A few interesting bits from Matt Cutts from his talk atthe Domain Round Table:
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Matt said a few interesting things himself, including:
Geo-targeting and IP delivery is completely different from cloaking and we don't penalize for it, so long as you treat Google like any other user. If you have a special page you're showing because we're from Mountain View or because we're a robot, that could cause problems.
We write (spam) classifiers for anything where lots of spam occurs - guestbooks, blog spam, forum spam, specific industries, specific keywords, but for something like Oompa Loompa dating sites, it's just not scalable.
Business.com, Yahoo!, Zeal are all good directories - and if you're building a directory for any reason, make sure it's of real value to users. You don't have to worry about every single link, but do some due diligence and try to nofollow any that you're worried about.
If a domain is parked, Google doesn't want it in the index.
How much content does it take for a domain to be valuable? Enough unique stuff so that it's useful to users.
Owning a keyword match domain name is going to carry some weight in Google for the foreseeable future. It is something they want to reward.
If lots of sites have the same template, that's not really a problem. It's when they don't have anything useful and valuable for users that we try to find them and throw them out. We do use HTML templates as a way to find sites/pages that are low value - we can just search for blocks of code and find all the pages using a certain template and if they all tend to fit this pattern of low value, we can toss them all out together.
One of the most interesting things for me was the bit about keyword matching domains carrying more weight, as this is something i`ve seen first hand and mention on here a lot. Nice to see that its going to continue for the forseeable future, as its great for niche sites.
Couple of other interesting things in the detailed writeup:
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on tld’s and their impact on ranking. Matt says early literature shows G didn’t care about what TLD was using.. just # links and how reputable those links were.
Matt says if a domain changes hands, Google resets the links vale to zero/near zero.
Generic domains that users are likely to remember, will indeed carry more weight than others. There is a real value to those FuneralHomes.com for example.
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