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It's Sunday and I know I was planning on having a nice relaxing weekend but Matt Cutts has been speaking at Domain Roundtable 2008 and he's come out with some interesting things that we all should be aware of. So here I am to write about them.

Now let me say straight up ... I'm not there at the conference ... what I'm using are some notes posted by a blogger that most of you guys would never have heard of but that doesn't mean that his reporting is flawed in any way. Instead, what Matt Cutts is reported to have said is definitely worth thinking about.

And for those of you who don't know who Matt Cutts is then let me tell you that he's the public face of Google for webmasters. You would be silly not to listen to what he says ... you don't necessarily have to believe it but you would be just plain dumb to ignore it completely.

GoDaddy
So what did Matt Cutts say? Well one little interesting piece of information is that if you buy your domain name from GoDaddy you're automatically registered with Google's Webmaster Tools.

Hmmm, now GoDaddy isn't exactly squeaky clean when it comes to doing the right thing by webmasters. Earlier this month I mentioned the clause in the Network Solutions terms of service that was allowing them to do whatever they liked with anyone's unused sub-domains ... and GoDaddy was said to be doing the same. Now we see Google and GoDaddy getting all close and cuddly ... I wonder why I have such a bad taste in my mouth.

Keywords in the URL
On the subject of keywords in the URL it seems that Matt suggested that Google gives some weight to keywords if they appear in the URL ... but it's not necessary to have them there if you want to rank well.

Now there's what looks like a definitive answer to a debate that's been going on for years. Five or six years ago I can remember a newbie board that debated that question for quite some time and most newbies found it hard to believe that they weren't important. Now we have the definitive answer ... and it's pretty much what some of the more experienced webmasters on that board suggested.

When a domain changes hands
According to Matt when a domain changes hands ... i.e. someone buys it from the previous owner then Google resets the links value to zero or near zero. When that one gets around you can see that the bottom just might fall out of the flipped websites market.

Who would want to buy a website just to see all their rankings possible drop through the floor?

And Matt's definition of spam
Now if the reporter got this one right then it's downright scary. It seems that in his introduction Matt said that he was on Google's web spam team - which is true - and he defined spam as 'sites that rank higher than they deserve.' Stop and think about that one for just a few moments and you'll begin to see what you should be afraid ... very afraid.

Who exactly decides what a site 'deserves'? Is it some form of personal preference that comes into play here? If two or more sites are equal on just about everything that Googlebot can measure then which human has the final say on the site that 'deserves' to rank the highest?

Does my site 'deserve' to rank lower just because I used a background color that some human arbiter doesn't approve of? Is my site considered to be spam just because I used tables instead of CSS or I used FrontPage instead of a humble text editor to write the code behind my page?

And while you're pondering those comments from Matt Cutts spend a little time considering what the release of Microsoft's tabletop computer could mean for you as you design your web pages. The tabletop computer was first announced last year and I'm sure many of us thought that Microsoft would never really reach the point where they were producing them in commercial quantities.

We'll they're not quite there just yet and probably won't be around for another three years but last week four of them were set to go on display in several cities across the United States.

Even if they come down to a price that I can afford I'm not sure that I'll ever really want one but you can bet that in this consumer driven world they're going to be very popular when they finally hit the stores. So it's going to be in your best interests to keep up with developments.

And now I'm off to enjoy the rest of my Sunday.