Matt: That's a really good suggestion, I have never thought about that. I have only ever tried to do it personally once. I will file that as a feature request, and see how they prioritise that. My guess is it will be relatively low on the priority list because of all the syntax mentioned, but would probably work pretty well.



Flashback Matt: I get to emphasis something about bold vs strong. So; there was a previous question on whether it was better to use bold or if it was better to use strong. Last night, I thought that there was a barely barely, difference between the two and not to worry about it. The next thing is someone took me to the code where I could see for myself, and Google does actually treat bold and strong with exactly the same weight. I was also shown that "em" and "italic" are treated exactly the same.

Q: Will we see more kittie posts in the future?

Matt: We will, in-fact I tried to get my cat in on this shot and to sit still, but he was a little scared of the lights so I will see if I can get him used to it.

Q: What are Google SSD, Google Gas, Google RS2, Google Marketplace, Google Weaver and other things discovered by Ruuscoe.

Matt: I think it was very clever to do a dictionary check against our services check-in, but I'm not going to talk about what those services are.

Q: Of what, many of the topics might be in the Duplicate Content Session of SES?

Matt: I gave a little bit of a preview in one of the other sessions, on video, but I think what we will basically talk about; Jerry will be there, a lot of other people will be there, and we will talk about shingling. What I will essentially say is that Google does a lot of duplicate detection from the crawl all the way down to the very last millisecond before the user sees things. We do stuff that's exact duplicate detection, and we do stuff that is near duplicate detection. We do a pretty good job all the way along the line of trying to beat out dupes and stuff like that. The best advice I can give is that your pages that will have near the same content, look as much different as possible, if they really truly are different content, a lot of people asked about a ..file compared to an html file. Typically, you don't need to worry about that. If you have similar content, on different domains, maybe one version in French and another in English, you really don't need to worry about that. Then again, if you do have the exact same content for a Canadian site, and a .com site, then its likely to be a thing of which one looks better to us and just show that, but it wouldn't necessarily trigger any sort of penalty or anything. If you want to avoid it, you can try and make sure that your templates are very very different. In General, if the content is quite similar its best to just let it show whichever representation we think is the best anyway.

Q: Does Google index or rank Blog sites differently than regular websites.

Matt: Not really. Somebody else asked about links from gov's and edu's and whether links from 2-level deep gov's and edu's like .gov.pl where worth the same as .gov. In fact, we don't have much to say, oh, this is a link from the ODP, or .gov or .edu, so give that some sort of special boost. Its just that those sites tend to have higher Pagerank because more people link to them, and web users link to them. So websites and Blogs, there's not really very much distinction, unless you go off the Blog search and things. In theory, we could rank them differently; but; for most part its just a general search and the way it crawls out, that we are working on OK.