Future of SEO – 20 Questions Asked By Webmasters to Matt Cutts

A campaign by Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web-spam team for recording a video series for webmasters has received huge response from SEO enthusiasts around the world.

Till date 1265 people have participated, 581 questions asked with a total of 13,531 votes .

Webmasters and SEO practitioners have asked some interesting questions to Matt which may play an important role deciding the “Future Of SEO.”

I have hand-picked and compiled 20 interesting questions for you, which may modify the course of SEO in future. (Source: Google moderator page)

Checkout my previous article related to this topic – Ask a question to Matt Cutts.

20 SEO Questions to Matt Cutts

1. Will Google add a disavow function to webmaster tools so webmasters can stop worrying about spammy links or competitor sabotage?

2. I have seen Matt Cutts say social signals from Facebook, Twitter and such sites are important for search engine rankings. But recently, I read that Google crawlers have no access to Twitter of Facebook. Then how are the social signals tracked?

3. When we create a new Landing Page with Quality content, Google ranks that page on top 30-50 for targeted keywords. Then WHY rank get decreased for next 2 to 3 weeks. If pages were not have required quality then why it got rank in first week?

4. Can a website with great content but few pages (i.e. business website) still be able get good rankings on Google? It seems to me that Penguin hammered lots of those small websites.

5. Can Google determine which site is the original owner of a copied content ?

6. If I haven’t bought links, participated in any link-wheels or schemes, or spammed links, should I spend time analyzing my links and trying to remove ones I didn’t create that look spammy?

7. If some site that is linking to my site gets penalized for purchasing links, will my site get effected by that penalty?

8. I found few links to my website from non-topic related sites. Is that going to hurt my rankings? Are you going to introduce link removal tool?

9. Why don’t you switch off the Pagerank toolbar feature? It is widely used by link sellers as a link grading system. Why do you continue to display Pagerank publicly? It appears to have little relevance, except to spammers.

10. Is Guest Posting considered a Black-Hat or White-Hat link building technique?

11. I’ve implemented authorship on my blog. My CTR went up for many queries. Thanks. My question is: does authorship affect rankings? Does my posts get higher rankings if you consider me as a trusted user?

12. Google is relatively quick in detecting new content, however Google is not always as quick to stop showing changed/removed content in it’s search results. Are there any plans to improve detection of changed/removed content?

13. I don’t want comments like “thanks” and “good article” mess up my content focus. Does Google recognise the comments section and give it less value than the main content on a page? If not, will it?

14. Sites that are updated regularly seem to rank higher in Google search. But certain sites can’t be updated that often. What is your take about such sites. Please help.

15. How to deal with inbound links coming from porn sites that weren’t created by me. For example, my site is getting porn links from “XYZsite.com” every 2-3 days about 5 months ago, the same time that this has been penalized. How to deal with them?

16. When will Authorship be used as a ranking signal?

17. Because Google cant “read” images, can putting your main keyword/phrase in the “alt tag” effect your ranking? If so in what way (good/bad)?

18. Will we start to see company logos in SERPS for those using the rel=publisher tag? And what do you see as the main benefits of this tag?

19. Will having a Google+ (and also FB, Twitter, LinkedIn) buttons on page and getting many Plus(s)/Likes/Shares from visitors help in top rankings on SERPs?

20. I have heard that using short URLs is better than long URLs. (SEO wise) I have heard that URLs and Breadcrumbs should match when using Rich Snippets. (to get shown on SERP) Q: Will using a short URL affect my Breadcrumbs shown in SERPs? THANKS.

Do you like any of the question above which relates to you as a webmaster and Search Engine Optimizer.