Google’s Matt Cutts Talks Caffeine, PageRank, PuSH, Buzz, and Much More

In case you missed it, WebProNews streamed a live interview with Google's Matt Cutts today from SMX West in Santa Clara. It's hard to narrow down the discussion to a singular topic, but here are some of the things touched upon in the video:

- The status of Google's Caffeine update (nothing's wrong, they're just being careful.)

- Site Speed as a ranking factor - settle down, it's not replacing relevance (and it's independent from Caffeine)

- PageRank - Google's probably not going to rename it, but people do obsess too much over it.

- PuSH - indexing much of the web in real-time

- Coming up with metrics for authority in real-time search

- Google Buzz - Why Matt Cutts likes it, but still uses Twitter as well

- Why does every product that comes out have to be the killer of an existing product?

- SEO vs. social media marketing

- NCAA Basketball and the Kentucky Wildcats

After discussing the above topics, Matt and interviewer Mike McDonald turn to Twitter for audience questions for Matt to answer.

Check out our new live video site at live.webpronews.com for coverage of SMX West, and future events (as well as whatever else we may end up broadcasting). You can also find archived videos there in case you missed any.  

Matt Cutts: Google Probably Won’t Call PageRank Something Else

Update: Matt Cutts says they probably won't rename PageRank. However, he agrees with Peter Norvig that people obsess about it too much.

Original article: Last year, Google quietly got rid of PageRank in Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa had said, "We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it's the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it."

Note: Watch our exclusive interview with Google's Matt Cutts at 1pm Pacific/4pm Eastern at live.webpronews.com.

A lot of people wondered why Google would keep PageRank in the Google Toolbar, where it still sits to this day. Search enthusiast Barry Schwartz of Rusty Brick speculated that Google would not want to remove it because PageRank is "too much of their branding." After some words from Google's Director of Research, Peter Norvig today, however, I'm not so sure that's the case.

Note: Watch Norvig's keynote address here (or view our liveblog of the event), and our exclusive interviw with him here:

Norvig said at SMX today that PageRank is still one thing that is "overhyped," and that Google never felt that it was such a big factor. They have always looked at all available data, combining every available signal and tiring to figure out the best way to combine them.

Norvig also said that it may be time for some re-branding with regard to PageRank. There may be a different term in the pipeline. "There's a technical formula that's PageRank, which is the way of judging the links between pages, and that's just one component of how we rank the pages and you get your final search results. There's all these other things that come in, but they don't have a catchy name. So some people apply PageRank to mean all the components that give you the final ranking, and that's where we get confused. So probably we need some other term for that...We'll get some marketing guys on it."

I don't know how seriously the company is considering this, as Norvig seems to simply be speaking off the cuff, but given the company's repeated emphasis on a lack of emphasis on PageRank, it would not be surprising to see them change the name. However, the problem with that could be, that these same PR-obsessed webmasters would just become obsessed with the re-branded term.

WebProNews will be doing a live interview with Google's Matt Cutts today at 1pm Pacific/4pm Eastern at live.webpronews.com. Perhaps he will offer his thoughts on the subject.

Do you think PageRank needs a different name? What would you call it? Give your suggestions here.

Site Speed Tips for When Google Uses That as a Ranking Factor

Last year, Google's Matt Cutts dropped the bomb (to put it in the exaggerated tone that many took the news in), that Google was considering taking site speed into consideration as one of many potential ranking factors for search results.

Is your site's performance up to snuff? Comment here.

This of course freaked a lot of people out, but as Matt and Google as a whole has maintained, this would not trump relevance. It would be taken more into consideration when there are two sites of relatively equal relevance, but one site loads faster and delivers a better user experience. Matt reiterated this point in an interview we did with him this week at SMX.

WebProNews also chatted with Maile Ohye, Senior Developer Programs Engineer for Google at SMX, about website performance (speed), how that pertains to search rankings and the user experience, and some tips for making sure your site is up to speed, so to speak.

Stream videos at Ustream

As far as site speed as a ranking factor, Ohye pretty much makes the same point as Cutts, and it's probably not going to be something where all of a sudden all of the faster sites are ranking better and the slower ones are doing worse. But it does enhance the user experience, and she refers to a study that found that an optimized site actually increased conversions by 16%. So if you're not optimizing your site's performance for Google, maybe that's a good enough reason on its own.

Watch the video to get some specific advice regarding some simple adjustments you can make to your site that can make a big difference.

If you're one of those freaking out about getting your site performance optimized, you may feel better after hearing what she has to say, and realize that it might not be as big a deal as you thought.

By the way, Cutts also mentioned that the speed thing is completly independent of Caffeine.

Do you think site performance is a manageable attribute of your search engine marketing strategy? Discuss here.

Links Not Always the Best Indicator of Relevance

In a recent video uploaded to Google's Webmaster Central YouTube channel, Matt Cutts talks about creating tags and categories on blogs for SEO purposes. Rather, he discusses how there's not much point in creating them for this reason.

On average, how many tags do you include with your articles/blog posts? Talk to ArisYulianta and Friends....

"Google is pretty good at saying, 'You know what? The first time you say a phrase, it's interesting, and the second time you say a phrase, it's still a little bit useful,'" says Cutts. "After a while, we sort of realized, 'okay, you've said that phrase, you don't have to keep repeating it 8, 9, 10 different times.' So there are certainly some blogs (including some really popular blogs) who have like an entire paragraph full of tags. And they have clearly spent a lot of time, almost as many, you know, minutes writing tags out as they have the actual content of the post. And I always laugh at that because it's not really that needed."

He notes that a lot of the time, the tags are already words that are used in the post, so it won't make that much difference.

Matt appears to be discussing how much the tags will benefit the page the actual content appears on. However, he doesn't really go into the pages that contain listings of the articles contained within those tags, at least with relation to SEO (He does point out that the tag pages can be useful because they can provide a feed for just that category). This is probably because they don't do particularly well in search engines either, which could be because they aren't linked to particularly often.

Google is all about providing users with the most relevant results for the best user experience, and maybe the fact that these kinds of sites aren't often featured near the top of results could be considered an area where Google isn't necessarily delivering the best results.

For example, If I wanted to find all WebProNews SEO articles, there is no better place than our tag page for "SEO" at webpronews.com/tag/seo. There, any user looking to find WebProNews SEO articles would find all of them arranged by date. If I wanted to see all of the Facebook articles Mashable has, I can do that by going to mashable.com/tag/facebook. Yet neither of these pages are returned anywhere near the top for queries like "webpronews SEO articles" or "mashable facebook articles", at least in the results I get (they can vary from user to user). Instead, you might find indvidual articles and results from other sites, with what I would consider to be most relevant pages nowhere in site.

Links are only one of the many factors Google takes into consideration for its rankings, but they are commonly known to be one of the biggest. These tag pages simply highlight the fact that links may not always be the best indicator of relevance.

Note: Our SEO tag page is crawled, and is even featured as one of our "site links" seen by searching for "WebProNews” on Google.

Would you consider there to be a more relevant result for a query like those mentioned above than such tag pages? Do you think Google’s algorithm could be improved in this area? Are links always the best indicator of relevance? Share your thoughts.

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