Interview with Matt Cutts To The Blog For Webmasters, Part 2

[Alvar] What is the potential of the Spanish language? Where does it fit on the web? What are the strong and weak points of the Spanish market? [Matt] Well, it's a really interesting market, and it's a really important market. It's one of our primary languages that we pay attention to. And it's not just Spain. Spain is hugely important. 20 million users, I mean it's a very mature market. A lot of people have access to the Internet. But if you look at Latin America, whether it's Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Chile, there are just so many countries there where Internet usage is really just exploding. And so the ability to do well in all of those different languages, you know, in Spanish in Mexico, in Spanish in Spain. We pay a lot of attention to it, and we try to return the best quality we can. [Alvar] So what do you think webmasters can expect from this blog we are just starting? What are the challenges as well that we're going to face in the future? [Matt] I think anytime you start out, it's how do I produce good-quality content, and then how do I find people who can appreciate it, who will link to it. And there was a really good piece of advice, I think it was Brett Tabke, the guy behind WebmasterWorld, who essentially said make a page of content every day. And maybe it's not every day, but trying to produce good-quality content on a regular basis. You know if you leave your blog or your site a week or a month or six months without ever updating it, people don't get excited about it. So having regular content that's produced is just a fantastic way for people to find you. And then after that, you're thinking about how do I promote it? And it's interesting, I just did a blog post yesterday talking about different fonts. And there were some fantastic resources. So if you provide a little bit of information for free, or a high-quality resource, or even a service, there was a site that lets you make your own font online, and another one where you could write in your own handwriting and get a free font. That sort of thing is something that users just love. They'll link to it, they'll share it with their friends, and that's what makes you really popular on the web. [Alvar] Google Chrome, the new browser. What about it? Do webmasters have to worry about compatibility issues? [Matt] The nice thing is, even though Google started more or less from scratch on how to make the browser work well, it used WebKit, which is the rendering engine behind Apple Safari. So as long as your website already looks good on Safari, you don't need to worry about doing extra things, and how does it look, and all that sort of stuff. But it's also pretty interesting, because it encourages everybody to write really solid code. You want to write code that validates and is well-formed, and will look good on Lynx, or IE6, or Opera, or an iPhone, and sort of emphasizes that you want to pay a little bit of attention to things that are cross-platform. But the nice thing is that Chrome by itself doesn't add a whole lot of extra work for webmasters. [Alvar] So what else is promising about Chrome? [Matt] Oh, I could go on and on about Chrome. Here's what I like: The speed is phenomenal. Like, they've built it from the ground up. So if you're using Gmail or Google Calendar as part of your everyday life... I was talking to a friend and said look, if you're using some other browser and you use Gmail, and you use Windows, you pretty much will switch. Just give it three, four, seven days, and you'll notice the speed difference. But there're also a lot of other differences. There's security. So they've built it so that if there's a hacker, he can't really get access to the underlying system, he can only stay within this browser. And even if one browser tab crashes, it doesn't bring down the whole rest of the browser. So it's still early days, you know it's not available on Mac or Linux at this time. And they don't really have an extension API. So, what I would recommend is go ahead and give it a try, and then see if it works for you. So google.com/chrome And what I've found is I love Firefox. Firefox is fantastic; I use all sorts of extensions. But the speed of Chrome is just phenomenal, and that's really what won me over. [Alvar] So they're complementary, right? [Matt] Oh, absolutely. You know I still have so many extensions that I use for getting in-depth and doing spamfighting. So I duck in to Firefox all the time to check out nofollow links and stuff like that. But they really do complement each other well, and I'd advise everybody to give them a try.