One of the more popular public faces of Google, Matt Cutts, has answered a few questions from webmasters recently and I thought a few of the things he said were worth remembering. Most of what he said was nothing new but still will be new to many reading this.
Matt restated something that I first heard and wrote about a couple of years ago and that is Google makes over 500 algorithm changes each and every year. Your website rankings are going to fluctuate accordingly. In most cases if you are doing all of the right things and your website is of value to visitors you will still rank relatively well. Obsessing over each minor ranking fluctuation is probably a waste of time however as often another change is right around the corner that will change your rank once again – usually restoring positions that you lost in the last fluctuation.
Another thing he mentioned was about the Meta Description tag. Google does not use the Meta Keywords tag in ranking but does use the Meta Description tag. Not only is this tag the first place it looks for the “snippets” displayed for your site’s description in the search results but Google also compares the contents of the description tag to the keywords being searched for to see if the site is a good match for the search.
He also addresses links. You may see that a site has thousands of links pointing at it but that doesn’t mean that Google is considering any of them when ranking the site. The only links Google considers in a positive way when ranking a site are links from sites that Google trusts. The rest are just ignored. Links that are deemed to be purchased or obtained from a “link farm” or similar scheme can still get you penalized and not just ignored. The message is to acquire good quality links and to not waste your time on the rest.
There has long been this misinformation floating around that the best top level domain (TLD) to have for your website is a .com domain. According to Matt that is not the case. All TLDs are treated the same. He did say that if there were a particular TLD that was primarily used for spam content Google may approach a site with more caution. For me, I would think a good example of that would be that having an english language site in a .ru (Russian) domain. That would not be a good idea as that domain is widely used by Russian spammers for english language spam. I doubt most Realtors and their real estate webmasters would be considering using a .ru domain, right?
Thanks for the reminders Matt!
