What does it mean to create great, user focused content? How do you get started, and what are some great questions to ask yourself? Learn more about creating great sites that perform well in Google search results at Webmaster Academy: … [Read more...]
What steps can I take to diagnose a drop in ranking?
When you notice a drastic drop in your rankings and traffic from Google, what process would you take for diagnosing the issue? Ryan, Dearborn, MI Learn how to diagnose ranking issues: www.google.com Site: search and other operators: www.google.com … [Read more...]
Ranking reports
Matt Cutts discusses ranking reports. … [Read more...]
How does Google search work?
Hi Matt, could you please explain how Google's ranking and website evaluation process works starting with the crawling and analysis of a site, crawling timelines, frequencies, priorities, indexing and filtering processes within the databases etc. … [Read more...]
How would a non-optimized site outrank a site which has done SEO?
When analyzing rankings for highly competitive keywords in our industry, we have found sites not as optimized as ours is (on-page), that have few links & little content are still ahead of us. What gives? Why are 'unoptimized' sites ranking so well?" … [Read more...]
Does Google use data from social sites in ranking?
Hello Matt, a recent article of Danny Sullivan suggests that Google uses Twitter and Facebook links as a ranking signal. Can you confirm this? Can you elaborate a little bit more on this? -WebSEOAnalytics Read the article: searchengineland.com Have a … [Read more...]
Can a site’s downtime affect its ranking?
Last year, one of my client's webservers went down for over a day. Would this have affected the site's PageRank at all? Hypothetically, what if this had happened for longer--could it actually drop the site from Google's index? Land Lubber, Colorado … [Read more...]
What signals are used in ranking other than PageRank?
I see so many people asking "Will this increase my PageRank?". Could you tell them *once again* that ranking is not just about "PageRank" but also 200 different signals? And while being there, why don't you tell us about those 200 different signals? … [Read more...]
Can you give us an update on rankings for long-tail searches?
"Many are talking about losses of traffiic with long tail searches: www.webmasterworld.com I was wondering if you could give us an update on what is happening with Google right now? Caffeine update? Algorithm change? Temporary?" Brian, Seattle, WA … [Read more...]
Is speed more important than relevance?
Lumenbeing from Los Angeles asks: "Since we're hearing a lot of talk about the implications of Page Speed, I wonder if Google still cares as much about relevancy? Or are recentness and page load time more important?" … [Read more...]