We’ve all seen Google Webspam team head Matt Cutts do dozens of Google Webmaster Help videos over the years, but none of them are as amusing as his latest video. To drive home his point about how important body content is on a website, Cutts appears on the video as nothing more than a talking head without a body.
Emphasis on great content
For nearly a minute, the disembodied Matt Cutts head stresses the importance of great content on a website, as the Google search algorithm considers great content as a core metric. As far as he’s concerned, this message bears repeating—which he almost always does in his videos—since many sites still find themselves at the receiving end of a penalty because of flimsy or duplicate content.
According to Cutts:
Head might have meta description, meta tags, all that sort of stuff. If you want to put stuff in the head, that’s great, make sure it unique, don’t just do duplicate content, but stuff in the body makes a really big difference as well. If you don’t have the text, the words that will really match on the page, then it’s going to be hard for us to return that page to users.”
“A lot of people get caught up in description, meta keywords, thinking about all those kinds of things, but don’t just think about the head, think about the body because the body matters as well”.
Cutts actually refers to his latest video as a public service announcement or PSA, which makes us wonder if this emphasis on great content means the upcoming algorithm update that he has hinted about will be even more stringent when it comes to content quality.
Watch the disembodied Matt Cutts head and his “PSA” below.