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.

Ed, from the Caribbean wrote:

How can linking remain a major part of a search algorithm when the majority of Internet users are unable to post a ‘followed’ link on the World Wide Web? For example Twitter, Facebook, wiki etc. are all ‘nofollow’. It seems only a very small percentage of links count.

I was very pleased about Matt’s response.

Matt is absolutely correct here. Create compelling content that people are going to want to link to and the do-follow links will follow. If you create a how-to about something related to your business, like a white paper or a really good instructional blog post,  people will link to that. The majority of the time, when people link to other stories, they don’t include the no-follow attribute. This is a great way to build links.

Matt has always said, often to the frustration of many in the SEO and Web design world, that building a great site with great content is the best type of optimization.

Now I don’t completely agree with Matt on the finality of that statement, the overall premise is key. Create great content and you will get good links and eyeballs looking at your site.

Crappy content will only yield crappy results.

What do you think? Post your thoughts in the comments.

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.

/…/

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.

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.

/…/

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:

Check out his video below:

I’d love to hear what your thoughts are on the news hyper update to Google. Post your thoughts below in the comments.

The video:
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The question was: “How does someone begin to SEO their site on a small budget in an overwhelmed industry such as real estate?”

One of the key points Cutts pointed out was to make your site different from all the rest. Make it useful and memorable and that will help your rankings. Check out the video below.

He explains:

Here’s Matt Cutts’ view on NOFOLLOW back in February on the Webmaster Tools YouTube channel:

And finally here is a video done at SMX Advanced in Seattle with Matt Cutts’ on the devaluing of the NOFOLLOW attribute:

What are you thoughts on the NOFOLLOW attribute and its impact? Post your comments below.

This is very helpful and makes sense because both BOTW and Yahoo Directory are actually useful to users as well as Google and the search engines. One thing that always gets me is how Cutts says that you don’t have to worry about going overboard on SEO to rank high, just provide great content. This in some ways is true. Great content should out-weigh Optimized sites, but in actuality it doesn’t always happen that way. I know Cutts really can’t say otherwise, but it just gets a little annoying that he keeps saying make great content and everything else will fall in place, when he knows full well that often that isn’t the case.

Here’s the video. I’d love to hear what you think of this and what you think about Yahoo Directory and Best of the Web.

Watch the video below. I’d like to hear what you’re thoughts are on linkbaiting the Whitehat way, discuss in the comments.