Top Ten FREE SEO Tools for Register Here

Matt Cutts (Blog SEO Twitter) of Google: Thinking Critically about Web Spam

Matt Cutts leads the Web Spam team at Google, and is the primary spokesperson at Google for SEO and webmaster opportunities. He has an almost cult following among the SEO cognoscenti, but we should think critically about Matt and his role at Google. Should he be believed? Is he an accurate source of SEO information? Besides identifying his blog and Twitter accounts... This blog posts explores the SEO teachings of Matt, as well as a recent hour long Youtube video by Matt explaining SEO.

By Jason McDonald Senior SEO Instructor - JM Internet Group. Posted: June 21, 2010

Contents:

Matt Cutts - Google SEO Guru
SEO Web Review by Matt Cutts
Beyond the SEO Cognoscenti

Matt Cutts - Google SEO Guru

Matt Cutts heads Google's Web Spam team, and is the primary spokesperson at Google who communicates their SEO policies. You can read Matt Cutts SEO Blog and Matt Cutts on Twitter, but both of these are really more for the SEO insiders than the general businessperson or marketer struggling to leverage SEO for their marketing. They are good resources, but deal more with esoterica than the big picture. At a recent conference, however, Matt reviewed websites for SEO (see below).

In teaching our SEO classes, one of my themes is to educate yourself to be a 'Google Detective.' By this, I mean to do your searches, and really examine what is going on behind the scenes. Rather than believing what others say, I recommend doing your searches and trying to infer from comparing and contrasting who is doing better or worse - trying to infer from comparison/contrast what is really going on behind the scenes at Google in terms of on page and off page SEO. Similarly, with Matt Cutts, being a Google Detective means examining his role critically.

So first of all his title: head of Google's Webspam team. Titles matter. Jobs matter. Matt doesn't bear the title of 'Google SEO evangelist' or 'SEO Promoter.' Rather, his mission is to fight Google Webspam. Webspam is abusive tactics by websites to compete (unfairly) and get to the top of Google's free listings. So Matt's job is to combat this. Do you think, therefore, that he is going to openly explain how Google ranks websites? Can he really share with the community how links work, what are the best tools for SEO, what are the best practices in terms of tag structure? Not really. If he did, the webspammers would have great access to the Google internal algorithms, and off they would go. So one major point about Matt Cutts is to see how constrained he is. Neither he nor Google can really effectively explain their algorithm, for fear of the webspammers.

Secondly, Matt works for Google. The source of one's pay has a big impact on one's perspective in life. Matt is much more like the White House press secretary than a truly objective outside observer. This isn't to belittle Matt and his contribution. But Google pays his salary, and therefore you are always going to hear Google's 'party line' from Matt. He's important, yes. But he isn't entirely forthcoming with how SEO works just as the White House press secretary is important but not entirely forthcoming about what is really going on in the Obama administration!

Bottom line: pay attention to Matt Cutts. Read the Matt Cutts Google Blog and follow Matt Cutts on Twitter. But be critical of Matt and realize that his supposed access to internal Google information is tempered by his inability to be forthcoming about how Google really works. He has a tough job.

SEO Web Review by Matt Cutts

Click on Above to Watch in Full Screen Or, go to Video!

Every so often, Matt and other members of the Google Webspam team participate in various conferences and do SEO reviews of websites. Fortunately, they post these to Youtube. (I have posted the direct video here in the blog). Reviewing this video is a really interesting exercise. You wonder how much they really know about SEO or how much they know, but aren't saying. I'm not sure that anyone on the Webspam team really has the 'keys to the kingdom.' The advice is rather haphazard and unfocused, even though the audience questions and sites submitted beg for just basic, common sense SEO advice. Matt doesn't refer anyone to the primary Google PDF document, on SEO, for example.

Here are the major points of the video -

• Text - Google likes text. Make keyword-heavy, text-heavy websites for Google that contain original content.
• Meta Keywords - this tag is ignored. Google explicitly has stated that it ignores this tag.
• Content - place usable content for humans above the fold.
• Links - inbound links matter (a lot) to Google, but avoid using link farms or link schemes.
• Malware - use Google Webmaster Tools to track whether your site has been hacked, and if so fix that immediately!
• Original Content - Google prefers original content over scraped / duplicate content.
• Outbound Links - outbound links can hurt you, especially if they are redundant.
• Long Tail Keywords - think about the long tail, which can be more important than so-called 'Trophy keywords.'
• Dashes vs. Underscores - Google prefers dashes in URLs separating keywords.
• Meta Description - Google uses it, so should you.
• Location - if local search is important to you, be sure to include your address on your web pages.
• Link Structure - be consistent with your link structure. Do not have four different URL's for your home page, for example.
• GWT / Ajax - if you are using it, create static links for it to be crawlable.

The video is worth watching, but it is very long. I think what is actually the most interesting is how non-systematic Matt and the other panelists are. They don't list things in clear priorities. They say, for example, that the TITLE tag is important, but don't clearly convey that it has the highest value for SEO. Similarly, towards the end, Matt says that the H1 / H2 family is good, but doesn't convey just how important its use is. The thrust of the panel is to create good user friendly content, and Google rank will follow. This is sort of true, but in a competitive market good content isn't enough. You must follow SEO best practices - both on page and off page (links) to really succeed.

My suspicion with all due respect to Matt Cutts and his team is that the real keepers of the Google keys aren't talking, neither to Matt nor to us. I think of him more as a press spokesperson, and that gets us back to the importance of being Google Detectives. The best way to learn what really goes on is to compare and contrast which sites do well vs. which sites do poorly and thereby infer the true best practices for SEO, in priority order. Start with those TITLE tags, for example!

Beyond the SEO Cognoscenti

SEO's biggest problem for businesspeople and marketers is the domination of the geeks. Google has a geek culture as do most of the SEO firms out there. Geeks like code. Geeks think of the world as a technical problem. Geeks like to obfuscate. The cognoscenti like to think of SEO as something so impossibly complex that mere mortals can't understand it. They relish in arcane tools like AJAX and GTW and the webmaster tool suite...

The dominance of these cognoscenti can be very intimidating. My approach to SEO is different. I try to explain it. I try to make it simple. I try to prioritize it. All of my students, for example, know that I clearly and unambiguously state that the most important tag on any page is the TITLE tag and that the TITLE tag of the home page is the most powerful tag on any website.

I recommend paying attention to the geek community, but never forget who pays whose pay check, and never forget that ultimately succeeding in SEO is about succeeding in creating high quality content (just as Matt says) but also in structuring this content with proper tags (which he hints at, but doesn't clearly explain) and, of course, getting powerful inbound links to this content. More easily said than done, of course.