Google has definitely discovered that videos is a good way of getting the message across. Here are a few videos that should be of interest for webmasters trying to rank well in Google. The topics are image search, the nofollow attribute and 301 redirects.

301 redirects and anchor text

Here’s Matt Cutts talking about how 301 redirects (i.e. the permanent change of the URL of a page) influences the effect of anchor text in inbound links (i.e. the phrase found in the clickable text itself).

Some search engine marketing people use redirects to strengthen the ranking of a page for one particular search phrase, i.e. the phrase found in the anchor text. In other words: They try to channel the ranking of one page to another by use of a redirect.

The short version is that the anchor text will be carried thorough, but not always, and especially not of you make too many redirects of this kind.

The nofollow tag

The nofollow tag (or more correctly: nofollow attribute) was introduced by the search engines for stopping blog comment spam from influencing the search rankings.

The number of inbound links to a page matters much in search engine algorithms, and spammers started adding bogus comments with links to the site of their choice to a large number of blogs and forums.

Because of this some sites put nofollow tags on all their links to dis-encourage spammers from posting on their sites. This applies to — for instance — Wikipedia and twitter.

In this video Matt Cutts argues that only a very small portion of links carry the nofollow tag, so this doesn’t disturb their algorithm in a serious way.

Some have argued that a link from Wikipedia is clear sign of quality and that it would make sense for Google to make such links count anyway. Cutts says clearly, however, that nofollow links from Wikipedia do not influence Google’s rankings.

Optimizing for Google Image Search

Here’s a video from Peter Linsley, Google’s Product Manager for image search. He argues that it is possible to get your images to rank better in Google Image Search.

Image searchers behave differently from web searchers, though. They normally scan all the images on a search result page and they look at a large number of result pages. Being number 1 is therefore not so important.

The landing pages are important, though. Searchers — as well as Google — like to find pages with the image over the fold, in large sizes, of high quality, with relevant info and descriptive text and with links to other pictures.

Sources: Google Blog and Matt Cutts’ blog.

See also Learn more about search and SEM from Google videos
YouTube: Google Webmaster Central Channel