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Would you rather spend time with a perfectly optimized website or a barrel full of kittens?

Would you rather spend time with a perfectly optimized website or a barrel full of kittens? - answered by Matt Cutts

Matt's answer:

MATT CUTTS: Today’s question comes from jzbecker in Vancouver who asks, would you rather spend time with a perfectly optimized website or a barrel full of kittens? What signals would the kittens give you the made them rank higher than the website in this decision? All right, I’ll admit it. I would rather spend time with a barrel full of kittens. I have two kittens in my life. And I really enjoy hanging out with my cats. So the thing to remember is that kittens have an emotional appeal, right? They tug at your heart strings. So if your website can have some sort of emotional appeal, not just is it perfectly optimizes in terms of my H1s, or how crawlable is it. That’s something that resonates with visitors. They respond to it, they’re more likely to click through, they’re more likely to link on it. Think about a site like Cute Overload. Whenever my wife has been having a bad day, she’s like oh, I need to get a little bit of Cute Overload. So you can even involve kittens in your web design if you can find out the right niche to be optimizing for. But in general, don’t just make a completely rational cold hearted website that is purely functional. If you can throw a little bit of fun in there, a little bit a ball of string on your 404 page, or something that makes people feel there’s a little bit of quirky good humor behind your website, they’re going to be much more likely to like it, link to it, and tell their friends about it.

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

 

Original video: