Google’s spam hunter Matt Cutts published a video recently that clearly stated that Google doesn’t consider SEO to spam. He say Search Engine Optimization is important to help the search engines discover the right content to place in the search indexes. Cutts also emphasizes that building great content is key to good SEO and ranking high in the search engines.

Check out the video after the jump.

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There has been a lot of talk lately about big brands like BMW and JCPenney trying to game the search listings by engaging in black hat techniques such as cloaking and link stuffing.

On the whole engaging in Black Hat SEO techniques might gain a brand a quick burst in the search rankings but over all the fall out is much greater. Getting banned from the Google search results is not work the small and temporary gain you might achieve.

Matt Cutts recently addressed a group of SEOs at Search Engine Strategies and explained that the search giant does in fact penalize big brands for engaging in Black Hat SEO.

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Image Credit: DeviceMag.co

Yesterday’s big announcement of Google Instant has left many in the SEO and Web community in general with lots of questions about what this new feature means for search engine rankings.

Google’s head of Web Spam, Matt Cutts, has published a blog post where he attempts to answer some of these questions.

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Google’s Matt Cutts had a interesting video on Youtube recently. He answered a question from a viewer who asked if the frequency of blog posts mattered when Google ranks a blog/site. Matt’s answer is interesting and true:

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Google has released a major revision to it’s search index. They call it Caffeine. At the Search Engine Land conference/expo SMX, SEL founder Danny Sullivan interviews Google’s Matt Cutts about the changes.

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SEOMoz caught up with Maile Ohye from Google and asked her some good questions about SEO and how Google indexes and ranks Websites. Take a look:

Matt Cutts, head of Web spam at Google, posted a very useful and informative video on the Webmaster channel on Youtube about how Google indexes urls that are specifically blocked by the individual site’s robots.txt file.

A Robots.txt file tells the search engines what to crawl and what not to crawl. If you don’t have something listed in the robots.txt file as “don’t crawl this” or “disallow” then it’s pretty much being indexed.

So here’s what Matt said. They get messages from angry Webmasters that say that Google violated their robots.txt file because they see their link in the search results. Matt explains that Google indeed listens to the robots.txt file but if people are linking to that particular page with anchor text that is helpful, Google will index it without actually going to the page, because the page as some value to people. Often times they will just have a page result without a description. If the page is indexed in the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) or in the Yahoo Directory, then Google might use the description from there to add it to the link.

In both instances Google has not gone to that page. The video is below. It’s worth the 4 1/2 minutes to watch it. Very informative and Matt even gives some suggestions on how to get the url out of the search index completely. But to be absolutely honest. If people are linking to that page that is blocked by your robots.txt file because it has some value, maybe you should open it up and let Google crawl it. It would most likely add value to your site.

Google has just released its latest open source endeavor – Google Chrome Frame.

Google Chrome frame allows IE users to choose (on sites using the plugin) whether they want to stay in IE or use the Chrome Javascript Engine.

We’re building Google Chrome Frame to help web developers deliver faster, richer applications like Google Wave. Recent JavaScript performance improvements and the emergence of HTML5 have enabled web applications to do things that could previously only be done by desktop software. One challenge developers face in using these new technologies is that they are not yet supported by Internet Explorer. Developers can’t afford to ignore IE — most people use some version of IE — so they end up spending lots of time implementing work-arounds or limiting the functionality of their apps.

With Google Chrome Frame, developers can now take advantage of the latest open web technologies, even in Internet Explorer. From a faster Javascript engine, to support for current web technologies like HTML5′s offline capabilities and <canvas>, to modern CSS/Layout handling, Google Chrome Frame enables these features within IE with no additional coding or testing for different browser versions.

<Chromium Blog>

I‘ve seen this discussion happening across the Internet, in forums, on social media and on blogs. Paid posts, are they bad? Maybe. But how are they different from a radio talk show host giving his pitch for a sponsor of the show? Nothing really. Google’s new fight isn’t against spam, though I’m sure that fight is still ongoing, it’s against bloggers who accept compensation for their posting positive reviews of the product without disclosure. Google sees this as a problem because the search giant’s algorithm relies heavily on links to and from sites for ranking purposes. If you as the blogger are pushing a product you aren’t providing unbiased value to the readers and to the Googlebot when you send a link to a sponsor.

Personally, if I review something, I do not promise a positive review. I promise a fair and unbiased view of the product and how it can or can’t benefit my readers. This is my own personal preference and I stand by it 100%. Other bloggers out there do accept paid sponsorships, and though I’m not a big fan, that’s their prerogative. I personally feel that bloggers need to find ways to pay the bills and if writing a PR post for a product or company helps in doing that, then all the more power to them. What I do have an issue with is the bloggers that don’t disclose what their plan is on their blog. They decide to accept compensation, but don’t alert people that it involves a kickback to them.

On the Goldstein Media blog, we have some relevant ads on our sidebar. We feel that these ads are relevant to our readers and don’t detract from the overall value of the blog. When a blogger hides affiliate links in their posts and writes complete fluff pieces for sponsors without alerting their readers to what they are doing. That is wrong.

Disclosure is key. WebProNews interviewed Michael Gray about this very topic:

A recent article on Search Engine Land, discussed Google’s assertion that the length of a domain registration doesn’t matter to a Websites rank as some people think.

Search Engine Land quotes three Google employees, one being Matt Cutts, they all downplay the effect of registration length on ranks but none of them definitively say that it doesn’t affect the rankings.

Google employee John Mueller suggesting in a Google Webmaster Help forum thread that Google doesn’t look at the length of a domain registration:

A bunch of TLDs do not publish expiration dates — how could we compare domains with expiration dates to domains without that information? It seems that would be pretty hard, and likely not worth the trouble. Even when we do have that data, what would it tell us when comparing sites that are otherwise equivalent? A year (the minimum duration, as far as I know) is pretty long in internet-time .

But let’s look at some more evidence. Earlier this year, Danny spoke with Google’s Matt Cutts about a variety of domain/link/SEO issues. In light of the claims from domain registrars that longer domain registrations are good for SEO, Danny specifically asked “Does Domain Registration Length Matter?” Matt’s reply:

To the best of my knowledge, no search engine has ever confirmed that they use length-of-registration as a factor in scoring. If a company is asserting that as a fact, that would be troubling.

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So we have, essentially, three recent Google statements about the length of a domain registration and its impact on search rankings. None of them specifically say, “No, it doesn’t matter at all.”

Ultimately, the full SEO power given to the registration length of a domain probably doesn’t affect the rankings that much. But does it hurt to register a domain for longer? I don’t think so. Regardless of the SEO juice, I feel that it is important to have your domain registered for multiple years, especially if it’s your main domain.

Goldstein Media owns quite a few domains, some we’re using for testing landing micro-sites,. other domains were bought for an idea that went by the wayside. For the domains that we’re experimenting with, we usually register for only 1 year. The more important domains, ones dealing with our brand and such, we have them registered for 4-5 years. The main reasoning behind the longer registration is less for SEO than for the fact that we don’t want to risk losing our identity online.

Below is the video done by Matt Cutts for the Webmaster Center channel on Youtube: