Last year Matt Cutts spoke on the “State of Index” at the Las Vegas PubCon in November 2009. He recreates the video for people who could not make the conference. The video is aimed at users, web developers, and webmasters. It is a summary of the changes Google have made for the year 2009. Please see the video below:

And here are the slides from the talk:

Google has launched real time search in some of the high volume searches. For example, searching ‘Haiti Earthquake‘ will look like the following:

The following was said by Google’s Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow, who led development of real-time search:

“You earn reputation, and then you give reputation. If lots of people follow you, and then you follow someone–then even though this [new person] does not have lots of followers,” his tweet is deemed valuable because his followers are themselves followed widely, Singhal says. It is “definitely, definitely” more than a popularity contest, he adds.

“One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation,” Singhal says. “As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well.”

It is a complex algorithm Google is using to decipher the authoritative tweets to the spam tweets. Singhal also explained how hashtags in Twitter might be a signal of a lower quality tweet. The Technology Review said hashtags “serve as red flags to lower tweet quality and attract spam-like content.”

So it seems social media’s influence on SEO is ever increasing. As one-way links are becoming difficult to find the need for producing quality content and being recognised as leaders in your industry is paramount. Have your followers in mind with every blog post, tweet and Facebook interaction, as they are going to be the key if you ever want to dominate the search engines.

Jen Lopez gets a quick interview with Matt Cutts and asks the question on the NoFollow rule. There has been much debate on the NoFollow rule of late since the publishing that there is proof that Google is indexing websites through Wikipedia, which has all outgoing links set as NoFollow.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Matt Cutts on NoFollow from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Google has released a statement in their blog that their team of Googlers have been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search.

The search engine attempts to increase the size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. There isn’t a noticable difference between searches as the infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine. But web developers and power searchers may find a few variances in search results.

Google are welcoming the community to test out the new infrastructure at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/.

Here’s how to give Google feedback: Do a search at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and look on the search results page for a link at the bottom of the page that says “Dissatisfied? Help us improve.” Click on that link, type your feedback in the text box and then include the word caffeine somewhere in the text box.

From a SEO perspective it would be interesting to see if our readers could find any changes, big or small. Drop us a comment if you wish, or let Google know direct.

Matt Cutts has been answering questions on Google’s webmaster central YouTube Channel rather frequently of late. With Google’s search engine algorithm changing their goal posts slightly over the past few months, many SEO’ers are looking to Matt Cutts to provide answers as to what to focus on. One of them being server location, this has been a bit of mystery and no one has really posted solid proof that server location is required for successful SEO.

Matt Cutts briefly explains that server location is important especially if you have a TLD domain.