Matt Cutts from Google is back to talk about site speed.

A while back, Google admitted that website speed was a factor in their ranking algorithms, and some reactions from SEOs were a little over the top. They created site speed checkers, started site speed optimizing programs, and insisted that websites they were working for be stripped down to ensure optimum speeds.

Well, Matt explains in this video that while site speed IS a factor, it is a very, very small factor, and would only affect websites with definite and obvious load speed problems. If your website is fast enough for a good user experience, it’s fast enough for Google. One less thing to worry about!

All it takes to make things difficult for any industry is a few snake oil salesman to show up and start making grandiose claims. As I said in a previous post about the signs of a bad SEO, the SEO companies offering “#1 at Google, Guaranteed!” are this industries snake oilers.

People WANT to believe these claims. The same way they want to believe they can lose 20lbs by Friday. Being #1 on Google for your most coveted keyword would be pretty awesome, right? Thinking that you could pay someone to make that happen for you in a reasonable amount of time seems so easy. Why isn’t everyone doing it?

Unfortunately it’s become part of our job as SEOs to keep pointing this out. To clients, and everyone else. YOU CAN’T GUARANTEE RANKINGS!

So, it’s nice to have this video to point to, and Google’s official written statement on the topic, here.

Do SEOs respect web design? Do web designers ignore SEO? This debate has been going on forever. It’s not particularly surprising, given that we’re always being forced to work together. But the problems develop from just that – NOT working together.

Designers work diligently to ensure their sites display and function properly in all browsers – testing and retesting for compatibility so no technical issues will prevent visitors from interacting with the website. SEO requires the same diligence, only to Google and Bing instead of Firefox and IE. Refusing to bring a site in line with search engine requirements is like dismissing a compatibility issue with a browser – only it’s the biggest, most important browser.

A web designer who’s unwilling to get up to speed on basic SEO principles can do a lot of damage. Every SEO has come across plenty of brand new web sites that appear to have been accidentally created from the entire “SEO Don’ts” list.

But, many designers have also encountered the SEO who seems determined to completely destroy a website’s aesthetic appeal and user experience in the name of improved search engine rankings. We know how frustrating it is to have us come in and demand that you add 17 paragraphs of text to your clean, minimalist design, or insist that you remove all Flash content immediately. I can absolutely see how designers may feel they are being impinged upon, or possibly disrespected by SEOs. We’re too demanding or unyielding, perhaps?

I suppose it makes sense that we would be at odds. SEO is not a creative process on the surface. If you get into it, you come to know that many sites will require more creative solutions for search marketing, and that the “feel”, concept and branding of the site need to remain intact through the optimization process. But by the same token, web design is not all about pleasing color palettes and graphics. The structure of the site is crucial for strong search results, and you can only be so “creative” with your site architecture before it becomes a problem.

If you’re about to fully redesign your existing website, or you’re preparing to launch a new one, this is the ideal time to hire an SEO firm. Bring them onboard to consult BEFORE the design is finalized, and definitely before the site is complete. Every SEO has heard “I’ll be in touch to get started as soon as our new site is live”. This timeline certainly makes sense from the client’s point of view, but realistically, it’s only creating more work, higher costs and longer wait times for everyone involved.

Of course many designers have decided to take advantage of the situation by also tacking SEO on to their service list. Which would be fine, if so many of them weren’t under the impression that SEO is all about meta tags or submitting the site to the search engines.

What search engine optimizers and website designers need to remember is that we both have the same end goal in mind for the client – a successful site. To get there we need to work together to build a structurally sound, attractive, content rich site that keeps conversion at the very top of the priority list.

Unlike the other search engines, Google seems to be particularly great at finding content you wouldn’t think they’d be able to find – like areas of your website that have no links pointing at them at all. It’s another Matt Cutts Webmaster Help Q&A video, and this time he covers two questions in one.

Matt goes over some basics first, stating that it is possible that there are links to this un-linked content from outside sources that you may not know about. Because, when you run a link:example.com search you’re not seeing all the links Google has indexed. Which, yes, seems very unlikely. If there’s no links to your content on your own website, how would someone else know it was there to link to? But given the volume of strange bots out there doing all sorts of strange automated things with other people’s content, it’s not that much of a stretch.

Then Matt delves into the second part of the question, covering how Googlebot sometimes deals with search fields and forms with drop down menus it finds on web pages. Which is – to test them out and see where they go, picking a choice from the drop down at random, possibly indexing what they find. Resourceful!

I’ll also mention another way to get Google to rapidly index content that has no links to it: Embed a YouTube video from the Google Webmaster Central Channel on one of the pages. Googlebot will be by lickety-split to check it out!

Of course none of this information is particularly useful for basic SEO, as un-linked content isn’t going to come up in search results very often – if at all.

Matt Cutts, Google guy, is back with a new Webmasters Help clip. This time about “no follow” links.

By “no follow” links he means links with the “Nofollow” attribute, which is added to the code of individual links. This “Nofollow” tag allows site owners to tell the search engines to not follow the link, meaning don’t visit the destination site, and most importantly to not count this link as a “yes” vote for the destination’s link popularity or factor it into their PageRank score. There is also a nofollow meta tag, which is used to tell the engines to not follow links on an entire page of a website.

Use of the nofollow tag began in 2005 and was encouraged as a method of preventing link spam abuse and other “black hat” link techniques that were getting out of hand. Many websites where visitors could post a link were highly abused by spammers and some SEOs, so the nofollow attributes and tags were suggested for these situations. It’s also common for site owners to use them when they want to protect themselves from any possible penalties a search engine may throw at them for linking to “bad neighbourhoods”. Adding “NoFollow” to a link is you telling the search engines “I am not vouching for this link.”

But, with every new method comes new problems. I think I disagree with Matt when he states that “it turns out, that’s a really small percentage” of “NoFollow” links on the web. I’d like to see that statement backed up with something, because I think that number has increased. A LOT.

It actually seems like there’s a small epidemic of inappropriate “NoFollow” links occurring. So many sites are littered with no follow links now. There’s a lot of misinformation out there that has caused some people to believe linking out AT ALL will harm their website’s search engine rankings, and that any outbound links on your site will decrease the value of inbound links. That linking to another site, even a site that you trust completely and is highly relevant to your content will somehow damage your standing at Google.

It’s even quite common for sites to have “NoFollow”s all over their internal site links, in an attempt to improve their site’s PageRank score using a technique they’ve dubbed “PageRank sculpting” – which is a whole other crazy mess we also have Google to blame for. Google has come out a few times and called this “sculpting” concept a bad idea, but unfortunately people never really believe them, so on it goes.

This video contains the usual message from Google about good and compelling content being the only thing that matters, which seems to be their answer to almost any question. Yes, the way to encourage unsolicited links from a variety of sources IS to create great content, however, more and more of those are ending up being of the no follow variety. Which they may need to readdress down the road.