1. Hi.
I wanted to take a minute and talk a little bit about searchengine optimization and spam, and answer
the question doesGoogle consider SEO to be spam?And the answer is no.We don't consider SEO to be
spam.Now a few really tech savvy people mightget angry at that.So let me explain in a little more
detail.SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.And essentially it just means trying to make sure that
your pages are well represented within search engines. And there's plenty an enormous amount-- of
white hat, great quality stuff thatyou can do as a search engine optimizer.You can do things like making
sure thatyour pages are crawlable. So you want them to be accessible.You want people to be able to
find them justby clicking on links.And in the same way, search engines can find them just byclicking on
links.You want to make sure that people use the right key words.If you're using industry jargon or lingo
that noteverybody else uses, then a good SEO can help you findout, oh, these are key words that you
should have beenthinking about. You can think about usability, and trying to make sure thatthe design
of the site is good.That's good for users and for search engines.You can think about how to make your
site faster.Not only does Google use site speed in our rankings as one of the many factors that we use in
our search rankings.But if you can make your site run faster, that can also makeit a much better
experience.So there are an enormous number of things that SEOs do,everything from helping out with
the initial sitearchitecture and deciding what your site should look like,and the url structure, and the
templates, and all that sort of stuff, making sure that your site is crawlable, allthe way down to helping
optimize for your return on investment.So trying to figure out what are the ways that you aregoing to
get the best bang for the buck, doing AB testing,trying to find out, OK, what is the copy that converts,
allthose kinds of things.There is nothing at all wrong with all ofthose white hat methods.Now, are there
some SEOs who go further than we would like?Sure.And are there some SEOs who actually try to
employ blackhat techniques, people that hack sites or that key wordstuff and just repeat things or that
dosneaky things with redirects?Yeah, absolutely.But our goal is to make sure that we return the
bestpossible search results we can.And a very wonderful way that search engine optimizers canhelp is
by cooperating and trying to help search enginesfind pages better.So SEO is not spam.SEO can be
enormously useful.SEO can also be abused.And it can be overdone.But it's important to realize that we
believe, in an idealworld, people wouldn't have to worry about these issues.But search engines are not
as smart as people yet.We're working on it.We're trying to figure out what people mean.We're trying to
figure out synonyms, and vocabulary, andstemming so that you don't have to know exactly the
rightword to search for what you wanted to find.But until we get to that day, search engine optimization
canbe a valid way to help people find what they're looking forvia search engines.We provide webmaster
guidelines ongoogle.comwebmasters.There's a free webmaster forum.There are free webmaster
tools.There's a ton of HTML documentation.So if you search for SEO starter guide, we've written
abeginner guide where people can learn more about searchengine optimization.But just to be very

2. clear, there are many, many validways that people can make the world better with SEO. It's not the case
that sometimes you'll hear SEOs are criminals.SEOs are snake oil salesmen.If you find a good person,
someone that you can trust,someone that will tell you exactly what they're doing,the sort of person
where you get good references, or you'veseen their work and it's very helpful, and they'll explainexactly
what they're doing, they canabsolutely help your website.So I just wanted to dispel that
misconception.Some people think Google thinks all SEO is spam.And that's definitely not the case.There
are a lot of great SEOs out there.And I hope you find a good one to help with your website.
Mar Cutt
Maile Ohye:
Hi, I'm Maile Ohye. I'm a developer programs tech lead at Google. I've been at Google
since 2005 working with our
search and our webmaster tools teams. But if I were a consultant for your startup, here's all the advice I would
give in under 10 minutes. This talk is aimed for companies who have their main content below about 50 pages.
For those sites that are looking to rank for thousands of unrelated keywords, like an ecommerce site or a news
agency, you might wanna invest more time with SEO. My objective for this talk
is to provide you the basics in the most efficient manner possible and to help you feel assured that you're not
doing something totally wrong related to search, and last, to provide pointers for more information. The first
thing to do with your domain is to decide whether you want visitors to see the dub, dub, dub version or the non
dub, dub, dub version. At which point your 301 redirect users from your non preferred to your preferred version.
Now, many large corporations, like Google and Facebook, actually keep the dub, dub, dub version, but you're free
to do whichever you want. The reason why we use a 301 and not a 302 is because a 301 is a permanent redirect
and that way it signals to applications like search engines, to actually transfer all those indexing properties from
the source to the target. The next step is to verify ownership of your site in Webmaster tools. And I don't just say
this because I work with the team, but I think this is really valuable. I encourage you to sign up for email
forwarding. Email forwarding allows Google, when we have any message for you, like when we think you might
have been hacked or we think your site is hosting malware, or we're having trouble crawling your site and we
found a high number of unreachable URLs. So any of those messages can be forwarded to Google Webmaster
Tools and if you have email forwarding enabled, it can be forwarded directly to the inbox that you check every
day. One more research tip is to perform a background check on your domain. For example, if it was
previouslyowned by spammers then you're not going to rank very well now. So, one good way to check is to look
at the keywords listed in Webmaster tools for your site and see if you see any unwanted words there. Also, you
can see if you're indexed by performing a site colon search with your domain. And if you see any problems the
Webmaster guidelines can be found at this URL. And if you have questions about penalties or reconsideration
requests and that entire process, my friend Tiffany Oberoi has a great interview listed here. I'd like to highlight
the fetch as Googlebot feature in Webmaster tools. It's a great feature cause you give us a URL and then we'll
perform a crawl as Googlebot, and you can see exactly whether we've been redirected appropriately and exactly
what content we download. An additional part of this feature, and I think this is really useful, is that you can

3. actually tell us to not just crawl but to submit to index for that URL. And this way, any time you update a page or
you create an entirely new page, you can trigger that entire process to happen by Google and have it available to
searchers even faster. My next advice is to include analytics code whether it's Google analytics or another
provider. Now you wanna start collecting this data even if you're not ready to use it because once you hire
someone it's better to have some historical information about your site. The next part is the strategy in your site
design. You'll want to create a great experience for all your visitors and their different personas. So, consider your
customers. Also your investors and what content will they see? Or even the press. Some questions to ask when it
comes to site strategy are utility. Does our site design meet the needs of each persona and does each persona
have a great experience? Navigation, if a searcher lands on a child page, and that's common with search results
they don't funnel directly through your homepage all the time, can they figure out where they are? And can they
easily navigate to where they want to be? Another question is about whether or not your site is focused. Does
each page contain one logical topic that's obvious to visitors? It's common with startups that because you're tight
on time and resources, that as you collect more and more information, you just add that to existing pages and
make those extremely long forcing users to scroll. But, instead, think about your site design and if that should be
broken up into separate pages. The next step, and this is especially helpful for Startups, is to define your
conversion whether that means for "group foo" visitors to sign up for the newsletter or to contact bizdev lead or
to try your product, you want to have a relevant conversion possible on every page. Like a call to action. And not
force users to make extra clicks. When it comes to your copy or the actual information that you have on each
page, it's great to include relevant keywords naturally in your text. These keywords are like query terms that
normal people would use to find your product or your business. So, for example, companies might call themselves
as selling athletic footwear but in your actual copy it's better to include terms like running shoes which is what
people actually search for. One more thing I wanted to mention about the copy on your pages is to answer your
visitors or the personas questions that they might have. For example, is the product reputable? Perhaps show
reviews or let other users review. Or if a user might ask, "What if this product doesn't work" then explain the
customer satisfaction policy. Every page should include a unique topic, a unique title as that can be displayed in
search results, a unique meta description which might be displayed as the snippet and then for non-dynamic sites,
this is just a best practice, but it's good to have keywords in the filename, lowercase and hyphen separated. And
then, of course, descriptive anchor text for every link whether you're linking internally or externally to another
site. So here's anchor
text that could use some improvement. For more information on our product
specifications, click here. Click here is not that descriptive. Better way to have it would be, for more information
please read our product specifications. So that's what you wanna aim for. A good example of a site that has a
unique topic on each page as well as a unique title and descriptive anchor text, can be showing with this search
result for NASA. Now, NASA doesn't only have their homepage shown, but also has generated site links. These site
links algorithmically by Google but they can influenced by great site design, having a unique title as well as great
anchor text. I'll quickly cover some potential pitfalls. Please do not hire a rogue or shady SEO. If they guarantee
any rankings it is too good to be true. Please don't participate in link schemes or buying links for the purpose of
passing PageRank. And last, I know it's great to have a fancy site but try not to focus so much on site fanciness
that you don't actually have indexable and searchable text. Another thing to consider about your site is the page
low time. I've noticed a lot of Startups don't necessarily have time to focus on this. But, it's good to know that

4. Akamai actually did a study of ecommerce sites and found that 2 seconds is the threshold for ecommerce sites
acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half second. In general, the longer your page takes to load, the more
likely it is that users can click away. Now, let's talk about ranking. Check that you rank for your company name.
Hopefully number once was site links. If you want to rank for other terms, you can use Webmaster tools' search
queries. And, I put this link earlier, but here's the link to a video on using Webmaster tools. Then, get involved.
For Startups it might be the case that no one searches for your new kind of product or service, so you have very
low query volume. At that point, you could prioritize, finding a potential audience or community through existing
forums, blogs or social media sites. Know that, to rank well and to stay on top, provide an awesome product or
service. And then, generate buzz. Startups often ask me about social media marketing and whether they should
invest their time. Well, I think that social media is terrific and one big reason is that rather than just having an
avenue of users coming through search, this really diversifies your approach and you can get visitors from
different sources. But here are a few tips. First of all, think holistically. So, you might create an identity on key
sites, and then participate. But, remember, you eventually wanna connect users to an entry point of conversion.
So think about that entire user experience from a social media site directly to conversion on your site. Also, and
this is fairly obvious, but focus your energy where your audience hangs out. And last, play to your authentic
strengths, it's likely that your company has limited resources. So, if your CEO likes to tweet, then go ahead and let
them, or if you have a salesperson who really enjoys Facebook then that's terrific, or if you have a developer
who's already on Google Plus or Stack Overflow then have them represent your company and interact with the
community there. My last takeaway is this, even with great advertising and terrific marketing, valuable conversion
still happens on your site. So please, stay focused and make sure you're ready.
Thanks so much for your time.
MATT CUTTS: Hi, everybody.
We got a really interesting and very expansive question from RobertvH in Munich.RobertvH wants to know--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 time lines, frequencies, priorities, indexing and filtering processes within
the databases, et cetera? OK.
So that's basically just like, tell me everything about Google. Right? That's a really expansive question. It covers a
lot of different ground. And in fact, I have given orientation lectures to engineers when they come in. And I can
talk for an hour about all those different topics, and even talk for an hour about a very small subset of those pics.
So let me talk for a while and see how much of a feel I can give you for how the Google infrastructure works, how
it all fits together, how our crawling and indexing and serving pipeline works. Let's dive right in. So there's three
things that you really want to do well if you want to be the world's best search engine. You want to crawl the web
comprehensively and deeply.
You want to index those pages.
And then you want to rank or serve those pages and return

5. the most relevant ones first.
Crawling is actually more difficult
than you might think.
Whenever Google started, whenever I joined back in
2000, we didn't manage to crawl the web for something
like three or four months.
And we had to have a war room.
But a good way to think about the mental model is we
basically take page rank as the primary determinant.
And the more page rank you have-- that is, the more
people who link to you and the more reputable those people
are-- the more likely it is we're going to discover your
page relatively early in the crawl.
In fact, you could imagine crawling in strict page rank
order, and you'd get the CNNs of the world and The New York
Times of the world and really very high page rank sites.
And if you think about how things used to be, we used to
crawl for 30 days.
So we'd crawl for several weeks.
And then we would index for about a week.
And then we would push that data out.
And that would take about a week.
And so that was what the Google dance was.
Sometimes you'd hit one data center that had old data.
And sometimes you'd hit a data center that had new data.
Now there's various interesting tricks

6. that you can do.
For example, after you've crawled for 30 days, you can
imagine recrawling the high page rank guys so you can see
if there's anything new or important that's hit on the
CNN home page.
But for the most part, this is not fantastic.
Right?
Because if you're trying to crawl the web and it takes you
30 days, you're going to be out-of-date.
So eventually, in 2003, I believe, we switched as part
of an update called Update Fritz to crawling a fairly
interesting significant chunk of the web every day.
And so if you imagine breaking the web into a certain number
of segments, you could imagine crawling that part of the web
and refreshing it every night.
And so at any given point, your main base index would
only be so out of date.
Because then you'd loop back around and you'd refresh that.
And that works very, very well.
Instead of waiting for everything to finish, you're
incrementally updating your index.
And we've gotten even better over time.
So at this point, we can get very, very fresh.
Any time we see updates, we can usually
find them very quickly.
And in the old days, you would have not just a main or a base

7. index, but you could have what were called supplemental
results, or the supplemental index.
And that was something that we wouldn't crawl and refresh
quite as often.
But it was a lot more documents.
And so you could almost imagine having really fresh
content, a layer of our main index, and then more documents
that are not refreshed quite as often, but there's a lot
more of them.
So that's just a little bit about the crawl and how to
crawl comprehensively.
What you do then is you pass things around.
And you basically say, OK, I have crawled a large fraction
of the web.
And within that web you have, for example, one document.
And indexing is basically taking things in word order.
Well, let's just work through an example.
Suppose you say Katy Perry.
In a document, Katy Perry appears right
next to each other.
But what you want in an index is which documents does the
word Katy appear in, and which documents does the word
Perry appear in?
So you might say Katy appears in documents 1, and 2, and 89,
and 555, and 789.
And Perry might appear in documents number 2, and 8, and

8. 73, and 555, and 1,000.
And so the whole process of doing the index is reversing,
so that instead of having the documents in word order, you
have the words, and they have it in document order.
So it's, OK, these are all the documents that a
word appears in.
Now when someone comes to Google and they type in Katy
Perry, you want to say, OK, what documents might match
Katy Perry?
Well, document one has Katy, but it doesn't have Perry.
So it's out.
Document number two has both Katy and Perry, so that's a
possibility.
Document eight has Perry but not Katy.
89 and 73 are out because they don't have the right
combination of words.
555 has both Katy and Perry.
And then these two are also out.
And so when someone comes to Google and they type in
Chicken Little, Britney Spears, Matt Cutts, Katy
Perry, whatever it is, we find the documents that we believe
have those words, either on the page or maybe in back
links, in anchor text pointing to that document.
Once you've done what's called document selection, you try to
figure out, how should you rank those?
And that's really tricky.

9. We use page rank as well as over 200 other factors in our
rankings to try to say, OK, maybe this document is really
authoritative.
It has a lot of reputation because it has
a lot of page rank.
But it only has the word Perry once.
And it just happens to have the word Katy somewhere else
on the page.
Whereas here is a document that has the word Katy and
Perry right next to each other, so there's proximity.
And it's got a lot of reputation.
It's got a lot of links pointing to it.
So we try to balance that off.
You want to find reputable documents that are also about
what the user typed in.
And that's kind of the secret sauce, trying to figure out a
way to combine those 200 different ranking signals in
order to find the most relevant document.
So at any given time, hundreds of millions of times a day,
someone comes to Google.
We try to find the closest data center to them.
They type in something like Katy Perry.
We send that query out to hundreds of different machines
all at once, which look through their little tiny
fraction of the web that we've indexed.
And we find, OK, these are the documents that

10. we think best match.
All those machines return their matches.
And we say, OK, what's the creme de la creme?
What's the needle in the haystack?
What's the best page that matches this query across our
entire index?
And then we take that page and we try to show it with a
useful snippet.
So you show the key words in the context of the document.
And you get it all back in under half a second.
So that's probably about as long as we can go on without
straining YouTube.
But that just gives you a little bit of a feel about how
the crawling system works, how we index documents, how things
get returned in under half a second through that massive
parallelization.
I hope that helps.
And if you want to know more, there's a whole bunch of
articles and academic papers about Google, and page rank,
and how Google works.
But you can also apply to-there's jobs@google.com, I think, or google.com/jobs, if
you're interested in learning a lot more about how search
engines work.
OK.
Thanks very much.