As Google’s Matt Cutts explains to WebProNews, one of the primary goals of MayDay was to address the people who do the “bare minimum” to avoid being classified as spammers. This type of content is often referred to as content farms. Due to the many complaints Google received about these content farms, the search company made changes to its algorithm to ensure that it returns the best sites for users.

“We’re trying to spot what are the signals for quality for pages or sites that really are going to be good for users,” says Cutts.

If webmasters find themselves affected by these changes, Cutts suggests that they re-evaluate their content to make sure they are providing the highest quality content. According to Cutts, the sites most readily affected are those with auto-generated pages.

On the topic of Caffeine, Cutts compares the index changes as moving from a bus to a limo. Back in 2003, the updates were slow, but with Caffeine, the index is faster, fresher, and richer. He says as soon as a document is documented, it is indexed.

In this interview, Cutts also encourages webmasters to submit video sitemaps. Just as regular sitemaps are important to help Google discover pages, the search company wants to be able to have a comprehensive view of all the videos on the Web as well.

Google Squared is a new tool that puts search results into a spreadsheet-like list. It essentially organizes the results into facts, so users don’t have to click on multiples sites to find what they need. Cutts refers to it as a “sideways query” and points out that it could provide new information for users that they would not have previously found using traditional search.

When we spoke with Cutts earlier this year, he mentioned the growing obsession that SEOs and webmasters have with PageRank. We asked him about it in the above video, and while he did say it was important, he was quick to point out that it was only one of the more than 200 signals Google takes into consideration. He says content, title, url, and proximity are a few of the factors that have additional influence.

Users have also probably noticed the new redesign to the search results page. Cutts says the left-handed navigation was present for a while before the company decided to surface it for all search results.

Interestingly enough, the options are different based on each query. A search for Tom Cruise, for example, would probably return image results in the navigation. On the other hand, a search for President Obama would return real-time results and updates. Cutts says it creates more opportunities for webmasters and SEOs.

Lastly, Cutts did say that Caffeine was coming along nicely and indicated that there would be some announcements regarding it coming soon. Keep watching WebProNews for all the latest details on it.

On the subject of Caffeine, Cutts says it is a very slow process because the search engine wants to make sure it has “high quality results.” Caffeine is live at one data center and will be rolled out at other data centers in the coming weeks and months. The software engineer speculates that the next data center will hit Europe.

After the news of Caffeine surfaced, many people within the industry believed site speed would play a large role in it for SEOs. However, Cutts points out that while site speed is an important signal for search engines, the Caffeine Update is completely independent of that fact. He specifically says, “We’re always going to care first and foremost about quality.”

He goes on to say, “If a site is twice as fast, it’s not going to rank twice as high.” Only in cases when there is primarily the same content on two pages will the one that is faster receive the higher ranking. Also, in regards to PageRank, Cutts told us that there are over 200 signals that Google uses and PR is not the only one that matters. He advises SEOs to pay attention to the other factors as well.

Google has also recently introduced the idea of pushing content to users as opposed to people having to pull to find it. This concept has been called Pubsubhubub, also known as PuSH. The basic gist is that it sends a ping to the “hub” once new content on a website is published. That “hub” will then notify all the subscribers to that site in real-time. Although developed by Google, PuSH is an open source platform.

When asked about Google Buzz, Cutts says he likes it very much but will not abandon Twitter as a result.

Lastly, the head of Google’s Webspam team told us that spam is always present. Although there are many new ways to spam, which ultimately makes his team work harder, Cutts considers it a win if it means the quality is better for users.

This wasn’t quite an all-search, all-the-time study session, though. Cutts and Mike McDonald spent a little while talking about college basketball at the beginning, and by the end of the talk, had both expressed their appreciation of Star Wars.

As for what happened in between, Cutts fielded questions individuals posed via Twitter. One question related to local business center quality, and Cutts indicated that members of his team are working on it and steady improvements can be expected.

Another inquiry touched on the idea of meta tags at the bottom of a page, and Cutts responded, “Normally, your meta tags need to go in the head section of the HTML. That’s definitely the preferred way to do it.” Otherwise, random people can leave metatags in the comments.

Then one more question addressed up the importance of backlinks for SEO. Cutts said, “They don’t hurt. . . . I definitely recommend having good page content, as well, but backlinks can certainly help with your search rankings.”

The fact of the matter, as Matt himself says, is that it is only going live at one of Google’s data centers, and it is not even live yet, but will be before the holidays. That said, Caffeine will not roll out to the rest of Google’s data centers until after the holidays. He says that while Google could have rolled the update out faster, they didn’t want to upset webmasters by releasing it before the holidays. This is something that happened in the past when Google released its infamous Florida update before the holidays, causing rankings to drastically change. Cutts says not to panic.

Cutts also says that there might be an address set up soon where people can go and search, maybe not exclusively with Caffeine 100% of the time, but where queries will be more likely to hit the data center that’s hosting it.

The second ingredient that Matt discussed is that of site speed. From the sound of it, speed is going to be a huge factor in SEO moving in to 2010. He says that a number of people within Google consider speed to be very important to the web, and they are considering if that should play a role in the rankings of websites in search results.

According to Cutts, speed hasn’t played a role in rankings in the past, but that may very well change. Watch the video for more details about Caffeine and Google’s resources for helping webmasters improve site speed.

How much of an impact will Caffeine have on results? Matt says there will, hopefully, not be a big difference. Google will integrate Caffeine slowly and take user feedback into consideration.

Matt says, “If we push forward as fast as we can, double down on innovation and try to do the best that we can, [and] do the right thing for users, everything else will work out.”

This infrastructure modification will lay the foundation for future indexing changes and will also allow for the expansion of website speed and size. Incidentally, it could even provide a stronger architecture for potential real-time and semantic efforts.

If you would like to try Caffeine, you can check it out at: http://www2.sandbox.google.com.

Stay tuned to WebProNews as we continue to bring you exclusive coverage from SES San Jose 2009.

Matt says, “We [he and Michael] don’t always see eye-to-eye (Nah, really?!) …  but one thing that Michael and I both agree on is that hacking sites to get links is basically pure evil.”

What will happen if you don’t heed this advice? According to Michael, “… your sites are gonna burn in hell.”

This has been a Public Service Announcement brought to you by WebProNews.

UPDATE:
Clearly, based on some of the comments, some of you are unaware that this was intended simply as a fun video. It is a spoof of the Pat Robertson/Al Sharpton PSA about the environment from a year or so ago.  You can go see that video here then watch ours. I thought it was funny…

Once again, Matt Cutts broke Google news for us. He introduced Google Friend Connect API at PubCon South in Austin, Texas and WebProNews has exclusive details in the above video.

Matt prefaced the announcement by explaining how we are all publishers now due to YouTube, Facebook, blogs, etc. He went on to say how spam should not be large concern because at this point in time, the focus should be primarily on creating good content. After considering those factors, Google released the Google Friend Connect API to help both publishers and users become more social.

Google Friend Connect API provides more participation, comments, interactions, and also less spam. A couple of people on Matt’s own team produced plugins for WordPress, Drupal, and phpBB.

Matt makes no claim of perfection on this and even strongly encourages others to create better plugins since they are all Open Source.

According to Google Blogoscoped, Akky Akimoto wrote on the Asiajin blog that Google Japan was paying bloggers to evaluate a new Google widget through a pay-per-post service called CyberBuzz.

Asiajin says, “These articles, which look almost the same as regular ones, have ‘ad’ tags which are very subtle, and will no doubt not be noticed by many readers.” The post also said, “So they are now link-building using monetary incentives to try to crook their own search results in a malicious way.” (Correction: I misinterpreted Akky Akimoto. The ‘ad’ tags are actually referring to article-type advertisements on the news website Gigazine.)

Google issued an apology that reads:

“Google Japan is running several promotional activities to let people know more about our products.

It turns out that using blogs on the part of the promotional activities violates Google’s search guidelines, so we have ended the promotion. We would like to apologize to the people concerned and to our users, and are making an effort to make our communications more transparent in order to prevent the recurrence of such an incident.”

Matt Cutts twittered “Google.co.jp PageRank is now ~5 instead of ~9. I expect that to remain for a while.” He expresses Google’s deep remorse and apologizes on the company’s behalf in this video.

Speaking on his own feelings, Matt says he was “mortified” when he heard about the incident. He goes on to say that Google’s position on paid links has not changed.

To correct the issue, Google is asking the bloggers to remove their paid posts. Matt also says Google realizes its need to continue to communicate and explain its position on paid links.

“This is something that we should have done better and I hope we will do better in the future.”

Keep watching WebProNews for the full interview with Matt Cutts including top security issues of this year and the latest on Google’s personalized search efforts.

Duplicate content has been a challenging issue for a long time. Websites containing a lot of content such as a retail site, could end up with several urls for each page making it difficult for search engines to crawl.

Google gives the following example on the Webmaster Central blog:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish” />

Simply place this link tag in the head section of the duplicate content urls.

The tag can only be used on pages within a single site. Both absolute and relative links are acceptable, but the search engines recommend absolute links. Also, links to all urls will be directed to the one preferred url.

For more information, each of the search engines have explanations and examples in their own announcements: Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Also, be sure to look for the rest of our video interview with Matt Cutts that includes his take on Google penalizing Google Japan, top security issues for 2009, and Google’s continued efforts with personalized search. The extended version will be available very soon.

Update: Matt further explains the canonical link tag here.

The event is taking place February 10-12, in Santa Clara. We have an incredible line-up of interviews to watch out for. We will be bringing you exclusive coverage of Vint Cerf’s keynote conversation as well as an exclusive interview with the with the man known as the “father of the Internet.”

You can also expect interviews from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. A few specific names include Matt Cutts, Software Engineer of Google, Larry Cornett, VP of Consumer Products at Yahoo, and Nathan Buggia, Lead Program Manager at Microsoft.

Don’t forget about our WebProNews articles either. The articles will take a deeper look into topics regarding Google’s SearchWiki, YouTube, Search Behavior, and many more interesting issues.

If you are attending the show, be sure to shout out to us when you see us. If you are unable to attend, keep watching WebProNews and feel like you are at the show.

There’s a lot more to SEO than just ranking number one in Google for a key phrase. Since searches based on personalization and localization are becoming more and more prevalent, Matt echoes Bruce’s words that the central focus for SEO’s should be traffic and conversions.

With all these innovations, the game is changing for SEO’s. Matt says they are now marketers and need to embrace universal search by integrating video, images, books, etc. As far as Google trends go for 2009, they will affect SEO’s as well. Matt reports how black hat SEO is “getting more malicious” and shamelessly illegal.

In summary, SEO’s need to be aware of these actions and act accordingly. They need to decide where they stand on legal and ethical issues and how they will adjust their strategies to compatibly adapt to these new trends.