Google/SEO | Search Engine Optimization

Expect Caffeine after the holidays

November 10th, 2009 Matt Cutts Posted in Google/SEO No Comments »

Back in August we mentioned a developer preview of Caffeine, which is new technology that improves our indexing infrastructure. The feedback on Caffeine has been very positive, so we’re ready to move from the developer preview to the next stage of the roll out: going live with Caffeine at one data center. This means that a small percentage of Google’s users will benefit from the technology behind Caffeine in their regular searches.

I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays. Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over. Most searchers wouldn’t immediately notice any changes with Caffeine, but going slowly not only gives us time to collect feedback and improve, but will also minimize the stress on webmasters during the holidays.

Thanks for all the positive feedback that people have given on Caffeine. If you still want to give us feedback on Caffeine, see the original Google Caffeine post for how to do that.

Export your Google Docs data

October 26th, 2009 Matt Cutts Posted in Google/SEO 1 Comment »

One of my favorite personal blog posts is about not trapping users’ data. In late 2006, Eric Schmidt declared “We would never trap user data.” Many of the major Google properties (search, Gmail, Calendar) make it trivial to export or download your data.

In the past, Google Docs would let you export a single doc at a time, but Google Operating System runs down exactly how to batch export your Google Docs. For each type of document (text document, presentation, spreadsheet, etc.) you can choose what file format to get.

I had about 81 personal docs (~13MB) and it only took about a minute to bundle the files up into a .zip file that my browser automatically downloaded. If you have a ton of files, you can choose to get an email when the .zip file is ready.

I really like this feature. By making it easy to leave Google, I think people are actually less likely to leave Google. Or as Jason Calacanis noted lots of people are happy just to get a backup.

By the way, read more about how Google lets you export your data at http://www.dataliberation.org/ if you’re interested.

One million video views!

October 22nd, 2009 Matt Cutts Posted in Fun, Google/SEO, Movies/Videos 1 Comment »

This year we’ve been making and posting videos on an official webmaster video channel, and earlier today we hit our one millionth video view. Making these little movies has been a ton of fun and we’ve covered dozens of topics for site owners.

We decided to celebrate in a couple ways. First, we added captions to all 150+ videos (over 11 hours of information). That’s important because for movies with captions, you can translate the captions into different languages. Now if you want to watch my videos but see the captions in Portuguese or German or Turkish, you can!

The second way we celebrated is with a fun video. As you may know, I recently lost a bet with my team and they shaved off all my hair. Click to see the 30 second explanation of why I’m bald. But you may not know that my team recorded a video as I lost my hair. Now you can watch and laugh along too:

I hope that you enjoy the video! You may want to subscribe to the webmaster video channel to see more free webmaster videos in the future.

Learn more about robots.txt

October 7th, 2009 Matt Cutts Posted in Google/SEO No Comments »

We made a video about how Google handles the robots.txt file. You can watch it if you want:

This answers a couple questions such as:
- Why is my url showing up in Google when I blocked it in robots.txt? Did you fetch that url?
- How do I make that url disappear from Google?

I hope the video helps if you have questions.

Where have you been in the USA or world?

October 6th, 2009 Matt Cutts Posted in Fun, Google/SEO 1 Comment »

Googler Douwe Osinga has a great personal project that demonstrates the Google Chart API. Just by clicking a few boxes, you can make an image to show the countries (or states in the USA) that you’ve been to. Here’s where I’ve been in the United States:

Clearly I need to do a trip across the northern part of the country. If you run a website, the Google Chart API is a great/free way to add pretty charts to your website or dashboard easily. You can even make google-o-meters