Google engineer Matt Cutts presented at WordCamp 2007 last weekend. (Session notes available from Stephanie Booth, Lisa Barone, and P Havens.). Matt’s session was recorded… when the video is posted, I’ll let you all know. Matt will hopefully be posting his Powerpoint to his blog, if he gets approval from the PR department. Matt Cutts gave me props twice in his presentation, and even called me out to the audience (even pronouncing my name right! Thanks Matt!):

1. He recommended my WordPress plugin SEO Title Tag
2. He recommended attendees read my blog post series about blog optimization

In this News.com blog post that I authored this week, I reported that, according to Matt, underscores in URLs are now or soon to be treated as word separators by Google. That’s a departure from their previous stance and offers an indirect clue that Google does give weight to keywords in URLs (which we at Netconcepts already knew from empirical evidence). TypePad and Movable Type bloggers can rejoice at this news, since the majority of them run blogs with a URL structure using underscores (including Lisa Barone), and up to now that was detrimental to their Google rankings. I would like to see Six Apart stop truncating keywords in URLs (by restricting length of URL to something like 15 or 17 characters by default), because that still is detrimental even after this underscore “fix” from Google. A few other highlights from Matt’s talk:

• Dynamic URLs are treated the same as static URLs, as long as you keep the number of parameters to a minimum.
• Directory depth doesn’t matter to Google.
• File extension doesn’t matter to Google, unlesss it’s .exe.
• Google’s status as a domain registrar is inconsequential to them accessing other registrars’ domain data.
• Google won’t admit blogs into Google News that have only one author.

UPDATE: The video of Matt Cutts’ presentation at WordCamp is live now. Check it out.