Great SEO Insights
Today SEOmoz posted a bonus whiteboard video featuring none other than Matt Cutts. The video is prompted by the current SMX Advanced conference going on near the new SEOmoz offices. And since Matt was in town Rand properly took the opportunity to have this interview, in which he asked a number of great and specific questions regarding how Google handles certain situations. These are great insights for all SEO consultants and I was surprised to actually find the insights useful since 99% of the stuff I read is not new to me when it comes to SEO strategy.
I am going to discuss what I felt were the major points, feel free to view the video yourself below.
What I found most interesting were the statements around crawling. We already knew that crawl priority was based on Page Rank at Google, not the PR that we all see but the internal PR that only Google sees and that is calculated and changed almost daily in most instances. Note that the toolbar Page Rank that we see can be a decent indicator of page authority but that it is not the actual.
Site Traffic and Other Engagement Stats Debunked as Ranking Factors
Matt noted that Page Rank is the main factor in determining crawl frequency and that traffic was not much of a factor at all. If you think of the porn example it makes total common sense. Porn sites constitute and overwhelming amount of traffic compared to most sites. If traffic to a site were to ever be too big of a factor in rankings then porn sites would dominate. Therefore traffic, and I would argue time on site and some other purported new SEO ranking factors based on visitor performance, are not good factors to weight heavily in the ranking algorithms.
The other interesting point made during the interview was that having a chain of 301 redirects is really a bad thing and that Google will only put up with so much. Having a redirect go to another redirect and so on is just suspicious for one, and another thing is that it reduces the crawling efficiencies for Google. These two thoughts are my personal ones and were not directly part of that interview.
There are some other good point about geo targeting based on IP and why that is bad for Google. I’ll spoil it and sum it up in simple terms. Google.com only crawls from one set of IPs worldwide so if you are IP serving content you may end up blocking googlebot.
