Pubcon 2010 Matt Cutts Keynote

Posted on November 13, 2010 by Roy Reyer

Don’t you sometimes wish that you had a crystal ball to know the direction where Google is going so you could follow their lead so you could get your websites to rank in their search engine?

Well you don’t need to be go out and find some fortune teller, all you need to do is pay special attention to what Matt Cutts says on his blog and at conferences. If you don’t know who Matt is, he is one of the head engineers at Google, responsible for developing and enforcing the Web Master Guidelines.

Matt gave a keynote presentation on Wednesday at Pubon and here are some of my personal take aways:

What Google is Paying Attention to:

Mobile; this includes mobile devices, applications and search
Chrome, Google’s web browser
Securities, keeping their search results clean of sites that are infected with Malware. Also the ability to search with SSL so “your boss will not know what you’re searching for”
Speed; Google Caffeine, Real Time Search, Google Instant, Instant Previews

Future Trends Google is Paying Attention to:

Mobile
Local Search
Social
Providing the user with a blended result in the SERPS, variety
HTML 5

Nine Tips for Search Engine Optimization

Stop chasing the algorithm, instead try to predict where Google will be going in the future
Keyword Research; use the taxi driver model, ask 10 people what keywords they would use to find your product/service
Pay attention to the first click in your copy, put your most important link first.
Copy, read your copy out loud before you publish it
Twitter; leave room in your tweet so it can be re-tweeted
Video, make one if you don’t have one
Conversion, guide you users, test and retest
Domain name, own your own domain name(s) including your personal name
Webmaster Tools, turn on notifications and email forwarding

Here are several other take aways Matt provided during his presentation;

Spam reports get four times priority in the spam queue at Google.
There is more web spam in Google’s search results and they will be moving their staff back to work on this issue.
Google reduced the number of hacked sites showing up in Google’s search results by 90%
Webmaster Tools will be leaving messages for webmasters concerning their site and will warn of doorway pages, parked domains and other spam issues.
Google disregards the canonical tag when it can hurt your site, specifically if you canonical link to a 404 page.
Google has 200 ranking factors but those ranking factors may have 50 or more variations within a single factor.
Google Places and Android App Market spam will improve over time.
Google will be looking at why exact domain matches rank so well. For example, if you have a site at www.blue-widgets.com it may rank a bit too well for the keyword phrase [blue widgets].
Google will be building a new paid link tool to block only the paid links on a page and let the other links, that are not paid, pass link juice.