WebProNews

Google: Page Speed May Become a Ranking Factor in 2010

Over the course of 2009, a consistent theme that Google has been involved with is that of speed. In announcement after announcement, Google has talked about the importance of speed on the web, and how the company wants to do everything it can to make the web a faster place. Has it occurred to you that how fast your page loads may have a direct effect on how your site ranks in Google?

Google May Change Your Page Titles

In case you were not aware, Google "reserves the right" to change the titles of your pages in search results. Google's Matt Cutts has released a video discussing why and how they go about doing this. Cutts says Google wants to show the titles that it thinks are most useful. "For example, suppose the title of your page is 'Untitled' or if there is no title. If that's the case, we try to show a relevant, useful title."

The SEO's Toolkit Part Three of Three: Resources

Welcome to part three of this three part series on SEO tools and resources. In the last two articles we discussed the variety of Firefox extensions used for SEO as well as an assortment of other free or affordable SEO tools. In this article we'll discuss some of the resources you'll want to access on a regular basis to keep up to date and informed on the goings-on in the search engine and SEO realm.  

Google Gives Users a Way to Lock SafeSearch

Google has launched a new way to lock SafeSearch. What this accomplishes is, users will have to enter their password to change the setting, and Google Search results will be visibly different than when SafeSearch is not locked. Google demonstrates how to to lock SafeSearch with the following short clip:

Where Google Stands on the "Keywords" Meta Tag

Google does not use the "keywords" meta tag in its web search ranking. Google's Matt Cutts explains this in a Webmaster Central video. This is not breaking news, by any means, but there are a lot of people out there that still put a lot of stock into this.

FTC Guidelines Raise Big Blogging Questions

Update 2:  Now Cleland says, "If people think that the FTC is going to issue them a citation for $11,000 because they failed to disclose that they got a free box of Pampers, that's not true. That's not going to happen today, not ever." (via)

Why Your Email Address May Show up in Google Search Results

Matt Cutts has provided some useful information for webmasters in the last few videos that have been uploaded to Google's Webmaster Central YouTube channel. It should be noted that this channel is designed to answer questions and provide useful tips for webmasters regarding their site's performance in Google. The topics are not always breaking news. Some you may know, but there are always other people out there that don't know the information.

Matt Cutts Head Shaving Footage Revealed

Google puts out a lot of useful videos through its Webmaster Central YouTube channel. If you are a regular reader of WebProNews, you have probably seen some of them covered here. They generally offer helpful advice for webmasters that have questions about ranking in Google's search results.

Geo-Targeting for Google with Webmaster Tools

Google's Matt Cutts has posted a new video talking about how Google deals with geographic targeting. This is a subject he has tackled on more than one occasion in the past, but in this latest one, he is elaborating on it a bit more, and explains that Google is looking more and more at this stuff as time goes on.

Why Your Robots.txt Blocked URLs May Show up in Google

Matt Cutts has appeared in yet another Google Webmaster Video, and this time he has a whiteboard with him so he can illustrate what he's talking about. What he's talking about this time are uncrawled URLs in search results. Cutts says Google gets a lot of complaints from webmasters who say the search engine is violating their robots.txt files, with which they intend to keep Google from crawling certain pages. Sometimes those URLs still end up in search results.