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Is there any advice that you want to change from what you’ve said in the past?

Is there any advice that you want to change from what you’ve said in the past? - answered by Matt Cutts

Matt's answer:

Today’s question comes from Matt Cutts in Mountain View. Matt asks, Is there any advice you want to change from what you’ve said in the past? So this is great in that someone is saying– OK, I’m saying– is there anything that you have said over the last several years that is now obsolete or that needs to be updated? And I can think of two things off the top of my head. The first one is I did a video back in May of 2010 that said we don’t use, for example, Twitter, at all in our rankings other than as a normal web page and the links are treated completely like normal web pages. There’s been a new article– Danny Sullivan did the research and we worked with him to make sure that it was accurate– that says that in some cases we do look at, for example, how reputable a particular person on Twitter might be, and we can use that in our rankings in some ways. So that’s one thing to be aware of. The other thing to be aware of is really esoteric, but since, you know, people might be interested. SafeSearch, whenever I wrote the very first version way back years and years and years ago, whenever you’re not able to crawl something– so for example, if it’s blocked by robots.txt– since people have deliberately said, I would like a safe version, a family safe version of Google, we would say, if we haven’t been able to crawl it then we don’t know whether it’s porn or not. So we’re not going to be able to return it to users. So the Library of Congress or whitehouse.gov or Metallica, at one point, Nissan had blocked various pages from being crawled in the search engines. And so to be safe, we said, you know what? We don’t know whether that’s family safe or not, so we won’t return it. Luckily, the SafeSearch team has gotten much more sophisticated and better and more robust since I wrote the original version, so now that’s something that we might change. If something is forbidden from being crawled, but for whatever reason we think that it might be safe, now we’ll start to return it within our search results. So that’s just one thing to be aware of. Those are couple changes that have happened that I know of where SEO is an always changing field and it takes a lot of research to keep up on all of the latest trends. But I just wanted to highlight those two things because those are two things that have changed since the last time someone asked me about it. Thanks very much for the question.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

 

Original video: