What exactly does Google think about poorly matched or missing meta title and description tags?

Did you know? Google has the capability to change/modify your site page tags–description/search snippet AND page title– if they can build a better search result…good? bad? ugly?

What do the TITLE and page DESCRIPTION meta tags look like in your page html? Here’s an example:

<title>Buy Bass Fishing Lures Online</title>

<meta name=”description” content=”Search our online catalog and buy bass fishing lures, including crankbaits, spinnerbaits, and neon plastic worms. Blah, blah, blah…”/>

Ideally the title tag shows up as a keyword-optimized top line and the description tag — also keyword-optimized– as the search “snippet”– like this….

In this particular example, when your site is optimized and you’re driving traffic you are potentially well-positioned to rank well for the keyphrase,

buy bass fishing lures

buy bass fishing lures online

or something closely related.

Keyword-optimized page title and description are what Google “looks” for when matching a search query to your content. If your keywords are buried in the page, absent from your title and description tag, OR if you have no tags at all, Google could do one of two things:

1. ignore your content altogether because it fails to match the searcher’s query

OR

2. modify your title tag and search result “snippet” with content snagged from deeper within your page. “They” can replace your lousy or completely absent description tag with something the search engine deems relevant. Matt Cutts calls these “useful titles and useful snippets.” And apparently this has been a Google “policy” for some time.

Yes…they can modify title tags.

Here’s the official lowdown on “Google can modify title and search snippets” from Matt Cutts:

]]> http://pestcontrolseo.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/thanksgiving-to-google-maps/ Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:02:28 +0000 thos003 http://pestcontrolseo.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/thanksgiving-to-google-maps/

Thank you, Thank you, Thank you Matt Cutts for fixing your google maps! (Not sure if he deserves all the credit but he was the google employee that reassured me that this would happen).  I must say that I am very optimistic about google maps and the direction they are heading.  Here are a couple of things you may want to be aware of when it comes to the future of google maps:

1st and most important…

Google Map extends to service areas of businesses!

This is the best news I have had all week!  In fact, Matt Cutts and Google will be receiving thanks in my Thanksgivings giving celebration this week! I had the pleasure of addressing my concern to Matt at Pubcon two weeks ago, thanks to an introduction given by Kate Morris, an SEM Gem.

Matt essentially admitted that google was cleaning up the mess it had accumulated from mining the information that was out there for local search. He assured me that the most recent update in the google maps was that they were now pushing their own information for the map results, not 3rd party info.  I mentioned my concern in that the current maps only showed listings within the actual metro city and that this was not reflective of the service areas of many service companies, (cough “Pest Control companies” cough). Matt assured me that they were aware of this and that they were working to correct this….

Two weeks later I get this…

Phoenix Pest Control Map in Google Maps

So if you notice the map title “Pest Control near Tempe, AZ” … Go through the results and you will notice that the first listing “A” falls right on the town of Tempe.  But “C” Bulwark Exterminating is not within the Tempe city limits… Awwesoooome!

Again… Tempe results show Bulwark Exterminating… not in Tempe… Actual address…

Two weeks ago this search would only give results in Tempe.  Now it gives results of companies that service Tempe but don’t fall within Tempe, AZ.  Thank you Google! FYI I have only experienced this phenomenon in the Phoenix area. But I have high hopes that this will roll out to our cities.

2ndly an update for the San Fransisco maps…

Google is currently beta testing their google maps for advertising:

Search done for San Francisco Attorney

Good? … possibly. What if I were already in the top 7, would I get charged for the click? And when they click on the map the sponsored listings no longer show.  The down side I see to this is that the sponsored listings don’t show the reviews. Reviews are huge for CTR.  I would prefer the sponsored list show my reviews and take you to the google review page. But as I have not tested this yet, I really have no constructive input. Just making you aware of what is on the horizon. Great thing about the internet is that you can always test… the bad thing is that you are always testing.

So as always… “The Future is so Bright that I’ve go to wear shades.” (Yes I am singing in my head.)

What a great day!

Happy Thanksgiving to all!!!

Google software engineer Matt Cutts talking about the scope of SEO in next five years.

Matt Cutts, a software engineer and an eloquent corporate spokesman for Google (s goog), spoke at PubCon earlier this month and later gave a video interview to Web Pro News, in which he said that the speed at which web pages are available might become a factor in SEO moving into 2010. He said that because many within Google consider fastness to be vital to the web, the company is considering making web site speed a factor in calculating page rankings. Those comments have confused and scared many folks as to how speed might impact their businesses.

To be sure, Cutts’ comments don’t offer any details, and it is not even clear if  Google will go down that route. (Matt, can you offer clarifications please?) Still, some are worried that Google is going to turn PageRank into a country club for the rich, and penalize smaller sites because they don’t have high-end hosting facilities. Of course, there is the uneven distribution of backbone connectivity. Many parts of the world are not as well-connected as, say, Asia or the United States, so does that mean this new approach to PageRank could penalize sites hosted in places that don’t have abundant connectivity?

Ken Godskind, chief strategy officer of AlertSite, a web site traffic monitoring service, thinks such a move could have a serious impact on many web sites. “The potential changes at Google mean there will be a REAL business impact for poor web site performance, and conversely, in Google’s words, a bonus for good performance,” he writes on the company blog. “Online organizations will need to look closely at themselves and the other parties that participate in the Web application delivery supply chain to understand and manage this new development in 2010.”

On a personal level, I believe that a faster web is good for everyone.  At some point in our web journeys we have all cursed slow-loading sites, a problem that is only going to increase as the web becomes more intricately intertwined, in the process becoming a patchwork quilt of diverse  services. Performance hiccups at one service can send out ripples of disruption.

Increasingly popular widgets can slow down the performance of even the best web offerings, thus lowering the overall experience. The increased interdependency of various services can often cause disruption. Hours after the news of Michael Jackson’s death spread on the web, many news sites became inaccessible and suffered slowdowns. Those sites didn’t crash but instead were hampered because they were pulling data from ad servers that weren’t prepared for the onslaught of traffic. On our own sites, we have seen things break down when one of our partners suffers an outage or has performance problems.

As a consumer of information, I would say Google giving preference to faster sites doesn’t seem like a bad idea. As a publisher, the high cost of speeding up my web offerings might hurt in the short term, but ultimately it means a better experience for my readers — and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Photo of Matt Cutts at Pubcon 2009 courtesy of PlanetC1 via Flickr

Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking

Hier hoor je het van de master himself.
V: Is Google ooit gebruik maken van de “keywords” meta-tag in zijn web search ranking?
A: In een woord, nee. Google doet verkopen een Google Search Appliance, en dat product heeft de mogelijkheid om meta-tags, die kan onder de trefwoorden meta tag match. Maar dat is een onderneming zoekmachine die volledig los staat van onze belangrijkste zoeken op het web. Onze web search (de bekende zoeken op Google.com dat honderden miljoenen mensen gebruiken elke dag) voorbij trefwoord metatags volledig. Ze gewoon niet enige invloed hebben in onze zoektocht rangschikking op dit moment.

V: Waarom Google maakt gebruik van de keywords metatag?
A: Ongeveer een decennium geleden, zoekmachines beoordeeld pagina’s alleen op de inhoud van webpagina’s, geen zogenaamde “off-page” factoren, zoals de links die naar een webpagina.In die dagen, keyword metatags werd al snel een ruimte waar iemand zou kunnen spul vaak irrelevante zoekwoorden zonder typische bezoekers ooit zien die zoekwoorden. Omdat de keywords metatag zo vaak werd misbruikt, vele jaren geleden begon Google voorbij de trefwoorden meta tag.

V: Betekent dit dat Google negeert alle meta-tags?
A: Nee, Google Ondersteuning verschillende andere meta-tags.Deze meta-tags documenten pagina meer info over diverse meta-tags die we gebruiken. Bijvoorbeeld, we soms gebruik van de ‘description’ meta-tag als de tekst voor onze zoekresultaten fragmenten, zoals dit screenshot laat zien:
Hoewel we soms de beschrijving meta-tag te gebruiken voor de fragmenten laten we zien, we nog steeds geen gebruik maken van de beschrijving meta-tag in onze ranking.

V: Betekent dit dat Google altijd negeren de trefwoorden meta tag?
A: Het is mogelijk dat Google deze informatie in de toekomst zouden kunnen gebruiken, maar het is onwaarschijnlijk. Google heeft genegeerd de trefwoorden metatag jaren en op dit moment zien wij geen noodzaak om dit beleid te veranderen.

Geplaatst door Matt Cutts, Search Quality Team

According to Google’s Matt Cutts, who was interviewed by WebProNews, that may be the case. “Historically, we haven’t had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast,” says Cutts. “It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much.”

It makes sense to me! I know personally when I try to load a slow site, it generally slows my entire computer down which is frustrating and I try to stay away from those kinds of sites. So if Google knew which sites were faster than others that would be great and save me time. It might also push those with slow sites to take some of the “crap” off or call up their web-designer and have them do a re-design that makes their site faster and rank higher in a Google search (and make it more aesthetically pleasing). Being a web-user, and not a web site maintainer/owner, I can’t really see any kind of downside to this.

What do you think?

Google sure seems hung up on the speed of the web these days, and I have to say, I like it. After announcing the SPDY protocol they’re working on to speed up page loading time, it has come out that Google is seriously considering using page loading time as a factor when returning search results. This isn’t some unsubstantiated rumor, either; it comes from none other than Matt Cutts, the high-profile Google employee who works on Google’s web spam team.

Cutts said that the directive to speed up searching comes right from the top, Google’s co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. According to Search Engine Land he said they want searching to be as fast as flipping through a magazine.

At first blush it seems counter to Google’s accuracy goals to favor fast pages over slow pages when a slow page might be more relevant to a user’s search, but I know that I have often not even bothered letting a slow page finish loading when I was busy searching for something specific. If Google can shield me from the slow sites, it will help me find what I’m looking for more quickly.

Google has completed testing on “Caffeine,” a semi-mysterious overhaul of its back-end search infrastructure, and it will soon roll the new platform behind its live search engine.

Google Caffeine

In mid-August, Google unveiled a online sandbox where it invited world+dog to test the new infrastructure, but as noticed by Mashable.com, the sandbox has been replaced by a brief message from the Mountain View Chocolate Factory.

“Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience,” Google’s missive reads. “Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.”

Previously, über-Googler Matt Cutts told The Reg that the new infrastructure was under test in a single data center – though he declined to say which one. A Google spokesman indicates that Caffeine will now be moved to a second data center for live deployment, adding that this will happen “over the next few months.”

In typical Google fashion, the company has been coy about the design of Caffeine. But Matt Cutts acknowledged that it’s built atop a complete revamp of the company’s custom-built Google File System (GFS). Two years in the making, the new file system is known, at least informally, as GFS2.

“There are a lot of technologies that are under the hood within Caffeine, and one of the things that Caffeine relies on is next-generation storage,” Cutts said. “Caffeine certainly does make use of the so-called GFS2.” Caffeine includes other fresh additions to Google’s famously distributed infrastructure, but Cutts declined to describe them.

Speaking with The Reg, Matt Cutts described Caffeine as an overhaul of Google’s search indexing system. “Caffeine is a fundamental re-architecting of how our indexing system works,” he said. “It’s larger than a revamp. It’s more along the lines of a rewrite. And it’s really great. It gives us a lot more flexibility, a lot more power. The ability to index more documents. Indexing speeds – that is, how quickly you can put a document through our indexing system and make it searchable – is much, much better.”

Building a search index is an epic number-crunching exercise. Today, Google handles the task using its proprietary Google File System, which stores the data, in tandem with a distributed technology called MapReduce, which crunches it. But these tools are used across other Google services as well, including everything from search to YouTube.

Looks like there is some news on the upcoming Caffeine rewrite for Google from Matt Cutts (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-caffeine-update/) and I’m very eager to see what this does to shake up the organic search results for customers looking for free online dating sites. My initial reactions to the test period were positive and I saw many of the empty or abandoned dating sites removed from results.

Der Ex-”GoogleGuy” Matt Cutts auf die Frage, ob durch Optimierung von Bildern mittels Google Bildsuche die Zahl der Besuche erhöht werden kann. Die Antwort ist nicht schwer zu erraten:

Ja, klar, man muss Bilder ja nicht unbedingt “qwertz54321.jpg” nennen. Ein sinnvoller Name für ein Foto eines ergonomischen Bürostuhls wäre eben “ergonomischer-buerostuhl.jpg”. Darüber hinaus macht eine entsprechende Bildbeschreibung Sinn, und die Platzierung des Wortes im Fließtext nahe dem gezeigten Bild.

This is really great to read.  Click here if you are thinking about making a blog.

Useful and entertaining video from Google’s Matt Cutts’ presentation at Wordcamp.  Grab a cup of tea and enjoy!

Oft beschweren sich Webmaster, dass ihre Seiten bei Google gelistet werden, obwohl das entsprechend deren robots.txt Dateien nicht gestattet wäre. Google Wizard Matt Cutts erklärt im folgenden Video, was genau passiert, und warum kein Fehler seitens der Suchmaschinen vorliegt.

Zusammengefasst: ein “Disallow” in robots.txt wendet sich an die bots (Crawler) der Suchmaschinen, und teilt ihnen mit, dass die Seite nicht analysiert werden darf. Daran halten sich die bots auch. Damit allein ist aber die Suchmaschinen noch nicht angewiesen, gar nichts über die Seite zu wissen.

Schließlich werden ja auch andere Seiten analysiert, die auf die betreffende Seite mit Linktexten verweisen. Diese Linktexte werden unverändert ausgewertet, und lassen daher manche der gesperrten Seiten in Suchergebnissen auftauchen, obwohl die Seiten selbst nicht analysiert wurden. Nicht analysierte Seiten erkennt man meist daran, dass unter dem Titel in den Suchergebnisseiten kein Beschreibungstext zu lesen ist.

Mit Hilfe des Google Removal Tool bzw. mit Hilfe des “noindex”-Meta-Tags wird die Seite vollständig aus den Google-Suchergebnissen ausgeschlossen, also auch dann, auch wenn von anderen Webseiten auf sie verlinkt wird.

Matt Cutts  belegt in seinem Blog die schon lange bestehende Vermutung, dass die Meta-Tags nicht die Berücksichtigung beim Ranking finden, die oft suggeriert wird. Dies trifft insbesondere auf den Keyword-Tag zu, der keinerlei Beachtung beim Ranking findet. Lediglich die Google Search Appliance wertet Meta Tags aus.

Eine Liste der wenigen, von Google zur Kenntnis genommenen, Meta Tags findet sich auf den WebMaster Tool Seiten.

Not a shocked to anyone that knows anything about search, but it’s nice to see it confirmed by Google, both on the official blog and on Matt Cutt’s blog.  I don’t think I’ve included Meta Keywords on a site in almost 6 years, but from time to time I hear people explain to me that they don’t need an SEO expert, they are doing keywords and descriptions… and I just wish them well.

Einsichten aus dem Goo(gle)inversum

Totale Produktivität, unendliche Energie, ansteckende Begeisterung, strukturierte Arbeitsweise, Erfolg? Wäre das nicht was für Sie? Kommen Sie, geben Sie es ruhig zu. Wollen wir doch alle.

Und landet nicht jeder von uns irgend wann einmal bei einem entsprechenden Buch? So einem “machen Sie dies und dann werden Sie das, vor allem erfolgreich und reich”. Hier nun die ultimative Rettung aller Sich-selbst-Verbesserer, und, wie fast alles Wegweisende kommt das große Geheimnis aus dem Goo(gle)inversum. Diese Erkenntnis wird Ihr Leben verändern – für immer. Die Erleuchtung kommt von Matt Cutts, Googles Gallionsfigur für SEO, dem Mann, der immer wieder zur Produktivitätssteigerung bei SEOs sorgt. Matt sagt:

1. Schritt: Kauf ein Buch! Irgend eines, Hauptsache eines mit guten Rezepten um deine Produktivität, deinen Erfolg zu steigern. Du kannst eines per Zufall aussuchen, es ist egal welches du kaufst. Nimm ein richtig teueres.

2. Schritt: Schau das Buch an und sprich zu dir selbst: “wenn ich XY nicht geregelt bekomme, dann muss ich dieses Buch lesen – zur Strafe! Und wenn ich es auf morgen verschiebe, dann muss ich noch eines kaufen!”

So einfach ist das. Und solche Weisheiten verbreitet Matt Cutts, seines Zeichens Head of Google’s WebSpam-Team. Glaubst du nicht? Schaust du!

Matt Cutts: How to Unlock the Amazing Secret of Unlimited Productivity

All of us could use some help increasing our productivity. So I’m going to share one of my best productivity secrets. This secret can literally CHANGE YOUR LIFE!!! Are you ready?

Step 1. Buy a productivity book. Any productivity book will do.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/secret-to-unlimited-productivity/

Wer jetzt auf die Idee käme, Matt’s anderen Aussagen über … könnten von ähnlicher Qualität sein, nein, nein, alles andere ist wirklich die Wahrheit – watch his lips, für die NLPler auch die Augen, sehr aufschlußreich

Zoekmachine optimalisatie is een vak apart.

SEOlab heeft veel successen bereikt bij het legaal optimaliseren van websites voor de klanten waar we voor werken, wij kennen de “allerlaatste nieuwtjes” om website goed te optimaliseren, graag sturen wij u via email met een referentielijst. Ons doel is om een snel en langdurig resultaat te realiseren, we bereiken dit door zowel de on-page en off-page factoren van uw website aan te pakken.

In questo articolo sul blog ufficiale di Google, Matt Cutts ribadisce ancora una volta che i metatag sono ininfluenti per quanto riguarda il ranking dei siti nelle SERP di Google. In particolare il metatag keywords non determina in alcun modo la rilevanza di un sito per Google rispetto a una determinata chiave di ricerca.

Di seguito, una paciosa videospiegazione

Website owners and webmasters for years have been including the meta keyword tag to help boost rankings on search engines. Meta keywords in the html of the webpage are added to help classify web pages on search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Many of the major search engines have dropped their reliance on meta data and have enhanced their ranking algorithms.  Google engineer Matt Cutts confirmed today that Google doesn’t use the keywords meta tag in web search.

Example Keyword Meta tag:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword1,keyword2″ />

Google uses over 200 factors to rank websites/pages for their search engine results; the keyword meta tag is not one of them. This doesn’t mean this tag is completely useless as other engines may use this tag as one of the factors to rank a web page.