May 18, 2006

Market Smart Interactive's Mike Grehan just interviewed Google's Matt Cutts at ClickZ, where Mike contributes as a ClickZ Expert.

Here’s a snippet from Google’s Matt Cutts' interview:

Is Page Rank™ such a big deal? Can you value a link on a page by its PageRank?

Matt Cutts: “There are over 100 factors in ranking. And PageRank is just one of them. It’s an important factor, but it’s by no means the be-all and end-all.

To me that shows the danger of short-sighted thinking and getting obsessed with just one facet of things, and not the facet which matters most.

So paying attention to the content on your site, building good stuff, those are the things that will help. Not “can I get my PageRank higher with one more sprinkle of green fairy dust?” or something like that.

The best links are those which are editorially chosen. Linked because of the site’s merit. Some of the best SEOs these days are those who are really good at buzz marketing, viral marketing, and word-of-mouth marketing.

Tactics like lavishing on reciprocal links; or reciprocal links don’t work as well — let’s try this fad called triangular linking; or let’s try buying links; all these sorts of things.

These are not the sort of links that are best for your site. They’re certainly more high risk.

Buying links is extremely risky. It falls outside of our guidelines, unless you add a no-follow tag. And that’s a very simple way to say, “You know what? I only wanted the traffic. I’m not concerned with search engines.”