Since February 2009, Matt Cutts has been uploading videos to YouTube answering webmasters’ crawling and indexing questions. Here’s some interesting ones you might have wondered about and maybe a couple you probably never have. There’s also a link to each video to watch the explanation in full.

You can watch all of Matt’s videos on the Webmaster Help YouTube channel.

Should I spend time on meta keywords tags?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_euoDRk1qN0

Answer: No

Experts already know this but from the horse’s mouth the answer to this was a simple ‘no’. It’s not used by Google in any way to determine a site’s rankings and there’s little point in creating one in the first place. Matt point out that other search engines may use this tag (though this is unlikely) but Google certainly doesn’t. Back in the day when SEO was in its infancy (and it’s most crude), it was possible to put any phrase you wanted into the meta keywords tag and stand a chance of getting ranked for it. Those days, however, have well and truly passed.

How does Google rank sites which run on non-standard ports?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wO-1zvXgzg

Answer: The same as other URLs

The asker’s query was whether Google would rank, for instance, www.example.com:241 differently to www.example.com, assuming content on both sites was the same and all other factors where equal. Matt says their spiders do a good job of handling URLs with port numbers and that ranking isn’t affected by this. He does on the other hand draw attention to the fact that users may be more reluctant to click on links in results pages that have a strange number on the end of the address, and that they are harder to remember. In summary, if at all possible don’t use a special port number for your site.

Do site load times have an impact on Google rankings?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3zmP0W26M0

Answer: Yes, with a ‘but’

The latest buzz in the SEO world has come from Google’s April 2010 announcement that the speed at which your site takes to load could affect website rankings. They estimate it will only affect 1% of websites out there and as they launched this change a few weeks before they announced it, you should only take action if you’ve already seen a drop in rankings.

Is Google Analytics data a factor in a page’s ranking?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBw9tbAQhU

Answer: No

Many have wondered whether the search giant used data it has about you site from Analytics in its ranking algorithm, and whether bounce rate, conversion rate or ecommerce tracking would increase or decrease your ranking position. Matt states this does not happen and even emailed a senior in Analytics to double check this.

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