At the “You&A with Matt Cutts” Search Marketing Expo (SMX) session in Seattle (Day 1), Matt Cutts was in fine form, fielding a ton of questions and carefully offering any calculated perspective that he thought Google may allow.

Occasionally, the live tone also honored the sometimes caustic setting that happens online as people comment on Matt’s blog or simply write missives based on his comments.

The first audience member said he’d like to ask a question with the hope that he could get a straight answer this time from Matt (in contract to his online exchanges).

With a smile, Matt suggested the man tossing up the question should know the answer already given his wisdom.

Surprisingly, very little of the session focused on Google Universal. Audience members enjoyed poking fun at the so-called “200 signals” that Google monitors to determine results.

Matt used the forum to continually emphasize that Google isn’t just about algorithms while workers sit around doing nothing. On the other hand, while human intervention is nice, any solutions need to be scalable.

Here are a few highlights from the informal discussion:

Supplemental Index
- Matt stressed again that supplemental results aren’t necessarily a sign that a website is in trouble with Google. Given time and inbound links, a website can make it in the main index.

- Google may not look at all of the keywords or phrase relationships if a website is in the supplemental index.

Guidelines
- Google is open to providing more details in its webmaster guidelines , Matt said. They were designed to reflect basic principles rather than go so deep that people would be prone to be busy splitting hairs. Patrick Sexton got a plug for his website that clarifies the guidelines.

- Matt reiterated that anyone can skip some of the guidelines or “go off the reservation,” as Matt said. It’s just a risky business.

Spammy Website Influence
- Can spammy sites somehow cast aspersions on a good site? It’s all about degree, Matt said, without really elaborating. If someone has 200 spammy sites, of course #201 is more likely to be scrutinized, he added.

Outbound Links
- Matt wouldn’t say whether links to other websites (in contrast to inbound links) really influence natural search engine rankings. He focused on their value to the visitor.

I’ve always felt it’s tough to ascribe value to outbound links. But Matt briefly talked about the visitor coming back to the website (having bookmarked it).

Website traffic, file sizes and the frequency of page updates could influence rankings.

Wikipedia
- Wikipedia may or may not continue to dominate the natural results, suppressing other websites that could have better or more accurate information. Matt wasn’t quick to kick around Wikipedia, suggesting in his responses that the Wikipedia content simply performs well for certain types of searches.

Searcher Geography
Google seems to do a good job of knowing the geographic origin of a search, Matt said. It’s all about trying to provide the best results.

Keyword Formation
- If marketers want to go out of their way to establish synonyms of keywords throughout their website, Matt applauds them. But Google will still try its best as well because we have a “symantic understanding under the hood” so we can “provide the right results to users.”

Matt didn’t add much new information, but affirmed some theories and clarified long-debated items.