question is: What are some things to watch out for (if any) when serving different content based on the visitor? 259
58. Can we feed Googlebot a version of a page that does not contain any advertising code (JavaScript or otherwise)? 248
59. Whenever Google detects a violation of its Webmaster Guidelines, can we expect a feature to be added in Google Webmaster Central where it could help the webmasters learn what the issue was? 241
60. Following your interview with Eric Engel - you mention about "If Modified-Since." We worked on many websites whereby the actual file timestamp doesn't change but the content does as the pages are database-driven. How should we deal with such situations. 231
61. How does Google calculate site load times in the data it exposes in Google's webmaster statistics? 231
62. Is there a good way to kick off a feed in Google Reader by doing something like temporarily making the feed include a whole bunch of old content? 230
63. Is Google aggregating SearchWiki data with Analytics for ranking? 221
64. If you run a family friendly site which however now and then mentions an adult word (e.g. because the word is ambiguous or just happens to be about sex education etc.), do you risk getting kicked out of the Google SafeSearch results zone? 210
65. On a web retail site, unique item descriptions are ideal for both users and Googlebot, compared to generic manufacturer descriptions. Some users prefer to see generic descriptions, too. Will including both reduce significance of the unique content? 205
66. Are there any negatives to generating a short list of "related posts? 204
67. When did "Did you mean" search results begin to be displayed? 202

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