Matt Cutts Interview Recapped

• Posted by B Jones on January 31st, 2006 - Comment on this Post »

Well, one thing I can say that was great about tonight’s Matt Cutts interview was that Greg Boser didn’t hold back any punches like a lot of the previous contests. There was plenty of direct questioning. The only sidestepping going on tonight was by Cutts.

SandBox
The discussion about the sandbox just confirmed my ideas that time/ age is not the only factor that determines whether sites are sandboxed. Keyword Difficulty is one thing that Cutts definitely agreed is directly linked to the sandbox effect. Basically, for anew site to get out of the sandbox, it has to somehow gain trust as being a legit site. That is probably a combination of age, links, site quality, and other factors.

In my opinion, the best part of the interview was the discussion of the LinkCondom site (This was a test done by making a new page on a new domain, and then making an exact copy of that site on a subdomain of an older established site. The older, established site outranked the original site in Google). One cool point that Matt brought up when talking about the ranking of the new domain was that, How “Real World” is the site? Sure, the site is a joke, but there were lots of links pointing to it. Cutts made it sound like it was obvious why Greg’s copycat subdomain linkcondom.webguerrilla.com/out ranked the original site linkcondom.com in the serps, but his explanation didn’t really make a lot of sense.

BigDaddy
One more data center (216.239.51.104) has been updated with the BigDaddy algorithm. All data centers should be showing BigDaddy results by mid march, or maybe a little later.

According to Cutts, BigDaddy �lays the framework for lots of good forward progress in the future�. Also talked about improvement with redirection and canonicalization issues (as we�ve heard before).

SEO Contests
Basically Cutts said that SEO contests after the nigritude ultramarine are irrelevant because the novelty is gone. That may be true for Matt, but since he won�t talk about any algorithmic issues, SEO contests are one of the best ways we have to learn about how Google�s algorithms are working.

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