Google software engineer Matt Cutts has been collecting questions submitted to Google and answering many of them on video in the Google Webmaster Central Channel on YouTube. We highly recommend these educational - often entertaining - videos featuring Cutts' responses to questions posed by webmasters around the world hoping to please the Google spider with optimized website and blog code and URL's.
Some sample questions:
- Are CSS-based layouts better than tables for SEO? (Cutts says "No" - Google reads both fine - although he recommends CSS for site usability and maintenance)
- How much does a domain's age affect its ranking? (Cutts - in theory it could matter, but currently it doesn't)
- Why do big brands rank so well? (Cutts says they don't and disagrees with the question's premise - one interesting comment to the video noted that large companies often generate alot of content such as press releases, resulting in a higher number of backlinks to their sites than small businesses with less Web content could ever hope to generate)
- How many pages can (will) Google index from a single site? (Cutts: "No limit" - Google crawls as much of a site that it thinks is useful).
- How can I make sure Google reaches my deeper pages? (Cutts: make sure important pages are linked to from your homepage - which he calls the "root page").
- Will a "coming soon" page soon negatively impact my site? (Cutts: "No - don't worry about it" - can even be a good thing for users).
- How can new pages get indexed quickly? (Cutts: "Get links" - especially from other high-ranked sites).
- Should I use underscores or hyphens in URLs? (Cutts: hyphens).
- Which is more important? content or links? (Cutts: work on building great content which should attract links)
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