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So last week Eric Enge interviewed everybody's favorite Spam Cop, Matt Cutts (not to be confused with everybody's favorite Axe Cop), about all sorts of juicy Googleyness. You can read the whole enchilada over at Stone Temple, or view an illustrated version Rand put together (I recommend you do both, it's really good material).

The interview shed a lot of light but also inspired some confusion and questions, especially about how much of a site Big G will or won't crawl.  If you've got a big site, say an e-commerce site with lots of flexible navigation and categorization, this could be a big problem for you. Fear not!  This week's Whiteboard Friday will show you a clean, simple way to allow for both great usability for your visitors and compact, straightforward crawlability for the engines.

You might also want to check out this older, but relevant post on diagrams for understanding crawl priority.

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First, let me make a quick introduction. Normally, I spend my time focused on new products at SEOmoz, working with a great team of people that design and build our new tools and features. Today I am excited to use my first blog post to announce our new SEO toolbar for Firefox, and tell you about some of the powerful features we have added.

As a quick reminder, all of these new features are free, and will be available to anyone who downloads the Firefox SEO Toolbar!  However, we still reserve advanced link data for PRO members.

So, on to the features. To add a little color to my descriptions, I've also asked some SEO experts you may recognize to preview the toolbar and talk about how they use the new features.

1. New SERP Overlay

This new Search Engine Results Page overlay was designed to offer the most relevant link data without getting in the way. You can now use our toolbar to see which search results are getting the most links, and click Explore to run a full analysis in Open Site Explorer. To turn on this overlay, click the settings button on the toolbar, and select SERP Overlay.

"I get the best 'feel' for abstract metrics by seeing them in familiar places. I find it easiest to understand the new metrics by seeing them on search results I'm familiar with; as an added bonus, this is one of the most helpful analyses you can do when looking at a new SERP for the first time." --Will Critchlow

2. Page Authority and Domain Authority

Page Authority and Domain Authority have taken their place as the primary metrics in the toolbar. These two predictive metrics will give you the best indication of how authoritative pages and domains are. If you miss having mozRank and mozTrust available at a glance, don't despair!  You can add these back into the toolbar by selecting them from the settings menu.

3. Surf Like a Search Engine

We have added new settings that allow you to hide images, turn off JavaScript, and even set your user agent. This will help you see pages like the search engines do, and identify potential bad page behaviors. And just to help out, we’ve added a handy little overlay to keep you aware of when any of these features are set. Just click the link in the overlay and all of your settings will return to normal.

"The new user agent switching means I’ve removed another plug-in from Firefox. I love my SEO plugins but I also think there’s such a thing as having too many. Go for simplicity is what I always say. Special love goes out to disable JavaScript, too – I actually caught a nice bit of hidden link spam with this last week! Disable images is a sure fire way to check out the image alt attributes on a web page too. Nice." --Richard Baxter

"I don't want to take credit for an awesome feature. OK. I want to take credit for an awesome feature. After constantly forgetting I was surfing as googlebot and getting chucked out of Google calendar etc I asked for this feature and it's just as awesome as I hoped it would be. " 

4. New Data in the Analyze Page Overlay

Our analyze page overlay has also been enhanced with a number of new, useful data points, including

• Page Download Time – this becomes more important with Google’s announcement that speed matters.
• Text to Code Ratio – Is there more code on your page than content? Don’t make the search engines sift through too much code to find the relevant content.
• HTTP status codes – Find out the status code of the current page, and learn which redirects were involved in getting you there.

"The overlay is still the most valuable thing for me. I must use it 5+ times every day to get quick info about how many links are on a page, whether it's using rel="canonical" or whether the keywords are properly included in the right page elements. I hate using 'view source' and searching through code; overlay FTW!" --Rand Fishkin

"The http status codes feature is my favourite new addition to the tool. There's not more reloading and hunting through LiveHTTPHeaders reports - this lets me very easily see the redirect route taken in getting to the current page." --Rob Ousbey

5. Quick Access to Tools from SEOmoz and Third Parties

The tools dropdown has been expanded to include fast access to the latest SEOmoz tools as well as a wealth of other helpful resources, including traffic data, Twitter tools, and domain info.
 

I hope you enjoy the new toolbar. Please give it a try, and be sure to send feedback so we can keep making it better. You can easily send feedback by clicking on the light bulb icon on the toolbar.

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Late last week, Eric Enge of Stone Temple (and a co-author of mine on The Art of SEO) published a fascinating interview with Google's head of Webspam, Matt Cutts. I think the whole of the SEO community can agree that Matt taking time for these types of interviews is phenomenal and I can only hope he does more of them in the future. Understanding more about Google's positions, their technology and their goals will benefit website creators and marketers dramatically.

The interview itself is certainly worth a read, but as one mozzer noted to me during the email string on the subject "I'm embarassed to say I couldn't make it all the way through." Fair enough; and that's why I'm presenting Matt's primary points in graphical, cartoon format. I've also included some adlibbing, interpretation and fun into these. Only the bits surrounded by quotes were actually taken directly from Matt's words, so please do keep in mind that this is my opinion of what Matt means (along with the occassional editorial).

#1 - There is No Hard Indexation Cap; But Indexation Has Limits

#2 - Duplicate Content Might Hurt Your Indexation

#3 - Lots of Qualifiers on Whether Affiliate Links Count

#4 - 301 Redirects Pass Some, But Not All of a Page's Link Juice

#5 - Low Quality, Non-Unique Pages Might Drop Your Indexation

#6 - Faceted Navigation and PageRank Sculpting are Thorny Issues

Personally, I liked how much Eric pushed Matt with scenarios that would require some advanced methods of showing faceted navigation to users but not search engines. However, I also understand that Matt needs to take a position that's right for 95% of site owners 95% of the time or risk creating a new "PR sculpting" issue.

One other item that really stood out and got me excited was this response:

Matt Cutts: (with regard to links in ads) Our stance has not changed on that, and in fact we might put out a call for people to report more about link spam in the coming months. We have some new tools and technology coming online with ways to tackle that. We might put out a call for some feedback on different types of link spam sometime down the road.

That sounds really good - a huge frustration for the SEO world has been the fact that so many SEOs perceive their competitors to be outranking them with black/gray hat linking techniques and feel they must engage as well is order to stay competitive. Shutting this down or making SEOs feel that Google is taking consistent action when obvious manipulation is reported would go a long way to quelling this thorny problem.

My last recommendation is that you check out Eric's 29 Tidbits from my Interview with Matt Cutts; a post that summarizes a lot of the critical information and takeaways quite neatly.

To end, I thought I'd add the four questions I wish Eric would have asked Matt (maybe next time!):

1. With Google's new recognition of internal anchor links and listings of those URLs in the search results, is it still safe to link to internal anchors on pages and trust that the link juice will flow to the page as a whole, or are content blocks inside individual pages now being treated as unique entities?
2. With the handling of nofollow changing and Google crawling/executing Javascript, what's the best way to link to a document on the web so human visitors can access it but search engines cannot WITHOUT wasting link juice/PageRank (robots.txt, for example, couldn't do this) or cloaking?
3. Does Google now (or will you in the future) consider the sharing/linking activities happening on Twitter, Facebook, etc. to have any impact on the overall link graph of the web (assuming we're talking only about those links that don't make their way onto standard web documents)?
4. When people ask the question, "why is my competitor ranking so well with low quality/manipulative links?" you often reply that they should be careful in presuming that Google hasn't already discounted the value of spammy links and the competitor is actually ranking on the basis of quality link sources. This creates an environment where marketers are constantly trying to discern which links pass value and which don't - could you give advice for relatively savvy, experienced SEOs to help them make those determinations so they can pursue the right links and stop paying spammers for the wrong ones?

If you've got thoughts to share, questions outstanding from the interview or my amateur drawings or things you wish Eric had asked Matt, feel free to post them below.

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