It’s not often that the world’s number one search engine gives specific information to site owners and SEOs on search engine optimisation issues. Although Google maintains a friendly and helpful attitude when dealing with the SEO industry, advice is usually of the vague kind. Recently, SEO professionals were given a bit more insight with a live video stream from Matt Cutts.
Cutts’ chat provided deeper insight into a few of Google’s initiatives, and a lot of information that could help your search engine optimisation plan:
1. Tags are lessening in worth – at least from Google’s point of view. Cutts recommended that site owners only use rel=canonical and rel=nofollow tags only when necessary because of hacker activity and diminishing effect, among other things.
2. Owners are not going to be told about blocked sites. Knowing when your site has been blocked by target users would be an incredibly handy thing for SEO. Unfortunately, according to Cutts, Google has no plans to include a ‘number of times blocked’ section on its Webmaster Tools. Blocks will be yet another thing to consider should your rankings go down, and obviously the best way to avoid having to deal with this is to prevent them. Talk to us at SEO Consult Australia about preventing users from blocking your site.
3. ‘+ 1′ will be taken into account in rankings. On the plus side, positive votes in the form of ‘+ 1′ clicks are going to be taken into account in your rankings. This means that while it will be difficult to detect when you’re doing badly, it’s easier to promote yourself when you’re doing well.
As has been the case for many years, Google’s advice is to stick with what genuinely works for your site users, rather than what you think will appeal to Google via SEO. Bringing it back to the user perspective is becoming even more important.
