Matt Cutts Joins the SES San Jose SEO Site Clinic

Google’s Matt Cutts has made a surprise appearance here today in the SEO Site Clinic at SES San Jose 2009 along with Web Guerilla’s Greg Boser and . SEO Site Clinic’s are basically free open forums here at SES where site owners and businesses can receive free feedback from these SEO experts and ESPECIALLY Matt Cutts.

By the way, Matt is sporting a new harido this week, a shaved head AND missing goat tee. I hear there is a funny story behind it, and hopefully we’ll have more info on that to come.

I’ve stepped in while the team is reviewing TeamQuest.com, picking apart their homepage mission statement, or atleast the text that they use to define their homepage and entire website. “Are people searching for these terms?”

Matt Cutts recommends putting together little focus groups of relevant users and customers and asking them about what terms and words they use to define your service. Those words should be used to define your site, and can then be used as the foundation of building out a keyword research and SEO implementation strategy.

Looking at TeamQuest.com’s business blog, it also seems that the blog source code includes a “no follow/no index”. One reason is because developers will put a no index / no follow on their dev version and then launch it without reviewing the code and taking this out. Don’t make that mistake.

Next Site : CheapAirportParking.ORG

Matt says look into rebranding with a more brandable domain name which may be more improtant for the long haul … distinguishing yourself from the “scuzzy underbelly” of sites which try to position themselves as spam or even pose as a real airport site.

Note : Is this a foreshadowing of the way Google treats brands vs. “search term” oriented domains?

Cutts says that the site has too many NoFollow links … why does the FAQ page use a Rel=”no follow” if its full of tight content. Boser says disallow the links when the Google bots visit the site, with a dasdarly smile. Matt Cutts replies that this is a good way to get yourself delisted from Google.

Note : Don’t use NoFollow to PageRank sculpt, Google wants content, feed it to them.

The conversation then turns to usability issues then the aspect of backlinks is brought up.

“Buying links is bad”

Now the conversation heats up. “How do you feel if Google does not penalize link buying.”

Matt says “If you are buying links, we can dig into it in a lot of ways. There are many ways to get links without buying them.”

Greg says the best way to get quality links is to have Matt Cutts bust you, then he links to you and you get all of his juice. Matt Cutts counters with something like “I have developed ways for those links not to carry value”.

Conversation Turns to Domaining

Domaining and IP Tip : Cutts says that you can have a large number of domains, but it makes much more sense to have less, and build them up. Therefore, they are more powerful.

If you’re going to spam with multiple sites, don’t do it with obvious domains or sites … like hyphenated domains or “dot infos”.

Cutts says it’s fine to have multiple domains … just register them and then 301 redirect them to your main domain.

Note : If the site you acquire or build has equity, that site’s equity will redirect as well with the 301.