Lets answer some of the questions meant for Matt Cutts from his Google Moderator page and see how close we are to his actual answers when the videos are published.
“How does google differentiate between purchased links and links from family and friends? What happens if a competitor buys thousands of low quality links to their competitor site and than reports it? How would Google know if the webmaster was victim?”
I’d say that family and friends won’t make thousands of links to your website so that won’t be a problem. There will always be ways to buy or sell links carefully and hope you won’t get caught but most link sales will get you links from sites which sell to so many others that it will be easy to get caught. I wouldn’t worry about a competitor buying you links because for a competitor to go so far would mean your website is already established and reputable. I personally don’t exactly know how, but I do know that reputable sites don’t get penalized (what would happen if Digg and Twitter were penalized when some competitor bought 1,000 links to the sites).
“It has been suggested that Google is starting to pay a lot more attention to visitors retention on a website than the links coming in to that site. Is that the way Google are going forward in ranking a website rather than base it on linking?”
The only way Google could track this is by forcing AdWords code on websites or through the Google toolbar; but not a large enough percentage of websites or users would fit into these categories so this isn’t an option for Google for now.
“We recently had a debate about whether or not text links carry more weight than image links with alt text. Speaking strictly about ranking, are text links better than images with alt attributes?”
I would say that yes, text links are worth more than images with ALT text. I can partially justify this because the highest quality links (editorial links) are text links, when most of the lowest quality links (images) are advertisements.
“What’s your take on “addon domains?” Does Google penalize someone for having one or more addon domains on their main website, (or if they’re self-hosting)? e.g. If you saw 2, 5, or 10 websites all coming from the same IP address, would that be bad?”
Matt Cutts already answered this question, but I feel that it he didn’t answer the actual question. My answer would be that Google does not penalize for addon domains or subdomains if they have quality content. It doesn’t make sense to me why Google would penalize a domain if it was an addon domain, and Google doesn’t usually do things that don’t make sense.
“If the result number 4 on a SERP is more clicked than the result number 3, it moves above? If a result that is under 3 others get more clicks than those ones, is it moved upward? At last, is the number of clicks that a page receives a factor?”
I would say no for two reasons. One is that some results could have better descriptions and get increased clickthrough because of those descriptions, but other pages with worse descriptions could have better content. The second reason is that if Google did this it would be highly abused by spammers.
“How can linking remain a major part of a search algorithm when the majority of internet users are unable to post a ‘followed’ link on the www? For example twitter, Fb, wiki etc are all ‘nofollow’. It seems only a very small percentage of links count.”
If I had to predict what Matt Cutts would say, I would bet on “A very small percent of websites actually use nofollow. Usually, areas where webmasters can leave merit based links (such as blog posts), are areas where links are dofollow. Linking remains a major part of the search algorithm because it’s difficult for spammers to abuse when these top websites use nofollow.”
“If a webmaster writes good content and he keeps doing that for a long period of time, but the website doesn’t get any links from other sites (backlinks), what do you have to do then to get a better position in Google?”
Generally, great content will be found slowly and it will be linked to. My advice would be to contact several webmasters of related websites when you have a huge amount of content and ask them if they could link to your website to help their visitors.
“How does Google determine domain age? Do they look at the whois data or do they rely on the crawler? e.g. When it first indexed the website. In general, how important is it for website authority? Thanks!”
Google has a patent that they can use domain age as part of their algorithm which would be taken from the Whois. However, Matt Cutts has said that just because they can use this information doesn’t mean they use it for organic results. Google tries to deliver relevant content for each search, and newer websites can have better content than older websites.
Thanks for reading; note that some of these answers could be wrong. It will be nice to see how close we are to Matt Cutt’s actual answers.
