Google + WordPress, The Matt Cutts Point of View
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Matt Cutts is a Software Engineer who heads the web spam team at Google. Matt has been using WordPress for years and feels WordPress makes search engine optimization easier and easier with each update. On today’s show he highlights the fundamental principles of success for blogging with WordPress. And addresses questions like:
- How do I get started?
- What tools do I need?
- Why choose WordPress?
- Which WordPress plugins do I need?
- Do meta tags matter?
- How do I know what content readers want?
- How do I generate unique content – the way Google wants it?
- What about duplicate content?
- Have I been banned or penalized? Why haven’t I been indexed?
- Do 301 (permanent) redirects “lose” any page rank?
Want more? Matt promised to return in the future to tackle more of your questions sometime after his trip to Mt. Kilimanjaro. Meanwhile check out lots of helpful videos on YouTube.
About Frederick Townes
Frederick Townes is the Chief Technical Officer of Mashable.com, one of the top 3 blogs worldwide. As designer, search / social media marketer and WordPress consultant Frederick’s projects are typically based on WordPress. One of his largest contributions to the WordPress community was his performance plugin W3 Total Cache.
Since 2003 his agency W3 EDGE has assisted startups and brands like: Smashing Magzine, CVS Pharmacy, Hyatt, Kodak, Microsoft, Sanyo, Sherwin Williams, Southwest Airlines, Staples, Sony, R.E.I., Weight Watchers, Yahoo and others.
A serial web entrepreneur, one of Frederick’s latest projects was W3 MARKUP. Quickly rising to the #2 web site production outsourcing services in 2008, W3 MARKUP was so disruptive it was acquired by the market leader after 11 short months.
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Thanks for the useful post Fred. We’re huge fans of WordPress, and now use it as our CMS and blog platform of choice, even though I created my own CMS a few years ago (which I demo’d to you at An Event Apart, Boston).
Nice work my friend,
Ben
Glad to hear from you Ben and glad you liked it! It’s been a long time, drop me a line sometime!
Wow what a show! learned a lot thnx guys!
that’s really a useful post for me..thanks anyway
Brilliant podcast and great questions and answers from you guys and Matt. It dispels a lot of the hype and myths you see online and pushed by a lot of people. I found it very interesting that Matt doesn’t use All in one SEO, yet explained how the meta description in it can still add value to your posts from a Google perspective and how Google grabs snippets out of the content of the page….once again, AWESOME podcast.
Thanks for those kind words Norm!
I have just been recommended to this post and that was so enlightening!
Have fun in France.
Good to hear it was enlightening! The fun in France will happen, not too worried about that
Thank you for sharing, it’s defenitly an intressing podcast to hear.
Great show! I really appreciated Matt’s comments about diving right in and just getting started. I had a year long conversation with a friend about blogging and finally had to jump in, and I’m happy to say that I’ve going strong for nearly 2 years.
He had some great comments that affirmed some of what I’ve been doing, and also gave me lots of new ideas to try to improve my blog.
Thanks for doing this show.
Awesome post. I knew a lot of new for myself.
Thank you guys, I’ll be waiting for another great podcasts.
Vitaly
Always good to hear Matt Cutts and all the more when the questions are really searching. Only downside was the scummy ads that interrupted the conversation.
Thanks Guys!
Nice. But what’s that announcer’s laugh at 08:09′?
Matt’s going to climb Kilamanjaro?
Apparently
Bit envious, I dare say 
Joost,
Thanks for bringing the show to our attention in your newsletter – it was very very informative!
All the best,
Janice
My pleasure Janice! I’ve decided I should push all the podcast into my newsletter, so from now on, you’ll get a podcast like this each week! Be sure to check out some of our previous shows too
Good to know the methods we are using are working well with G – Nice to get a little info on a few of the other elements of WP too.
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Thanks for a great interview.
Joost – how does what Matt said about how Google understands and makes allowance for WordPress archives etc affect the requirement for plug-ins like Meta-Robots ??
Great interview everyone – thanks…
Joost – how does what Matt said about how Google understands and deals with WordPress (multiple/duplicate) archives etc affect the requirement for the Meta-Robots plug-in ??
He’s lying
Nah kidding: it really depends on your circumstances, there’s a lot of options in Robots Meta, some are more useful than others.
This is an interesting post that is packed full of information. I am a ‘newbee’, so the level of discussion was on a level that I could understand.
I am subscribing to your podcast because it gives me value. Hopefully when Matt comes back, in about four months, for the “advanced” discussion I will be able to implement his tactics when I discuss the Canon Vixia HF S100 Review on my blog.
I am interested to know what are the top 5 plugins that most of bloggers are using.
Keep up the good work!
Fred, you managed to squeeze a lot of good stuff out in that interview with Matt and I thank you for that. I must read your blog and return when Matt comes down from the mountains! Thanks a ton. Geoff D.
Thanks Geoff, sometimes an hour is just not enough time.
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Great resource. Insightful information. Thanks for taking the time to share the podcast. I have some new concepts to think on (and act on).
Act! I think that was one of the more important things to say
yep, whatever you do eventually you’ll wish you’d done it differently in someway or another…. but if you don’t implement anything at all in practice and just keep optimising it all on paper then you’ll have gained absolutely nothing….
It’s like keeping track of how much money you might have made if you’d actually bought shares in a company on such and such a day, but just thought you’d keep an eye on them instead… you risk and therefore gain nothing.
Just make a start – find out what works and what doesn’t, and build on the good stuff.
Yep, live and learn. You have do just do it!
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Thanks so much for this interview! I’ve been feeling like I’m grasping around in the dark (light?) for months now and everything I believe to be true about WordPress and Google SEO was confirmed to be basically correct in just this one interview.
Special thanks to Matt Cutts for taking the time to be there with you (and for us).
Best,
Nanci K. Murdock, CFA
Awesome podcast. I listen to some of this stuff while I’m at work. I really like the bit where Matt says, just start something up! I like this because that’s how I started learning… all I had to do was just put a website up (via wordpress =D) and learn along the way. Thanks for the good info guys! Keep it up.
Just finished the posdcast I like it.
Some thing I didn’t know.
Main goal… focus on content!
Regards
Good show, guys. I would like to hear a more advanced interview with Matt focusing on WP issues. Another question I’ve never seen answered is how Google views the various Amazon affiliate links, such as in editorial text. Obviously the content has to be legit, but I’ve long wondered if there is a line you cross with X number of Amazon affil links over time.
But nowadays less interaction on WordPress but more in Facebook. So, what do you think? Why this happens?
Great interview. I’m a big wordpress fan but are now branching out more into more ecommerce (gotta pay the bills). Would like to hear more about the duplicate content issues that face ecommerce site owners and how to handle this!
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Great show and the best use of my time in a long time!! Surprised me that he goes with raw WordPress for the most part on his own blog. I am looking forward to the next session. Great job in framing questions that actually produced new information.
Nice one!! Was actually surprised how many things I did well
I agree with Tyler Brown. Trying is the best way to “Throw yourself in the deep”
Thanks!
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Great info. I too just jumped into blogging a couple of months ago. I still have a BASIC question. Your example in your podcast said you changed the url to match popular google search results BEFORE you published the post. Now that I know URLs are so important to page ranking, can I go back and change post titles (on posts that have already been published) without messing up anything that is linked to them. Can I also leave the post titles as is, but change the associated urls after the posts have been published?
Thank you!
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Great podcast Guys.
Matt is The Oracle when it comes to SEO, and WordPress is now the platform of choice, not just for blogging but as a functional CMS for websites too.
Some great content in there which for me dispels a few myths, the old adage remains true “Content is still King”.
I’m off to implement some new ideas for the Football Magazine I’m currently working on.
Thanks again!
Great interview with Matt Cutts. He certainly seems to like WordPress (and why not!), it’s just so easy to use.
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Fantastic interview- I learned so much and it’s great to hear it directly from the horse’s mouth rather than all the hype out there.
I have a question concerning analytics- the results in my C-Panel stats are much different than Google Analytic’s results. GA’s results are (much) lower than what AW Stats shows for the same type of data. Can you explain the discrepancy?
thanks,
Kathy Pop
Great podcast – first one I’ve ever listened to, but it won’t be my last. Love all the fanastic info and questions.
I see all of the better seo blogs using WordPress so I know it must be good following a leader both in Google and here.
Matt Cutts is like Alan Greenspan a few years back (in a good way), people hang on to his every word, and rightfully so.
It is always good to hear things directly from a Google engineer before they are spun out of control.
Outstanding podcast. I love listening to Matt first hand. Excellent questions. I stopped using Thesis and moved to the Builder iTheme a few weeks ago. as far as a CMS, WordPress is the best in my mind. I never liked Blogger.
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I am huge fan of wordpress. but i need a plugin for creating tables in my wordpress blog. can you help me with this?
thanks for your information .always learn alots here
Word Press has changed our business model. Why reinvent the internet when 1,000′s of developers have been slaving over this open source killer platform for years, oh and it’s free.
We can bend our designs any way we want, and Google still loves us because we are on Word Press.
Now I need to go find a subscribe here so I don’t miss out!
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Jongens super bedankt !
wederom veel geleerd voor ons blog !
groeten!
He is using WordPress. But guess what, he clearly demonstrated in a video he made, that he doesn’t even recognize the most simplistic PHP or JavaScript syntax. Check out the video at around 14 minutes into it and you tell me. It’s true, huh?
http://nexwebsites.com/post/Matt-Cutts-Head-of-the-webspam-team-at-Google.aspx
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Thanks guys, I really appreciated the podcast. I’m fairly new to wordpress and have b’zillions of plugins – can this cause problems with my wordpress install. I tend to think i need all the bells and whistles e.g. i just installed a broken link checker, which i think is awsome and cant live without…is it the typical experience of users that they at somepoint cut back. I guess that Matt has because he has a whole heap of people linking to him and doesnt need to be so careful…
Thanks again guys…it was very informative
Great podcast. Always enjoy your posts and the other content.
Thanks Fredrick hosting Matt. Great questions and answers by both. Giving me some new fresh insight. My sorry butt was glued to my chair, even taking notes on the commercials I heard. ) Fantastic podcast!