Check out the video after the jump.

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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.

Honestly I’m glad to see Google dealing with brands of all sizes the same.

The only true way for lasting results in Google and other search engines is to play by the rules (to an extent) and not push the envelope to the point of ripping.

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.

Included in the post Matt highlights one of his YouTube videos where he answers a question about if SEO will still be around in 5 years. His answer, simply — Yes.

White Hat techniques are a good thing, Matt says. People edit their resumes to make them more appealing to to employers. White Hat SEO techniques are just like that. Essentially you’re tweaking your site to be more appealing to both the search engine and to visitors.

He says on his blog:

A key insight behind Google Instant is that if we want to get people answers and solve their problems faster, we can help with that by improving our UI to help you formulate queries more quickly (and then doing a bunch of hard work under the hood to answer that query too). Google typically returns search results in milliseconds, but it takes several seconds for you to type a query. In other words, the limiting factor on a typical search is you. With predictive search and instant results, you can often get the answer you want much faster.

Here’s some additional questions, along with my personal take:
Q: Does Google Instant kill search engine optimization (SEO)?
A: No! Almost every new change at Google generates the question “Will X kill SEO?”

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Q: Will Google Instant change search engine optimization?
A: I think over time it might. The search results will remain the same for a query, but it’s possible that people will learn to search differently over time. For example, I was recently researching a congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson’s blog that had been on page 2 of the search results.

Essentially, Google Instant makes getting your search results that much faster and that much more adaptable. It might effect SEO in the future, but for now it seems Instant has made searching Google new and exciting again.

Read more about Matt’s take on Google Instant.

What are your thoughts on Google Instant? Do you think it makes much of a difference in how you search? Share you thoughts in the comments.

Google’s Matt Cutts

I totally agree with Matt, the quality of posts is by far the most important factor to having a good blog for both readers and search engines a like.

I always tell clients that they should try and write a quality blog post once a week. Now when I mean quality, I don’t mean that it has to be long. It  just has to be well written and informative.

The reason is that I want people to come to my clients sites not only because Google put the site high in the results but because they find what my clients write interesting. If people don’t like what is being written and never come back they’ll never convert into customers.

So as much as I hate to say it, I agree with Matt about creating quality content is some of the best SEO out there.

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.

Vanessa Fox, a former Googler turned SEO consultant wrote the following in Search Engine Land:

So what is Caffeine and what does its launch mean for searchers and content owners?

Maile Ohye, of Google’s Webmaster Central told me “the entire web is expanding and evolving and Caffeine means that we can better evolve with it. As the ecosystem improves, we improve too and return more relevant content to searchers.” Google’s Matt Cutts added that “Caffeine benefits both searchers and content owners because it means that all content (and not just content deemed “real time”) can be searchable within seconds after its crawled.”

Caffeine is a revamp of Google’s indexing infrastructure. It is not a change to Google’s ranking algorithms.  It is live across all data centers, regions, and languages.

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How can content owners best take advantage of the new infrastructure?

Content owners will reap the benefits of Caffeine without doing anything at all. In fact, there’s really not much, if anything content owners can do. Some may wonder if this change means that existing best practices around crawl efficiency matter more than before. Is page speed, which Google has focused on more lately, more important? Nope. Google told me that this change doesn’t make any of the crawling, indexing, or ranking factors more or less important than before. It simply makes crawled content available in search results more quickly before and paves the way for added flexibility in taking advantage of the whatever may come as the web evolves.

Other things that have changed with the Caffeine release are:

• Content is available to searchers more quickly
• Google’s storage capacity has greatly increased
• Google’s flexibility in storing information about documents has greatly increased

What do you think of the new revision to the Google search index? Has it effected your rankings in anyway? Post your thoughts in the comments.

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 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>

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:

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: