He really looks like an hostage in Iraq, allmost on the disclamer video :)

Oh, and we were already talking about that there : http://blogoscoped.com/forum/59468.html

So, I repeat, if anyone have the transcript of these videos, it could be very useful to post that here :) Thanks

So, Matt at the end of video 1 says that Google is *slightly* favoring <b> over <strong>. If true, this is kinda weird, 'cause the latter is the current W3C recommendation (as it better separates content from layout).

Merci beaucoup, Philipp,
Because I'm working on a new design of my website, and all the <b> have been remplaced by <strong>... I hope he did a mistake!

But this behavior of Google may change, and other search engines may not evaluate it this way. I don't think you should fret about these things, as Matt said. Still, it's sending the wrong signal... and "anti accessibility" or "anti W3C" signal, if you will.

I think we can look at the <b> versus <strong> issue this way:

Google is not in the business of "sending signals about accessibility", it is in the business of giving good search results.

So I assume Google assigns a weighting to thousands of factors, including the use of tags.

If spammers tend to prefer <strong> because of perceived SEO benefits (or even just because they pay more attention to their HTML), the relative "goodness" of <strong> will decline. As non-spammy sites catch up with their use of <strong>, its relative "goodness" will increase.

Perhaps the important thing is for a webmaster to avoid using any technique that is "in fashion" with spammers, because Google is going to cotton on to that and penalise it.

Anyway, in this case Matt says the difference is small enough that you don't need to worry about it.

A great quote I saw recently was "SEO is a game of inches" which I think applies to most things in general – i.e. as much as people would like one, there is no silver bullet to accomplishing stuff.

So yea, when Matt said <b> provides more weight than <strong> I was really surprised since the former is depreciated. I wonder if this is really true – heck maybe Matt just tossed that out there as a funny mis-direction ploy since now thousands of webmasters will be frantically changing their web pages to use <b> ;-)

What would be REALLY interesting is a snippet of their internal Google code as my guess is there is a simple weighting table for various tags. I.e. regular text = 1, emphasis=2, stong=3, bold=3.1 (!), h3=5, h2=7, h 1=10, title=20, etc. Yea, I realize that other factors will be applied, but that should be the first-order analysis.

alek

P.S. I've been using <strong> instead of <b> for years – ditto for <em> instead of <i> – because it's nice to have validated pages. Even if what Matt said is true today, I gotta believe the search engines will eventually adjust this. So being standards-compliant may have some (small) SEO penalty today, but long-term, it is just soooo right to do IMHO.

> I.e. regular text = 1, emphasis=2, stong=3, bold=3

And once you accumulated too many points, you'll be axed for over-optimizing ;)

YES ... as mentioned above, other factors come into play – i.e. if ALL of your text is BOLD'ed then your score is really high, but a negative weight factor is applied. Dito repeated text, etc. etc. But I gotta believe the initial weighing is a simple table buried similar to what I wrote above buried deep in the indexing engine code.

I'd venture to say that <i> is more important than even bold..

as italics are often used for titles of things, and with google being academic in nature... proper titles can be seen as important references right?

<< So, Matt at the end of video 1 says that Google is *slightly* favoring <b> over <strong>. >>

I immediately thought that it was probably just because it's shorter – and that would mean less bandwidth for Google when download the entire contents of the Internet. Imagine if every website that Google indexed used <strong> instead of <b> – that would certainly add up to a lot more data!

He did say "probably favour" rather than "will increase rankings" afterall...

I think the explanation on the image index was not very great. In fact he did say nothing about that one. Still there are a lot of future possibilities with this index, a pitty that he didn't give us more insight on that...

Philipp Lenssen, I got clarification on bold vs. strong: they are treated the same (I hadn't gone to look at that code in ages). So I'll have to clarify on that point.

Art-One, there was an image index update last weekend. And I think the image folks want to be more on the "main line" with the rest of our indexing, so that's good too (e.g. changes from the main web indexing would also be more likely to affect image indexing).

Ryan, em and i are both treated the same too.

<< I got clarification on bold vs. strong: they are treated the same... >>

And webmasters all over the world are now frantically changing their <b> tags *back* to <strong> tags because they preferred them in the first place but didn't want to sacrifice a 0.000001 increase in their PageRank... ;-)

Thanks Matt!!

Ditto what Tony Ruscoe said above ... Matt shoulda waited a week or so before you clarified! ;-)

Well, nothing really new here. But good to hear it anyways. Maybe I should ask some questions...

There are three new video's:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/more-seo-answers-on-video/

Matt, thx for the reply. What I was aiming at was a bit more future like... Will the image search be extended with features like the ones that are now present in Picase as experimental features? (Give me pictures which are 20% yellow?)

And will in future it be possible to give picture as input (e.g. a face of someone) and ask for all the simular ones? (I know I'm asking a lot...)

N° 7 & 8 are on-line too now.
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/vidyo/

Who wants get a backlink PR5 ?

I'm searching for someone who is able to transcript the videos of Matt Cutts. No translation, just transcript.
Contact me by mail or via Gtalk at : tomhtmlgmail.com

5 hours
no answer :'-(
Nobody wants to help me?

PS : you can also use the transcript on your blog/site, it could be a real interresting content ;-)

BTW Philipp your mentioned on: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/video-google-webmaster-tools/
[Edit: linked link]

I transcribe his videos from time to time when I think the items Matt discusses are of great general interest...

Don't you wanna give it a try yourself Tom? Or are you at the office and you can't do listen to sound? :)

Tom has holidays I suppose? Or was it your last year at school?