Google Matt Cutts Hints At Upcoming SEO Changes At PubCon

                                                         

Matthew "Matt" Cutts currently heads the Webspam team at Google. He works with the Search Quality team on search engine optimization issues.

One of the highlights of the year for me is Matt Cutts talk at PubCon. So me not being there, being 6,000+ miles away, was unfortunate. It was the first PubCon I've missed in, well, I can't remember.
Anyway, there was some excellent note taking of his presentation, plus PubCon streamed it live, so I saw a glimpse of it. I wanted to pull out the highlights and most important things Matt shared, specific to topics SEOs should be concerned with for the end of this year and 2014.
First, the live blogging I took this from include Bruce Clay, Search Engine Journal, Pole Vault Media, Search Mojo, Search Engine Land and Google+ via Brian Patterson. Of course, there is a ton of Twitter action from the event.

  *  Black Hat Hacking will be a core topic Google's web spam team will focus on. They hope to go after the hard core hacking tactics and reduce that impact on the search results.
  *  Child pornography will be blocked significantly in all countries, not just the US.
    *Toolbar PageRank may or may not be fixed. The "pipeline" to export the quarterly data broke and Google has no immediate plans to fix it.
   * Mobile is going to be a key area in 2014, so pay attention to it.
  *  Autocomplete, look to add requestAutocomplete to your forms.
  *  Top Ad Heavy Algo will get refreshed in a big way, see the previous update over here.
  *  Authorship 15% Reduction - Google is going to get picky on who they show authorship rich snippets for. So don't be surprised if yours goes away, look for ways to make yourself more authoritative. This includes rich snippets for your site

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Types of URL Redirections - 301, 302 and other Redirects in SEO

Response codes impact every page, image and file on your website.
A visiting search engine bot figures out what to do based on those codes. Incorrect response codes can cause:

• Indexation problems;
• Duplicate content;
• Site performance problems;
• All manner of other site higgledy-piggledy.

301 Permanent redirect-

The most common use for redirecting users from old places to new ones is through using the 301-redirect which basically tells the server that some content has permanently moved from one place to another.

301 redirects helps in proper passing of the link juice without seriously affecting the search engine positioning of the website.

302, 307 Temporary redirect

This was previously debated to be equal to the 301 redirect with regards to SEO purposes. I think the debate is killed nowadays as it is pretty evident that the 301 works a lot better, even if temporary. Basically it tells the requesting server that the content is there, only just not now. It also tells the server that it should continue to request the “old” place in the future as well as the content will return to there in a while.

307 redirects are temporary in nature and are mostly used by web developers.

303 Use GET method to retrieve

This is basically telling the server to use a specific method to fetch the information on the server and is not applicable in this exercise. 303 redirects are "see other" redirects. It tells the search engines that the requested resource exists on a different url. This type of redirect does not passes the link value and should be avoided.

304

304 redirects tells the search engines that the requested resource is not modified. Hence these are known as "Not Modified" redirects.

305 Use Proxy to fetch

The 305 redirect tells the agent that the resource requested must be fetched via proxy.

305 redirects tells the agents to locate the resource using a proxy. The location field must be specified that contains the URL of the proxy.

  

404.

 Page not found. If a file simply doesn’t exist, your server should deliver a 404 status. You can use a 410 response if you want Googlebot to retry the bad URL less frequently.

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