Google’s Matt Cutts often has a few bits and pieces of useful information for all website owners out there. The following are two topics he has recently covered that site owners will likely find of interest.

Cross Linking Domains

For anyone out there with multiple websites, the question often arises regarding how to cross link these sites together – not only for usability purposes but to also keep Google happy. At the end of the day, Matt goes on to recommend being very weary of linking 20 domains together unless you have a very good reason to do so (such as different versions of the site for each country served.).

Duplicate Content Sometimes Okay

A HUGE topic in the world of SEO evolves around duplicate content. Everyone knows that duplicate content is bad when it involves copied websites, plagiarized site copy, and repeated blocks of text containing far too many keywords, but sometimes you can copy a piece of content and not have to worry.

Matt describes one example where having a block of content duplicated on all pages of a website will not actually harm you. “If it is legal boiler plate that is sort of required to be there, we might at most, decide not to count that but its probably not going to cause you a big issue.”

So on one hand, this content, be it terms and conditions, a disclosure, etc, is perfectly safe to copy (as it should be) so this is good. But on the other hand, he does use indecisive language like “we might” and “probably not”. His answers are certainly not concrete, so I would still take this with a grain of salt. I suspect that the folks at Google do not have a problem at all with this type of duplicate content but that their algorithm is not perfect at separating what is good versus what is bad so be sure to play smart.