Matt Cutts 2007 SEO WordPress talk at Wordcamp – Transcript

Matt Cutts Wordcamp July 21st 2007 Talk – ( digg it here )
(Dr. David’s email)
Matt Mullenweg: This is the last session of our user day and we are very honored to have Matt Cutts here. (continued below)

Matt is senior engineer at Google and the head of the web spam team, which doesn’t spam, they keep the spam off the search engine. So more than almost anyone in the world he has insights into ranking on Google and blogs, and search in general. So thank you Matt.
Matt Cutts Thank you very much
Hey, Thank You.
Awesome! Whoh hoh.
You guys still have enough energy to be able to clap at the end of the day. Everybody still doing o.k.? Excellent! All right! Well give up one more round of applause for Matt and all the WordPress folks. Wow.
It’s been a good day, hasn’t it? It’s been a really good day.
O.K. so I have no idea whether I am like blindingly loud or you can barely hear me.
I’m O.K.? All right. So what I want to do is I want to make sure that we have time for Q and A and the best way to insure that is that you guys raise your hands if you have a question.
I am the exact opposite of the last talk. O.K.
Because Robert started out with PowerPoint and trimmed it down to zero slides.

I started out with zero slides this morning and I started writing and writing and writing over the course of the day so I have got about 30. We’ll see how many we get through. But in order to insure participation I’ve got some shwag, some O’reilly books. So this is how it works.

The PowerPoint will be color coded. So when you see something that is green or blue or a hyperlink and if I don’t mention it, raise your hand and let me know because that’s when I want to go show something on the web or give something away or something like that.

But First of all, how many people know me? Has anybody heard of me? O.K. about half and half.

So I work at Google. I work on webspam. I work on search quality.

So, I want to return high quality results to users. So if you write high quality blog posts I want to return your blog posts to users hundreds of millions of times a day.

A little misconception. Some people think that Google hates sites. I was at an SEO conference and this is a spammer. I have pixilated out his picture. You know.

Do you notice anything different? I’m wearing the same shirt. Maybe I need at least one new T-shirt. Love my Ale 8 shirt. O.K.

So, some people think that Google hates their site, or they don’t like their site, or they have a grudge against their site, or something like that.

I want to show you an example of somebody who believes that. Have you guys seen this? This is AlexChiu (dot) com He has created an immortality device. No seriously. Immortality device. Live forever. Right? It’s patented, so it must be true. We all know patents work. How does it work? Magnetic rings. You wear them on your hand, it clears out the Chi, you live forever. O.K.?

So, It’s kind of interesting, because he’s got magnetic feet stuff that you wear.

Yeah I know its kind of like 1992 called, they want their web design back. Right? Whoooo! Old School! It’s like Geocities and Myspace had a love child.

O.K. And It’s pretty cool, because he’s got, whatever this is, gorgeous pill or something, let’s you live forever.
And I got a little curious. I wanted to see how it works.
The way it works is magnets. You’ve got a wound, and then you break up the wound, and then you live forever.

So, you might not be able to see this. The take away is weak magnets are lose, O.K.?
Weak magnets bad. They lose. Weak magnets are lose. O.K.

Now why am I quoting this site?
Why am I mentioning this site?

This guy, it’s like Monty Python saying, come see the ……. Right?
This guy claims he’s being repressed by Google. Right? Because of the immortality device! Right? It’s the immortality device.

Google can’t let you find out the truth.
Whatever you know, you know?
Google won’t broadcast to four hundred people at Alex Chiu (dot) com.
And tell you to go check it out. Yeh! censorship! Exactly! It’s all the man, keeping you down under their feet. Now you can read all this stuff, it’s pretty great. Now don’t let a big guy like Google cover your eyes and ears.
Here I am promoting this site a little bit.

Now who here thinks that Google is suppressing the site because of the immortality device? Anyone? Oh yeh, yeh, alright! Sarcastic Crowd! O.K.
Well, I’ve let you in on a little secret now? Haven’t I?

O.K. Here’s the story. If you go down to the bottom of this page. Do you see this text area right here? Yeh? Let’s view the source on this page.

Oh! Oh! dear. Ohh Ohh no. Ohh no. Ohhh!… Oh Oh.

O.K.

So we start out with body parts. We quickly get down to celebrities. Right? You know?
Chad Isac. Misha Bilsen

Wars Trilogy Eggs
Sonic Megadrives Download testify.

Hundreds of words. Hundreds.
In this little tiny text area.
It’s about forty pixels by twenty pixels.

So yes, this site has a penalty in Google.

It sounds like such a good theory.
You’ve got all of these celebrities in here. All this sort of stuff. God’s, Devils.

So in general, we want to return good sites.

I thought I’d. I’ll throw in I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.

I’ve been enjoying hearing plugins, and what people have been using.

Akismet of course is awesome.

You guys may not know this one though, math comments spam protection.? Anyone? Oh O.K.!
One person doesn’t like it. Math is bad. Fair enough.

Google Analytics. I added my footer.php.
Feed Burner. Anybody use Feed Burner? Cool. Very Cool.

Democracy, I use it for polls. This is kind of funny.
Stephan? Stephan is the guy who wrote SEO title, which swaps your, name of your blog with your post title, and can also do a lot of other stuff.
I like to install the minimal set of plugins, so I only edited my header.php and changed this code.
I’ll do my very best to get this power point put live on my website or somewhere so people have to like scrawl down notes, or anything like that.
But even switching the name of your blog with your post title can really help a lot with your traffic.
And then I have a love hate relationship with WordPress cache. anybody?
It’s like if Dig comes knocking you really want it installed.
But It’s kind of a bear to uninstall and re-install, and all that sort of stuff.

So Democracy, I like that, cause, you can do polls. Which type of pet do you have? On my blog a lot of people like to have Googlebot

It’s strange.

Math Comments, Spam Protection. It asks you what is the sum of one plus eight.

That stops a lot of people. It helps a lot. Carry the one? That’s crazy talk. I don’t understand this.

Yeh!, But you can also change like one to the number one and letter one, and stuff like that.

Here are some plugins I’m thinking about installing. Thinks like comment karma, and credit comments. You can vote things up and down. Author highlights. You can highlight some stuff. And then these last ones are more like you know, making your site a little more readable, and putting your URL structure in place the way you want it.

O.K., so let’s get to the meat of it. SEO tips. It’s a little bit of a hodge podge but we will see some organization later in the talk.

I would actually say not to put your blog at the root of your domain. So if you go to my blog mattcutts.com, or you go to my domain mattcutts.com it says there’s not much here, go to my blog.

My blog is at mattcutts.com slash blog.

You can also do blog dot whatever your domain is.

So how many people put their blog, right on the root page?

Quite a few people.

Now if you were starting over again let me just, I will put this for you to consider because and people will link to your root domain and people will link to your blog. So in some sense you can get a little bit of extra page rank because people will do two links. They will like to you and link to your blog.

And in addition you might want to leave some room for future expansion

Have something besides blog at some point.
So it’s not a big, big deal. I wouldn’t go like changing things around.
But if you’re just about to start a blog, consider it. You know?

Think about putting it on a subdomain, or a subdirectory, or something like that.

I actually I like to call my stuff blog, cause, I intend to use WordPress,
I love WordPress, but at some point you might switch.

Its also nice when you unpack the latest WordPress because it doesn’t overwrite your stuff, so you can move things over.

Lorelle:Except!
Matt: Except
Lorelle:When you search for a blog about …
Or WordPress tips, …..

Matt:It’s the man! Keeping you down.

Lorelle:So when you for example, if I am searching for wordpress themes or I do a tag…

audience member: It’s not working.

Lorelle:I know its not working, I’m yelling! For like WordPress themes…
And you put a name or you do a tag like for technorati

What happens is, everybody who uses WordPress in their URL and their not talking about WordPress comes in to the search results and in to the tag results.
Stop It!
Use blog! Use Fred!
Use anything, but stop using WordPress!

Matt:There you have it.
Wise words. Wise words. O.K. What do SEO’s know? Search Engine Optimizers know that bloggers might not know.

How many SEO’s do we have in the audience, and I know all three of you, so go ahead and raise your hand. Oh there’s an extra one there! I saw Jonah, I saw..
Keywords.
How many of you are just sort of writing blog posts like,
I’m going to talk about whatever i am going to talk about
My I-phone, my cat,
my fashion, whatever.

That’s O.K. But is also helps to thinking about the words that users are typing.

So for example L. O. L. cats.
Is it L.O.L. cats or lol cats?

audience: lol cats!

Matt:O.K. it’s lol cats. Sounds like it’s a unanimous opinion.
So if you go to say, Google and you type in “Keyword tool” you will get to a free tool that lets you type in lol cats and this is the sort of stuff it will tell you for synonyms.
People are also typing cat pictures, L.O.L., funny pics cats, funny pictures cats, and down here a nice niche LOL kittens. Right? Right?

I can has cheeseburger, or cheeseburgers. But who’s tackling the kitten space. So there’s an opportunity for you.

Think about the kinds of words that people are typing. Now I don’t want people to spam. The last thing I would ever want people to do is spam.
But if you know people are going to type in
Funny pictures, cat cats, kitten kittens?
There are completely natural ways to work that into a post.

So let me show you one example here. O.K.

You can’t see it that much. Let me make it bigger. Can you guys see that?O.K. so I have a post I mostly talk about search and search engine optimization but every so often i go off and say Now I need to do a gadget post. I was trying to figure out how to change the default printer on Linux and there were like no good posts about it. So I said, I’m going to own this niche “this is like mine” I’m going to write a post that just dominates the changing your default printer in firefox category. So what did I do? well, changing the default printer for Linux and firefox
Up here in the URL I had change, in the title I said changing. Its not spamming. Its just like using a variant of the word. If you look down here i make sure i use the word cup
I use Firefox or Mozilla. Right? Because some people will use the word Mozilla instead of Firefox.

I make sure I’ve got, you know, a little bit of a tip about how to set your environmental variable in bash versus tcsh and i use words like setting Now i am not targeting a very important niche at all
I don’t even show any adds on my blog, so I don’t even care.
I don’t get any money from it at all. But just using these words, these synonyms in a completely natural way, Lets you be more well rounded, and it makes it more likely that when a user comes to google and they type in “My default printer is broken in Firefox,” those words will be in your post.

So its more likely that you will show up.
Now use this knowledge only for good, never for evil. O.K.
There are people who use such knowledge for evil and that’s where they get into trouble

audience member:Maybe we should make that into a plug in that generates a list of tags based on words you’ve typed in…

Matt Cutts:
I wouldn’t go that far. Work it into your post in a natural way because People are going to going to be doing those searches and if they see what looks like a ransom note down at the bottom with tons of keyword variants they don’t like it, they are gonna report itas spam and stuff like that so go ahead and put the work in and say “I am going to find the synonyms. I am going to target this space.But I am going to use the word I-phone and I-phones. Not just the singular, but use the plural as well.” simple simple stuff like that. Question, yeah?
audience member: …do you get more of the synonyms through the comments….
Matt:Totally, Totally. There are a few commenters that are jerks. Right? Like one or two out of a hundred will just go on forever, but in general your users will come in and they’ll say “That’s absolutely the case. Another way you can set your printer is blah, blah, blah.”

I love this. let me go down to the bottom here
(Audience member says something inaudible)

Now you are starting to get a little closer to the edge. I wouldn’t go that far on misspellings. Let your users leaving comments do that for you in a very natural way
Because, trust me there will be people who don’t know how to spell that well.
Wow Linux, that’s too hard to schpeal. My head hurts!
okay so i did this post in August 2006.This sort of warms my heart. Here is a guy in May eight months later saying Thank you!Why is it so hard to figure out this stuff? Right?

Its completely white hat. Your just writing a tutorial. This guy is going off on cups D, and cups D printer. Just you know?He’s an angry man. Right.

Who the heck names this stuff? The gimp? What?
This is a guy who should have waited for like maybe one or two more versions of Ubuntu.

It’s not quite ready for him yet
I wouldn’t give my 95 year old grandfather, you know, an ubunto machine quite yet. But It’s getting there because of people blogging and writing and doing help tutorials like this.
Completely white hat thing to do. O.K. Use categories that are good keywords. One of the greatest one of the biggest reasons i started using WordPress instead of blogger isnewsletter and i worked for Google people would have expected i started on blogger is
Wordpress supported categories. I have categories that are like Gadgets, hacks, how-to weblog, blog,You could have one for wordpress, and if they make sense use those categories and whenever you do your post, it will just say categories, dadadadada, Now that’s a very clean, very simple way that’s usable but also helps your search engine optimization. It helps your ability to be found.

Don’t make your category cartoons if you’re a porn site cause thats where you harm your usability thats where you go against whats helpful in google.

But theres perfectly logical ways to have categories and still have it help
audience member:
What if I have already set up my site with URLs should I change it?

Matt:
you’re good, you’re good, I’ll get to you in just one second. What if I have already set up my site

Now this is kind of interesting. This is the domain. Alright.

Everything after the slash is called a path. So people often ask me should I use dashes? Also known as hyphens. Should i use underscores? Should I use no spaces at all? What do you guys think?

audience:Dashes!

Matt: Now the interesting thing is that we used to treat underscores as if they were like word A Underscore word B We would glom that together .And we would index that as A underscore B If you searched for the word A we wouldn’t have returned your post.
We are in the process of changing that. We might have already changed that.

So dashes and underscores are almost exactly the same. but in engine world dashes are nice because if there is no space at all the search engine has to segment it.

And google can do that pretty well We can break up words.
But can every single search engine? gigablast, Ask.com,Turbo10, you know, not every search engine will. Keep it simple and search engines will do it better by you
O.K. Now someone had a question. what was your question here?
audience member:Should I change all the URL’s? Should I go back in?

Matt:That’s a great question. First, this is going to get a little weird, but ah David Klein are you still in the audience? If you had a choice between the Samba pocket reference
Ajax hacks and programming Fire Fox, which one would you choose?
David Klein:
Programming Firefox because that is the only one I have any chance of understanding!

Matt:O.K. I am reserving that one for you. O.K.
so now you get to pick. You want a Samba pocket reference or ajax hacks which is tips and tools for creating responsive websites
So O.K. By volume.
Picking it by poundage as the better one
No I would not re-work your site. If you’ve already gone with no spaces don’t change everyone of your old posts and do a permanent or a 301 redirect

It’s not worth the hassle. But on new posts, go ahead and put dashes in there.
And WordPress is great in that many of the default settings are already set up i configurations that work well with search engines
O.K. So I basically already made this point here to change to default printer.
Alt tags on your images, use them!
They are good accessibility. We’ve got a guy at google who is blind.
He gets really angry when people

or don’t fill in their alt tags
It just takes like two extra seconds
It really makes a big difference.

You can get a lot of stuff found in image search, and video search.

I made a series of about 10 or 15 videos just for fun.

My wife was out of town for like three weeks last year and i was like “alright, I’m just gonna make a bunch of videos and throw them up on Google video. When I have spare time is when I do these sort of experiments. And it’s gotten, the total number of them has gotten two hundred and fifty thousand views. which is pretty cool!
It’s just free traffic. I don’t make any money so it doesn’t really do me any good.

Be thinking about these alternative technologies, Be thinking about image search, video search, stuff like that. Question, yeah?

audience member: Hi, sometimes Ill give it a full sentence for an alt tag or space additional context, do we get penalized at a certain point?

Matt: no that is a good question umm sometimes if it is a full sentence, will it get penalized? No, you wont get penalized. Now, if you do five hundred words and its like cheap-cheap-Viagra-online-mesothelioma-debt-consolidation-mortgage-payment…you know, then you might run into some trouble.

But in general our supporting algorithms are smart enough that we sort of don’t trust those after a while you know, after you know the first, say, seven or eight words I wouldn’t worry about it, usually I go for an alt tag that is three or four words, maybe five words but that’s about it.

Yeah, question, up here…yeah you are in the light

audience member: on the URL thing, -yeah- does having .php in the URL cause a problem.

Matt:Good question. Does having .php, .asp .cfm, .htm, .html, ya know does not make a difference whatsoever. It makes no difference whatsoever call it whatever you want. What’s the only extension I wouldn’t recommend that you use for your pages

audience:”.asp”

Matt: It’s like web design inside joke .asp is don’t use its like the anti-Microsoft side ,but no no the extension I wouldn’t recommend is dot exe.

If every single one of your webpages was a program that could be a little weird. Yeah I wouldn’t worry about it. Umm but in general how long it takes to fetch your page, the extension, none of that stuff matters at all. Does Google give any bias for apache versus Microsoft IS? nope don’t care

Audience:so what about question marks or hash marks?

Matt:Wokay, what about question marks or hash marks? In general, google takes a URL, if it sees a hash mark, it truncates at the hash mark . So if you have blah blah blah hash three blah blah blah hash four, those both get treated or not applies to the same URL. question marks signify dynamic URLS for the most part and what that means is your passing URL parameters into your webserver. we treat dynamic URLs for example, for page rank, exactly the same as we do static URLS. In the old days search engines used to say ill crawl one hop from a static url to a dynamic url something like that and that was a cruddy way to do it and that search engine isn’t independent anymore. umm so we treat them just like URL. Now the only advice I give I would keep the number of parameters low, like two or three. umm if you’ve got fifteen then the odds are that you have two parameters here and two parameters here then it do very easily . so we tend not to crawl these like lots and lots of parameters.

And there was somebody who was patient over here that was gonna ask a question okay so then youre golden, whoo alright O.K. so sometimes-

I am gonna try a joke I don’t know if it will work, O.K. sometimes people say should I do a video or should I do a podcast? My rule of thumb is ask yourself how handsome or how pretty you are alright sure there is a site called hotornot.com, submit a picture of yourself. And if you are a seven or above do a video. If you’re a six or below, do a podcast. I normally stick to podcasts, I have to admit.

alright O.K. lets talk about usability for just a minute, umm I added this one, make sure your site is crawlable. now if you’re bloggin on WordPress, you’re pretty much guaranteed your site is crawlable, and in a very nice way sites that are hierarchical, treat it like structure, things like archives, you know, 2007 june and then the posts are prefect for search engines. so the default WordPress install is almost optimal in terms of crawlability. What you can do is you can if you’re looking at something besides WordPress install like netscape 4.7 and look at your site and if you can get to every page using this ancient version of netscape or links you should be completely fine. if you’re using like ,you know, frame sets or all sorts of weird stuff then you might want to take a second look at your stuff frame sets don’t work well on iphones for example.

so yup question British question

Audience member: yep British question. Just on that point you mentioned about the hierarchical structure of WordPress 2007… duplicate content, does that not end up in the supplementary index ?

Matt:O.K. we got a power user question about supplemental results the short answer is supplemental results are determined mainly by page rank and so there is not much you can do about it but get more links but not to worry about them in general. WordPress does suffer a little bit in the ability to get to posts in three or four different ways.

And so I have a wish list for WordPress at the end and I should have added that one. Ill try to add it in real time or something. It would be nice if you could say “O.K. I only want to get access to this post from this particular url structure” and I think there are some plugins that will let you do that too. I will have a little bit of tips later catch me if I don’t say it

O.K. you really should check out your site on a cell phone or an iphone because more and more people are gonna be looking at your site like this.

I was looking at a site earlier today and it was just like gosh, crazy boiler plate, ugly stuff before you get to the meat and people just wont come back, make sure that your post creation dates are easy to find O.K. Did anybody see this little thing that google did a post about the movie sicko. That little thing, yeah I know it was a bit of a mistake on our part and we called our own foul and we said this was our bad and we apologized , but what did they do that was especially bad -in my opinion- was they didn’t put the date of the post so somebody done a post on Friday and she showed back up on like the day after on the weekend to sort of add an additional post and you couldn’t tell how quickly they were coming back to cycle through that conversation. You would not believe the person previously said people come to your site, they view it as kind of- they don’t know you, they don’t know anything about you. If you don’t make it easy to find out when a post was created that is gonna hurt because people wanna know.. Is this information from like four years ago and about how to change my default printer? or is this really recent?

So you really wanna try to make post creation dates easy to find. Question? Someone said- yep Stephan? Yello

audience member: if you put the date in your url and you have a lot of slashes in there is that gonna affect the imprinting or the crawlability?

Matt:Good question. So the question is if you put the date in the url that will add a lot more slashes does that affect google or other search engines? It does not affect google. Google doesn’t really care how much or how detailed your urls are. Page rank flows completely independent of how many slashes there are.

There is rumors that yahoo or Microsoft might look at the depth of the directory so what I do is I have the posting and I have the date at the top of the post O.K. so I don’t have the date in the url, I can see both sides .

O.K. I can take or leave this slide- who wants to see this slide about how to move to a new webhost? Oh, more people than I expected so ill do it very quickly and then ill get to your question. So this moving to a new ip address so suppose you have- im matt cutts, I want to move to mattcutts.com. I want to move to a new webhost but I want to keep my domain, mattcutts.com. This is optional -if this scares you don’t worry about it. Dns whatever you look up it matches it to an ip address and that last for a certain period of time typically a site lasts for about a day, at google it will last for about five minutes. Anybody can take a guess why we do the ttl for five minutes ? so we can bring data centers in and out of rotation and we don’t have to wait very long.

But you probably have a dns time delay of about a day. If your webhost or your registrar lets you change that you can change it to about five minutes and then all your users will migrate in about a minute or so what you want to do is you want to bring both sites up so that if they go to the old ip address, they still see your site. if they go to the new ip address they’ll still see your site. Once your site is up at both locations then you want to change your domain name settings to actually point to the new site. As soon as you see google bot or new users coming to the site your pretty much golden you can throw away the old site and take down the old site and the old ip address..

Audience member:the thing you might consider doing is do not archive.

Matt:I wouldn’t actually recommend no archive for this case .There are various cache settings you can do probably this one is the safest because every 500 fetches or so we will try to look at the subtext and end up doing your DNS so usually for this case that should be enough.

Question.. giving you a lot of exercise I apologize.
audience member: kind of Going back to the phone or iphone whats better is it to have a separate site slash iphone slash wap or whatever or mobile or have your style sheet take care of it ?

Matt:If its at all possible, I would try to do it with the same style sheet and Apple has a really good user interface document that says how you can give them a stylesheet thats different from regular browsers while still serving up the exact same document. So that’s pretty handy. If you can, that’s what I recommend. But you know sometimes that begins to get a little to complex . Or sometimes you want to make an iphone specific site or something like that. yep, question.
audience member:comment, actually. For mobile browsers, I would just use Alex King’s plugin wpmobile. its just painless it works and it works awesome on all the browsers and you’re done.
Matt: yep, the benefits of having a good blog software platform absolutely. O.K. this ones also veto. You know, I can do this slide or not, do you guys wanna see it or not? I need to see a few more hands. Oh yeah, O.K., alright I don’t care, ya know.

So if you’re moving to a new domain, so you’re at mattcutts.com and you’re going to myspiffyblog.com and so you’re completely changing your domain name-the one line is use a permanent or 301 redirect a permanent means this site has forever changed to this site. 302 or temporary redirect means that this site has either gone over here but just for a little while, keep checking back at the original location so that’s the simple explanation.

If you’re an advanced user, here is what I could recommend: pick one sub directory or one part of your site and do the 301 on the one subdirectory. It’s a little harder with WordPress but if you have a general website, its not bad to do .Do the 301 to the location on the new website and if you see everything flow through, all the traffic is fine just like it was before, then I would just go ahead and 301 permanently redirect the whole site. Whenever you create a whole domain sometimes it takes a while before google has enough trust in it so, if you’re doing the 301 redirect and everything flows just fine in terms of traffic, you’re totally golden. If you’re really low,take a little while and think about it see if you can find any particular problems.

So heres a couple of things you can do number one- how do you link to your site? Suppose you want to link to www version of your site maybe the non www version of your site? A lot of people shoot themselves in the foot by maybe linking half of their links with www and half the links without the www. So you wanna standardize you wanna pick one way or the other and just go with that as much as you can. umm ..question yes?

audience member: What had the tools th ability to choose the www versus not would that fix that problem…

Matt: It helps, it helps. ill talk about that in just a minute. Another question- yep?

audience member:I am hearing a lot about the difference between having www and not having it…I don’t understand whats the real difference? Isn’t it the same website regardless?

Matt:It is for you the same website ,but technically they can be different urls that show up different content. So let me see if I can show you an example of that. If I do a search for php calendar, I get -he’s changed it ok. php calendar.net and like www php calendar.net used to return entirely different stuff. So google can’t automatically assume they are the same or else we’ll break a few peoples sites essentially. For you well give some advice in just a little bit .

Now one thing that I absolutely recommend, is even if you’re doing this 301 redirect-if everything works for ya just fine, google provides a way that all of the backlinks or a very large fractions of the backlinks to your site and then you can say oh yeah yeah yeah bob was linkin’ to me, I can ask him to link to my new site. So that helps as well. You’re not relying on the search engines to redirect these directly, you’re going to the source, you’re going to the people linking to you because they want to and you’re saying “hey my site changed. go ahead and update your link and just link here instead” and If you can get enough people doing that also it helps quite a bit wit hit

Lorelle: Can I make a little point on the track backlinks and standardizing thing? With the backlinks and many people get the plugins that take the www off and then youll get the feeds. If you click on the link in the feed it will come to a 404. that’s the kind of standardization he was talking about. Can you address that just a little bit more so people get that, because this is a daily whine of mine.

Matt:Yeah yeah absolutely. Let me see if I can kinda show you on my site. Technically mattcutts.com- lets do it on… see this is my silly little site here www mattcutts.com and mattcutts.com and mattcutts.com with out the slash and mattcutts.com with the slash and mattcutts.com index dot html-all of these can be completely different urls and your webserver can return completely different content for them , and some webservers do so we can’t just assume they are all the same even if we see index.php is that the same as matcutts.com? well, you don’t really know, and so what I recommend is doing a little audit of you site, look at the backlinks, see what people are linking to, look at your own links within your site and theres a very simple way, ill show you how to get the report from google. And then say am I doing something weird, am I splitting where my links are going? And am I linking some to sometimes I link to the root, sometimes I link to the root with the slash just try to standardize that and that will help google and all search engines sort of give you full credit in all the right places. Yeah question?

audience member:I just wondered if you’re going to make that distinction between the www and the not and so forth couldn’t you just do a text sum and actually assume they are the same I mean does

Matt: That that’s what we do yeah but the kiss rule- keep it simple for search engines right? Search engines usually get that right but sometimes they mess it up. So for example, suppose you have some rotating code that shows a different banner ad, a different template over here or something like that, the page, if we fetch the page and then fetch the www version and they are just slightly different- sometimes that can cause degenerate stuff. So its better to take care of it on your side so there is no confusion whatsoever.

O.K. so I’m gonna plug some google services, but these are the ones that I actually really really believe in and think that everybody would benefit from and you’re more than welcome to use anybody else’s. I just think these are pretty handy.

The webmaster console, how many people use the webmaster console? Interesting okay, I thought it would be about half but its maybe just a little over half. Feedburner, googlebot feedburner and now you can get all sorts of extended stats for free and in fact, they have a thing called my brand which lets you serve your feeds off of like feeds mattcutts.com instead of feeds.feedburner.com . That’s nice just because everything is under your control if you ever wanna change things, its on your domain and not somebody else’s domain and actually having email a few maybe three emails from matt in my email inbox saying “hey how are we gonna handle all of these feeds that show up as search results?” and google is working on making sure we do a better job of processing those, but in the meantime it is always a good idea to have the feeds completely under your control so if you wanna get rid of feedburner you can always just leave it behind.

Custom search engine you can just do a free site search. If anybody is using adsense, are you guys using this section targeting? if you don’t use this, adsense will target through all the text on your page. And sometimes you’ll get ads about blogs, blogging blog software, wordpress and if you’re doing a blogpost about that, thats great. But if you just take the meat of your post and add a comment at the beginning of the real content you write, and a comment at the end. well target to just the content in your post. So sometimes those posts will get a lot more targeted a lot more focused a lot more about what you’re actually talking about, which means more clicks more revenue for you yeah?

audience member:Can you have multiple sections like that on your page?

Matt: Oh good question, can you have multiple sections? I don’t know. i’ll find out for you. And then, you can? O.K. I think you can- he is saying yes O.K.. I don’t know if you can block sections I am not an adsense guy so yeah ill go bug em and find out more

audience member: Matt- can you change the feedburner over to the live brand does it break the old one?

Matt: No it doesn’t as long as you use the feedburner plugin for WordPress, it all works really well. And most feedreaders they handle those 302s ans 301’s just great so I wouldn’t worry about it. The question is if you change from feedburner to your domain, does it break things and I haven’t seen it break anything.

Google analytics is nice just because you can see you know where people are coming from ,like this is some traffic from my site over the last month, I am getting a few people, getting a few people, whoa! what happened did it get doug, did I get slash audited red and you can click through and you can find out where your traffic is coming from the queries that people are using are they coming from direct links are they coming from search engines, are they coming from people that type in your url? It’s all free, its all really nice- Give it a try,if you don’t like it, you know, take it off your page.

I want to spend just a couple minutes talking about the webmaster console because its really really handy. I think people that haven’t heard of it before or haven’t tried it will like it . Its at google.com/webmasters.

There was a very large book publisher that used robots.text to block themselves out completely. So they emailed us in a panic and said “why did google hang my site? Google is the man keeping me down” and im like “check your robots.text and if you used the webmaster console you wouldn’t have to send us this email.” I once knew a SEO that claimed he got 10,000 dollars for diagnosing a problem that a site had and it was because hey had robots.txt blocking themselves out from the search engine. so this is just a very simple bio that’s powerful. It can tell you where you can and cant go on your site. This tool lets you test things out before you put it by, so you cant shoot yourself in the foot quite as easily.

You can also report spam to us and we give more weight to those spam reports.

You can remove urls like -suppose you work for a college and you accidentally left up the social security numbers of 30,000 people. I swear this happens like once a month.

We get a call “I really didn’t mean for all the credit cards of all my customers of my pool cleaning service to show up on the web” okay, well then why did you leave it up on the web and link to it? You don’t even need to contact us this is completely automated and it runs 24/7 and you can remove urls, you can also do things like see backlinks, see crawl errors, see stats .

I’ll show you some examples. So here’s some backlinks from my site. These are external links which are probably ones you’re interested in, you can also get internal, so you can see people are linking to my group page, they’re linking to my blog. You can click through, you can see who’s actually linking to your site which is really handy, as we mentioned, if you ever move your site .

Do you have a question?

David Klein:Thank you. I have heard rumors that putting google analytics, using it on your site for some people has caused it to crash in google search. Is that true or is that false? –

Matt Cutts: Complete myth. Somebody asked me that at PubCon a couple of years ago, which is a SEO conference, and I promised I would never use google analytics data in webspam. It would never ever hurt you, but we would be very sensitive to even the perception of advertising on google, of using adsense, not advertising on google, not using adsense, using analytics, not using analytics causing problems. So No, I think that is a complete myth.

Installing analytics would definitely not lead to a crash. Thank you good question.

You can also see crawl errors. On this page I have got 35 links that are broken. If you look at these links, they are to upper case blog, blog parentheses percent 2-0 now these are not my links cuz WordPress does good links, and you know I know I never make a mistake, right? I could never have a broken link, but if you see these you can figure out Oh, maybe I can handle 404’s differently. If I use 404’s in a different way, I can get 35 links for free so you could use your 404 handler just do a redirect to your root page or something like that. It can be really handy to see as google is crawling what sort of stats can you get, so this is also in the webmaster console. This is the number of pages that get crawled a day, this is the number of kilobytes that gets downloaded per day by googlebot.

What happened here? I have no idea! I don’t know what happened here. But there is no way I would have known without running this you know without running the webmaster console so I know I need to go check out whats going on. Maybe I added G zip and coding? I have no idea, this is how long it takes to download pages by googlebot, so you can tell. See I had a spike where it took me three seconds per page for googlebot to fetch my pages, so if your site is running slowly, or having problems you can often spot them by using the webmaster console. And just to close out the conversation we started out earlier, you can even tell google whether you want www your domain or not www your domain and indicate your preference. So its just very handy we view it as a two way channel of communication.

Alex Chiu that guy that had like 500,000 phrases on his page we now have a message center where we can contact people and say you now have hidden text, or a penalty or malware, maybe you don’t know you’re hosting a spyware Trojan or something. So it’s a really good thing to enroll in, completely free won’t hurt or help your rankings. O.K., wow time flies. Do you think its better to, say, get traffic from google by ranking high and then get noticed by the world? Or get noticed by the world and then get traffic from Google
Matt: “The second one! Samba pocket reference guide for you! Yeah, we want to be a reflection of the web. If there are important things on the web, we want to find them. But if you are trying to push yourself up into Google first, so that people can find you, you are kind of working against the grain, you are going up hill. It is much, much easier to think about all the different ways you can get known in the world and then Google will find out about you naturally.

So this is just some brain-storming. There is a site that makes signs, like safety signs. They’ve gotten like tons of links for this. All they do is create a PDF. Anybody here develop for the IPhone? Huge opportunity! The people that are really kind of thinking ahead a little bit. There is going to be like four of five really important sites that host IPhone apps, IPhone app Directories, and if you can get on the ground floor of that, you know, you can get a lot of traffic, a lot of visitors.

Have you guys seen the L-O-L Cat builder Yeah, Lolcat? lolcat, sorry. It’s like calling my grammar wrong. So this is great. You just sort of select a picture. You select some text. Invisible chorus line. (Laughter in the audience.) Alright? Now, how much (inaudible) does it take to make this. This guys is like literally like, here’s some pictures. He doesn’t even come up with his own pictures. He waits for people to submit their pictures. By the way, some people don’t get that it is supposed to be pictures of cats. They’re like (Audience laughter) Ok, here I come, I’m a lolbug. No, no, you’re supposed to be a lolcat, not an lolperson. They add some fonts, and boom these guys are getting like huge amount of links, huge amounts of page rank. So, creativity is a big theme.

Lonely Girl Fifteen, how much money does it take to make a video? If you’re pretty, it doesn’t take any money. Just, set it up on yourself. If you’re not pretty, you have to hire someone who is pretty. And now you have Lonely Girl Fifteen.

The Million Pixel Homepage. Making a Mac versus PC parody.

The Free Hugs Campaign. How much does that cost? A video camera! You go and you hug people. There’s no money.

Parez Hilton. I mean. You take pictures of celebrities and you scroll on them and you’re done.

Now, admittedly, there is- are costs. You have to have people send you leads and stuff like that. There are all sorts of creative things. One guy sold his mustache on Ebay. (Audience Laughter.) He called it the Captain. He said: “Buy the Captain on Ebay. What happened? Ebay suspended the auction. That’s great for him, right? He’s like : “Oh no, I’m rumbling with Ebay. They’re not going to let me sell my mustache.” Now, he’s got a blogstorm going on. This sort of thing is generally called link-bait. Some people call a link-bait, saying : “Oh, link-bait it’s an ugly, bad thing.” I think people should kind of embrace the idea that there are different ways to get attention. There’s lots of ways to get attention. And many of them are completely white-hat. You can do really neat things. One guy just said: “I’m going to make a video of people just saying the word Google really fast.” Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, Google, just like for five minutes. That’s all he did. He got like eight people to do it. He got like half a million views. There you go. Pick a word. Say it fast. Put it up on YouTube. You’re done. (Audience Laughter.)

This one is kind of neat. O.K., where is David? Alright. Somebody pass Programming Firefox back to him. Can’t move forward. Watch out for the speaker. Yeah, that’s a good idea. Sorry about that. Anyone still have hearing? Anyone, no, no, what. Very good, very good. How simple, how cheap can link-bait be? Well, ah, David is actually a guy that I, I’m sorry, I didn’t remember your face, but I remembered your site. We met a search conference a while ago. He’s already got the idea behind link-bait now. Look at what he was doing earlier today. Ah, (audience laughter.) This is live link-bait. Link-bait on the web. Ok, so he’s taking pictures of people, like, Matt. Writes down photomatt.net. He wants to be a writer. Click on the picture. He’s a writer. He’s done this like for you know like fifteen things. He’s got me.
(Audience member calls out :”I want to see mine.”) Which one is yours. It might not be up yet.(Inaudible.) He’s drawing as fast as he can. Ok, so I said I wanted to be a Photoshop Plug-In Developer. You know. Oh, I’m like, ah, I don’t know what a Plug-In developer, you know, there’s a plug, developer. (Audience laughter and applause.) Creative! Yeah, yeah! It is a plug-in. He is doing all sorts of stuff. Now, what did this guy do? He came with a camera, a pad of paper and a marker. What is he doing that is really smart? Well, he’s getting people to put their URL down. He’s not just doing random stuff. Who can resist linking to their own, you know, parody, right? So, here is thirty people, who automatically like, look, look. He said I wanted to be a, you know, the boss of the Yankees. And here I am, I’m the general manager of the Yankees. You know. How does this take to do? Not, very long, cause he’s done it today. Right, he’s done like eight today. So, in many ways, it is just the creativity.

There’s other stuff you can do as well. You can do tutorials. You can do analysis. One guy did, “Who has better Web-Spams performance, G-Mail, Yahoo or Hotmail.” All he did was count how many spam-emails he got in a week. Got a ton of links for it. Ah, you know, all sorts of stuff. You can see what’s going on on Techmeme You can live-blog. Does anyone live-blog in this? Ok, so, like, instant way to get some free links. You’re like, oh, the live-blog coverage of Wordcamp. Ah, I don’t care as much for creative controversy. Some people, it’s like their specialty. Like John Dvorak. He’s like, yeah, I say what I want, you know. Respect my authority. People link to me cause (audience laughter) cuz this is crazy good. Now, he’s gone, right? He’s left? Ok. I’m safe, I’m safe. Ah, mention Robert Scoble right. Mention Robert Scoble. He does blog-seaches for Robert Scoble Mention a-listers in general, he’ll find you. There was one guy, and I’ll recreate this poll. It’s really creative. Jeremy Schumaker did this. I’m going to give you two options. You have to vote for one of them. You have to vote for one of them. Two options, so…take your pick. Number one: George Bush is a great President. Raise your hand if you agree. (Audience laughter.) So, you’re all choosing the second option! Fine. The second option was: George Bush is the greatest President. OHHH! OHHHH! (Audience laughter.) Creative, huh?!! This guy got like a hundred and twenty comments in under an hour. He’s like: “ I’m melting and I can’t handle the pressure.” He’s a WordPress guy too as well. Controversy. Use this sparingly, cause, boy, you can give up some credibility as well. You can always do the stuff Digg thirteen reasons why something sucks or rocks. “Eh, eh, it would be great if WordPress would do a little more keywords and not the post names. Don’t do a sponsor post. If you get popular enough, people may try to hack you. Ah, don’t bother to try to write this down. I’ll try to put it live on my blog. If you want to you can protect your WP admin. directory and white-list certain IP-addresses, my home-address, my work-address and then nobody else can get access to your WP-admin. Mmm, I did an April 1st joke, where I pretended to get hacked, which was fun. Like, I got a lot of like traffic. “Woooh, look at that, Matt gets hacked, what a lot of fun, got dug,” until the hackers were going like: “Oh, he wants to get hacked, huh! Okay!” (Audience laughter.) A new version of WordPress comes out, and I’m upgrading like that! I mean… (Audience laughter.) So, just putting this in place, protected me from all this sort of stuff, even like zero-day attacks that people have published yet. If that ever happened, well, they could only do it from these two IP-addresses, so a little bit of preventative stuff.

Ahhh, some suggestions from WordPress, I’ll skip over that.

And, then some more reading. This is Google’s official Webmaster Blog. This is my blog. I talk about seach, Google and SEO, and stuff like that. Ahh, Steffen, I give you props. He’s got a tag for blog-optimization where he talks about WordPress specifically. And in this (inaudible) like here he wrote the things to do right after install WordPress. It’s a good thing to double-check, just to make sure you get all of your ducks in a row.

Ok, and that’s the end of my something-something. Questions?

(Question from the audience, inaudible.)

I will do my very best. I’ve created this from scratch, so that Google wouldn’t have to worry about me having weird comments hidden in about secret projects so I should be ok. It may take me few days, but I’ll do my best.

Question from audience member: “ Google News, ahh, I’ve noticed that blogs occasionally come up in Google News, but not consistently. Are they supposed to? Are they not supposed to? I noticed like AOL Fan House for example is a blogging but it comes up all the time against other articles. Can you speak about that?”

Matt: “Yeah, that’s a really good question. What’s the criteria for inclusion for Google News? In general, the criteria is that we want you to be like a real news outlet. A lot of the blogs that get in versus the blogs that don’t get in in my experience, it seems to be whether you are a single person or whether you are multiple people doing the blog. Because one of the things that Google News requires is that you have multiple editors or multiple contributors, so my blog will never make it into Google News, cuz its just me. If I added other people and played up the roster of the other people who contributed, the odds would go much, much higher. So that’s one thing you want to keep in mind if you want to shoot for that. Other questions? Or do you guys just want to get some drinks and yep?

audience member: Is there any connection between domain registration and SEO?

MaTT: Is there any connection between domain registration and SEO? Well you know google does want to be able to trust your domain. If your domain is cheap mesothelioma online.biz or info, then we might be a little more suspicious.

audience member:(inaudible, asks about who is data?)

Matt:Its interesting see google is a domain registrar but no domain registrar gets access to anybody, any other registrars who is info. So that is a common misconception. People think google is able to register domain names so therefore it goes to who is of everybody else automatically and that is not the case. you still look like you want to ask another question okay cool other follow up questions Yes!

audience member: For example a .info wordcamp.info for the wordcamp report, would that get rated lower because its dot info than,say, a wordcamp.com?

Matt:There are valid dot infos for example, this is one of my office mates. I met Singall you know he works on information retrieval this is his domain is singall.info in general we try to avoid sweeping generalizations based on the tld. That said, huh, theres not a lot of good dot infos theres uh okay heres three. webmacster are you webmacster? Well but it does happen but in general you don’t need to worry about that . If I were starting fresh id probably go for a dot com. But right now we have nothing in our scoring like that as far as I know Yeah?

audience member: (inaudible, asks about google analytics flow)

Matt: google analytics on wordpress.com its are we working on it? Well you…not available not available at this time, but thank you for the feedback. ill go back and ask about it

Lorelle: and feedburner too. Is google going to make it easier to report splogs? Copyright violators, its really a pain in the butt. it cannot be done visually it cannot be done by email, it has to be done in print by snail mail.

Matt: noo no no no noo well no

Lorelle:I know it’s a little late but I get an email back that says you have to send it

Matt:No no no no go to the webmaster, okay so lets go to google dot com. okay so webmaster tools and report spam in our index. yeah if youre doin the dmca you have to do that by snail mail right now but if you see a splog , don’t worry about the fact that its copyright, worry about the fact that its spam cuz spam is my team and I think we are relatively fast on off topic stuff we care about that we want to kill it so this is a better way to do it so . It’s really nice because this is not just a web forum sitting out there that anybody can stump thousands of times a day. This is an authenticated thing where you have a google account so you can build up trust over time and we do give those more weight. Of course we do have to prioritize, so if somebody reports somebody that’s got like no traffic whatsoever versus like a huge guy we might look at the huge guy first. But this is a fantastic way to report spam.

Lorelle: (inaudible…can you send me an email back saying I have…)

Matt: okay that’s different I think that’s the dmca or the trademark, stuff like that. this is the one I would go with. Yeah yeah you can use adsense, you can report spam that way but I would.. mmm good. One hand in the back yeah?
audience member: (inaudible..when should I use index no follow….)

Matt:What I would try to do instead-the question was there are sometimes multiple paths to a post you can put ?= pe111 you can do the post name, you can have the archive, you can do all sorts of stuff other than using no effects and a follow, I personally would see if you can figure out so the ht access with the redirects so that the 301 redirected the aliases to the URl that you prefer.

audience member: (inaudible)

Matt:Yeah its certainly fine to use no index, that’s a tag that says don’t use this page and then follow which says do follow this link, so don’t index this page to follow this page it works well O.K. so some people are getting a little antsy so anybody that wants to one more what do you think matt? We got time, okay anyone that needs to leave its O.K. I am not gonna get my feelings hurt

audience member:right so I heard you say when you index a blog my question is: do you look at anything else on the blogother than like tag lines, tag for the feeds or is there some type of meta tag key word?

Matt: Yeah we look at the entire content of the page now one thing we don’t rely on as much is the meta description tag. meta tags are not really seen by users that much so we tend not to give them a lot of weight but we do look at categories, sidebars,navigation things on the side all of that all of that stuff the whole content of the page .so all the tags definitely yeah if you look at my blog. uh I will often have uhh I

audience member: do they have the same weight to the search engines?

Matt:It sort of depends navigation or boiler plate we might not count it quite as much, O.K. my blog has crashed. But in general we will count the entire content of your page pretty well. What I advise you to do is use the keywords in the content somewhere in the post, that’s really what you want to rank for that’s a good question

audience member:(inaudible…”Matt, do you have any resources for… google keyword search engines …yadda yadda when you’re not spamming when you’re still targeted things like that…)

Matt: no no I cant think of it man. Whenever I do my post I try to keep my keywords in the back of my mind so ill use slight variants and stuff like that a lot of good bloggers do that uhh if you read some of the A-listers you’ll notice they sort of vary their text a little, they use slightly different words just to sort of catch. It never comes off as false or fake or anything like that and its more like when you see five lines like 70 words all repeated cheap vacation homes in Nevada, cheap vacation homes in Miami, cheap you know like that.thats where it really tends to go overboard

audience member:I have always heard that page title is definitely the most important thing not of the post of your page umm how would it be to would it then be important to write an extra field into your WordPress blog so you could set the page title to something different other your blog post cuz if you have the post title is “And he’s wrong again” but the post is about George Bush and you don’t get to the word george bush until the third paragraph then I was told that the next thing that you look at is the first 200 characters of the post.

Matt:No its not a hard limit like that but def if you can get the keywords you know closer more in the title that helps a lot you know the you know journalist write in this reverse triangular style where they get the most important words in the first paragraph and it sounds so great to do funky headlines like “And He’s wrong again”, but when you try to find that post about how George Bush is wrong, you don’t remember “and he is wrong again”, you know so I would just go for something that is a little newspapery and say looks like George Bush was wrong again Now if you want to do and he was wrong again, that is totally fine just use it in the first you know sentence or two so don’t just bury your story in some sense is my advice

audience member: Are we better or worse off altering the content we send googlebot so like changing the title or the…
Matt: So the question is are we better off altering the content we send to the googlebot? No you’re not. That’s called cloaking and that can get ya kicked out of the index for a long long time. Just write with users and search engines in mind it is good practice because the users land on a page they really like and google does a pretty good job of indexing things and finding synonyms and stuff. If you only have the word car, we can still return it you know like the word automobile let me show you guys a quick tip if you show if you do (?word) help. We wont even, we wont just search for hep were also holding problems, faq’s, support, so google knows about these synonyms underneath the hood. If you only have the word help, and somebody searched for support we might be able to still return your page but its better if you include the words directly, that way we don’t have to do as much work as much guessing about whether your page might be good but definitely don’t do different things for user and search engines that’s advanced stuff and we will get you kicked out of the index for sure yeah? yeah if we find it
Audience member: You just mentioned basically exactly my question

Matt: Woo Hoo

Audience member: You were talking about, you have key words in the back of your head right, so, you talked about synonyms too in your post and changes in your url or title. Where here you’re saying, no really google is smart enough to do this for you.

Matt: So google wants to return the best web results. Most webmasters are not as smart as you guys, right? They’re just not. They’re not as savvy, so they just write whatever they’re going to write. So google has to adapt to the way the web is. That’s why we have synonyms and all this stuff underneath, the umm, underneath the hood. Now, there’s a huge difference between a football coach and a coach purse, and if we have to infer that difference, you know football coach vs. coach purse, for coach, it’s more likely we’ll get it wrong. So if you give us some help, if you us give a little bit of a safety net, a margin of error by including these words, we can be a little more sure that it’s really about those words, but we’ve been known to be able to re-write some queries like pictures of Bellagio to overhead view of Bellagio pool and stuff like that. So we’ll keep trying to return great search results, it’s just whatever help you can give us definitely gives us that start.
(pointing) All right you in the back.

Audience member: (inaudible question)

Matt: Wooooo, umm….42. No, it’s kind of interesting because I’ve gotten letters from blackhat spammers, like really good blackhat spammers. I got one in March that really warmed my heart, and he essentially said I can’t make enough money sustainably, reliably enough with black hat so reluctantly I’m switching to whitehat and that was great, he was like grrrrrr. I have to give up my 2.5 terra-byte server with all the anagrams i found on the web. Yeah, rock on! You know? So there are people who are going to try to cheat, we’ll do our best to catch them, and please help us with spam reports if you see them as well, but that’s what we want is all whitehats. So the best advice is to not so much worry about the outcome, but make great compelling content and come up with some hook, right, some social engineering, the gimmick, the angle that’s going to make your stuff go viral, the lolcat builder, the stuff that’s really going to make people send your link around. That is just to die for.

Audience member: (inaudible question)

Matt: Ok, so if you want to get advanced it’s like super duper advanced I would just use this much code, if you want to go for it, feel free. Good question, OK.

Matt Mullenweg: Last question. So everyone in blog optimization panel, people talk a lot about (inaudible section)..and I’m sure there are some friends here that have been approached by people saying I’ll pay you five hundred a month if you link to me and things like that, what is your opinion?

Matt Mullenweg: Ohh, an easy question to end up on. I’m glad you asked that, it’s really interesting. I think it’s very cool that WordPress even says that you can’t have paperpost on Wordress. You know if you read the terms of service on WordPress.com, it even highlights that in blue if I remember that correctly and you also get a treat if you read the terms of service very carefully, a little easter egg in there. So in general if you want to sell links make sure that they don’t effect search engines. There are tons of ways to do that. You can do a link through a url that re-directs and then robot that text out, you can use java script, you can use the no follow tag, we don’t care how you do it. But if you’re selling links or selling page rank that directly effects search engines, then you’re in some sense kind of diluting the pool and it makes it harder for other people to be found for the words they’re trying to show up for if you’re selling those words to somebody else. So selling links, buying links is against our guidelines and we do take action against that.

Matt Mullenweg: Thank you so much for coming out.

End of Transcript.

This took about 20 man ours from four different people over the past three days. Thank you to my wife and Jaque for working in the middle of the night! If you see errors, or know what you or someone said that has been left blank due to being inaudible, please leave the correction as a comment and I will fix it. Matt, what did you say about your T-shirt?

Also, Alex Chiu. Please take no offense to this post. I am simply reporting on what Matt said. I have actually already purchased a set of immortality rings from you!
Huge thanks to John Pozadzides at One Mans Blog for spending the entire time at Wordcamp up in the balcony filming everything and putting the video of this talk on his site. Thank you for the invaluable resource.
… means that that we could not understand what they were saying.
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