Search Engine Optimization

part 1 | part 2

About Matt Cutts | Blog

Does the position of keywords in the URL affect ranking?

To clarify the question, does it help in any way if the keyword goes:

example.com/keyword/London

or

example.com/London/keyword

Matt’s answer is – keywords in the URL definitely help a little, but just as a bit. As far as the position, do not stress about it too much. Make sure the keyword you want is there and leave it at that. Focus energy on content and link building.

Do site load times have an impact on Google rankings?

The answer given to the question on April 28, 2009 is NONE. Quote from Matt: “What might happen in the future, I don’t know”. Matt also states the obvious, is if a website takes a year to load up that Google cant even fetch it, then obviously it will affect the rankings, however for now speed has not ranking impact.

The answer to the same question, but with regards to Adwords is different. Here’s a quote http://searchengineland.com/google-adds-page-load-time-to-quality-score-algorithm-13513

A Webmaster World thread tipped both Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Roundtable (that’s me) off on the fact that Google has added an additional quality score factor to the AdWords ranking algorithm. The new factor is page load time. If your destination URL is a very slow loading page, then Google will give you a poor “load time grade.” The load time grade will be part of your quality score and if you have a poor load time grade, then it can impact your AdWords rankings.

Does anchor text carry through 301 redirects?

The answer is yes, however Google reserves the right to decide how it passes weight on redirects. Matt explains that Google logs all the redirects to a website, just as links, and if there’s an abnormal number of redirects it might set off red flags.

Another part of the question was, what if all or most of the links are redirects. How does Google treat it? Matts answer is – it would be very abnormal and probably fall into the same box as manipulation for the sake of rankings, so don’t do it.

What’s a preferred site structure?

The question is – how does Google treat content buried deep within the root of the website. For example:

http://www.optimization.ca/Learning/search-engine-optimization/link-popularity-enhancement.html

Matts answer is not SEO advice, but rather conversion rate advice. He recommends putting important information at the root page, in the most obvious spot, since the more click people have to do, the less number of visitors will do it. Brian Eisenberg of Future Now always talks about the 3 click rule, is that anything past 3 clicks from the initial visit will not be discovered, so make sure to put the important stuff at the root, and just minimize number of clicks in general.

As far as SEO advice goes, I personally recommend putting your content closer to the root, since some of the content I buried in our website about a year ago has not been crawled yet, event though site ranks well on SERPs.

part 1 | part 2