Mike Mcdonald did an excellent interview of Google employee Matt Cutts and former Google employee Vanessa Fox. These are two of the most notable figures in the search engine optimization world and they casually reveal important information about the current Google search algorithm.
Great takeaways from this informal conversation:
- Matt explains how paid links can get you into trouble
- Full pagerank update December 2007
- If your rank dropped first, your pagerank was reduced for link selling
- if your pagerank dropped later, inbound links that previously had high pagerank are now greatly devalued
- Vanessa spills the beans on the projects she worked on while employed at Google Webmaster Central: geolocation tools and including multiple languages
- Google is much better at valuing links and has a killer paid link filter
- Subdomains are not what they once were. Logical subdomains are useful for good site architecture, but superfluous sub domains will not get you extra spots in the SERP’s.
- Sites using sub domains likely to be devalued are shopping and e-commerce sites.
- Vanessa Fox explains how to not have your blog hacked
- Notable sites that were hacked: Donald Trump & Al Gore
Read more and see the comments at web pro news.
Tip for WPN – allow embedding of your videos like YouTube. You will get much more exposure by allowing others to post and reference your content.
3 Responses
I ponder if it’s going to be true that links will be devalued – will our paid links be banned from search engines?
Ah I see it now mike. Maybe you could make it more visible by putting an icon of a video recorder next to it.
Most of us are conditioned by youtube and other embeddable video applications to find the code inside the flash movie.
We do allow for embedding video…. Click the link that says “add this video to your site” and embed away!
(it’s in big red letters right beside ‘Comments’)
🙂