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Tag: Matt Cutts

  • ‘GoogleGuy’ Matt Cutts Leaves Google, Will Continue with the US Digital Service

    ‘GoogleGuy’ Matt Cutts Leaves Google, Will Continue with the US Digital Service

    Matt Cutts, who was once believed to be the mysterious GoogleGuy on Webmaster World forums and later became the main conduit of information to webmasters about Google search updates, has resigned from Google. For the last few years Cutts has been on leave from Google and has more recently worked for the US Digital Service. He announced on his blog that he had resigned from Google as of December 31, 2016:

    When I joined the US Digital Service, I only planned to stay for three months. That quickly turned into six months after I saw the impact of the USDS. In the last month, I made a big decision. On December 31, 2016, I resigned from Google. I’m currently serving as director of engineering for the USDS. Mikey Dickerson, the first administrator of the USDS, is a political appointee, so he’ll step down on Inauguration Day. When that happens, I’ll serve as acting administrator of the USDS. The work that the USDS does is critical to the American people, and I’m honored to continue that tradition.

    The USDS played a pivotal role in rescuing the Obamacare website healthcare.gov that was beset by huge cost overruns while still not working. Cutts also notes that “the US Digital Service has helped veterans get their health benefits, brought bug bounties to the federal government, and helped the IRS protect taxpayer info.” He posted this video to illustrate the important work and accomplishments of USDS:

    “Working for the government doesn’t pay as well as a big company in Silicon Valley,” writes Cutts. “We don’t get any free lunches. Many days are incredibly frustrating. All I can tell you is that the work is deeply important and inspiring, and you have a chance to work on things that genuinely make peoples’ lives better. A friend who started working in this space several years ago told me “These last five years have been the hardest and worst and best and most rewarding I think I will ever have.””

    For those in the search engine space Cutts is very familiar, having attended many Pubcon, SearchEngineStrategies and SearchEngineLand conferences. WebProNews has video interviewed Cutts and written about things he has said hundreds of many times over the years while covering the search industry and Google. Here are a few of our WebProNews exclusive video interviews with Matt Cutts:

    PubCon: Exclusive Interview With Matt Cutts (2006)

    PubCon Las Vegas 2007: Matt Cutts of Google and Vanessa Fox (2007)

    WPN Exclusive: Matt Cutts Apologizes on Behalf of Google’s Penalty against Google Japan (2009)

    Breaking News: Matt Cutts Explains “Canonical Tag” from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft (2009)

    Matt Cutts on Changes at Google (2008)

  • Will Matt Cutts Be Back At Google In 2016?

    Will Matt Cutts Be Back At Google In 2016?

    Google’s former head of web spam Matt Cutts will not be returning to the company this year from the sound of it. He reportedly said on an internet talk show that Google has extended his leave throughout the remainder of the year.

    Cutts appeared on Leo Laporte’s Twit.tv show, and according to Search Engine Land, he talked about this during the pre-show, which wasn’t recorded, so we can’t provide the video of what he actually said. However, according to the report, Cutts indicated that he’ll be gone through 2015, and that Google is not paying him for his time away, but it is still providing him with health benefits.

    Barry Schwartz reports: “Matt added that this gives him a lot of options that he is considering. Including staying with Google at the end of his leave.”

    This isn’t the first time Matt Cutts has appeared on Laporte’s show to talk about his potential future with Google. Last fall, he said:

    Well, I really have been impressed with how well everyone else on the team is doing, and it’s created a little bit of an opportunity for them to try new things, explore different stuff, you know, approach problems from a different way, and so we’ll have to see how it goes,” Cutts responded. “I loved the part of my job that dealt with keeping an eye on what important news was happening related to Google, but you know, it’s not clear that having me as a lightning rod, you know for, you know unhappy black hat SEOs or something is the best use of anybody’s time compared to working on other things that could be making the world better for Google or in general. So we’ll see how it all works.

    Laporte asked him if he has the ability at the company to just do something different if he wants to. Cutts responded:

    The interesting thing is that at Google they try to get you and go do different projects, so the product managers, they encourage you to rotate every two or three years, and so it’s relatively rare to find people who have been around forever in a specific area. You’ll find Amit [Singhal] in search, Sridhar [Ramaswamy], you know, some of these people that are really, really senior, you know – higher ranking than me for sure – they do stick around in one area, but a lot of other people jump to different parts of the company to furnish different skills and try different things, which is a pretty good idea, I think.

    Jeff Jarvis was on the show too, and asked Cutts what other things interest him. He said:

    Oh man, I was computer graphics and actually inertial trackers and accelerometers in grad school. At one point I said, you know, you could use commodity hardware, but as a grad student, you don’t have access to influence anybody’s minds, so why don’t I just go do something else for ten years, and somebody else will come up with all these sensors, and sure enough, you’ve got Kinect, you have the Wii, you know, the iPhone. Now everybody’s got a computer in their pocket that can do 3D sensing as long as write the computer programs well. So there’s all kinds of interesting stuff you could do.

    Last month, Google said it had replaced Cutts as the head of web spam, but declined to name who the replacement was. They indicated that the person wouldn’t be the public face Cutts has been over the years, though John Mueller has pretty much taken over that part of Matt’s duties. In fact, Ignite Visibility President John Lincoln, who contributes to Search Engine Land on occasion, created a comic about Cutts and his leave which reveals that Mueller has actually been Cutts in disguise the whole time!

    Where is Matt Cutts? – SEO Comic Book – An infographic by the team at Where is Matt Cutts? – SEO Comic Book

    Images via YouTube, Ignite Visibility

  • Someone Made A Comic About Matt Cutts And His Leave

    Someone Made A Comic About Matt Cutts And His Leave

    Ignite Visibility President John Lincoln, who contributes to Search Engine Land on occasion, created a comic about Matt Cutts and his leave from Google. I hate to spoil it, but on the other hand, I don’t really care. It turns out that John Mueller has really been Matt Cutts all along.

    Last July, Cutts announced he was taking leave from Google. It was originally supposed to last at least through October. At the time, he wrote on his personal blog:

    I wanted to let folks know that I’m about to take a few months of leave. When I joined Google, my wife and I agreed that I would work for 4-5 years, and then she’d get to see more of me. I talked about this as recently as last month and as early as 2006. And now, almost fifteen years later I’d like to be there for my wife more. I know she’d like me to be around more too, and not just physically present while my mind is still on work.

    So we’re going to take some time off for a few months. My leave starts next week. Currently I’m scheduled to be gone through October. Thanks to a deep bench of smart engineers and spam fighters, the webspam team is in more-than-capable hands. Seriously, they’re much better at spam fighting than I am, so don’t worry on that score.

    At the end of October, Cutts revealed in a tweet that he was extending his leave into 2015:

    In November, Cutts made some comments on a web chat show indicating that he might be interested in doing different work at Google when he decides to go back to work.

    While Cutts has been away, the webmaster community has mostly heard from Mueller, at least when it comes to addressing Google webmasters issues in videos, which Cutts used to do on a regular basis. Here’s the comic:

    Where is Matt Cutts? – SEO Comic Book – An infographic by the team at Where is Matt Cutts? – SEO Comic Book

    In reality, Google said last month that it has someone new in the Matt Cutts position of head of web spam, but that this person won’t be “the all-around spokesperson” that Cutts was, so they’re not naming who it is.

    Over on Search Engine Roundtable, Schwartz is telling people to stop harassing Mueller because it’s getting “disgusting”. Apparently a lot of people are being pretty nasty to him. I guess he did get to take Matt’s place in that department.

  • Google Has Replaced Matt Cutts

    Google Has Replaced Matt Cutts

    It looks like Matt Cutts has been officially replaced as the head of web spam at Google. We don’t know who his replacement is, and we might not anytime soon, but the company has confirmed his replacement nevertheless.

    In July, it will be the one-year anniversary of when Cutts announced he was taking leave from Google. It was originally supposed to last at least through the following October. At the time, he wrote on his personal blog:

    I wanted to let folks know that I’m about to take a few months of leave. When I joined Google, my wife and I agreed that I would work for 4-5 years, and then she’d get to see more of me. I talked about this as recently as last month and as early as 2006. And now, almost fifteen years later I’d like to be there for my wife more. I know she’d like me to be around more too, and not just physically present while my mind is still on work.

    So we’re going to take some time off for a few months. My leave starts next week. Currently I’m scheduled to be gone through October. Thanks to a deep bench of smart engineers and spam fighters, the webspam team is in more-than-capable hands. Seriously, they’re much better at spam fighting than I am, so don’t worry on that score.

    At the end of October, Cutts revealed in a tweet that he was extending his leave into 2015:

    In November, Cutts made some comments on a web chat show indicating that he might be interested in doing different work at Google when he decides to go back to work.

    Search Engine Land is now reporting that Google has someone new in the Matt Cutts position of head of web spam, but that this person won’t be “the all-around spokesperson” that Cutts was, so they’re not naming who it is. Danny Sullivan writes:

    Going forward, Google says to continue to expect what’s already been happening while Cutts has been away. Various individual Googlers will keep splitting the role of providing advice and answers to SEOs and publishers in online forums, conferences and other places.

    So far, webmaster trends analyst John Mueller has been the most publicly visible voice of webmaster issues for Google on the internet, regularly hosting lengthy webmaster hangouts and talking about various Google updates and whatnot.

    Matt’s Twitter bio still says, “I’m the head of the webspam team at Google. (Currently on leave).”

    Image via YouTube

  • Has Google Lived Up To Its ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Mantra?

    Google’s famous “Don’t be Evil” mantra has been questioned time and time again for many years, but it’s back in the spotlight thanks to comments made recently by co-founder and CEO Larry Page.

    Do you think Google has done a decent job of keeping in line with the “Don’t be evil” mantra? Share your thoughts in the comments.

    Page did an interview with the Financial Times in which he talked about how, as the FT put it, “the search engine’s original mission is not big enough for what he now has in mind.”

    The mission is actually that whole thing about organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible, but the evil thing did come up. This is the part that deals specifically with that. FT reports:

    It is a decade on from the first flush of idealism that accompanied its stock market listing, and all Google’s talk of “don’t be evil” and “making the world a better place” has come to sound somewhat quaint. Its power and wealth have stirred resentment and brought a backlash, in Europe in particular, where it is under investigation for how it wields its monopoly power in internet search.

    Page, however, is not shrinking an inch from the altruistic principles or the outsized ambitions that he and co-founder Sergey Brin laid down in seemingly more innocent times. “The societal goal is our primary goal,” he says. “We’ve always tried to say that with Google. I think we’ve not succeeded as much as we’d like.”

    After that, the actual mission statement was discussed, and Page said he thought they probably needed a new one, and that they’re “still trying to work that out.”

    The reason they need a new one is basically that Google has grown so much, and has become so much more than the search engine it was when it was founded. I mean, they have robots, self-driving cars, smart glasses, smart contact lenses, and are trying to work on a cure for aging. It’s probably not too unreasonable to be thinking about updating the mission.

    Some took this story, however, and spun it as something along the lines of “Google has outgrown its ‘Don’t be Evil’ mantra”. I think this misses the point.

    Either way, Matt Cutts, who is currently on leave from Google (and it’s unclear whether he’ll actually be back or not), weighed in on the topic on an episode of This Week in Google.

    He said, “They have tried to have a culture of ‘Don’t be Evil,’ and you can argue over individual incidents, and you know, whether this specific thing is evil or that specific thing is evil, but Google as a whole, whenever I look at the DNA, the people try to do the right things. So if you’ve got Larry marching off in one direction, and you’ve got the rest of the company saying, ‘No, we disagree,’ then they drag their heels, and they create friction. That, in my opinion, helps to move things toward a consensus of maybe a middleground, which works pretty well.”

    He added, “And then having that critical mass of smart people lets you say, ‘Oh, now I can do voice recognition better. Now I can do image recognition better, and I can unlock all kinds of good applications to improve the world that way…’ It’s a tough call…It’s a good problem to have, I guess.”

    Here’s the full episode.

    This takes place roughly 28 minutes in, but the discussion about this whole topic lasts for quite a bit. The episode also has a lot of discussion about Cutts’ future with Google.

    Cutts thinks Google tries not to be evil. Do you believe him? What are some specific areas that you think the company needs to improve on in that regard? Share in the comments.

    Image via YouTube

  • Is The Matt Cutts Era Over?

    Is The Matt Cutts Era Over?

    It’s not 100% clear yet, but it’s looking like for webmasters and SEOs, the era of Matt Cutts is a thing of the past. His career at Google may continue, but it doesn’t sound like he’ll be the head of webspam going forward.

    Would you like to see Matt Cutts return to the role he’s held for years, or do you look forward to change in the search department? Share your thoughts in the comments.

    It’s a pretty interesting time in search right now. Matt Cutts, who has been the go-to guy for webmaster help and Q&A related to Google search for quite a few years, has been on leave from the company since July. Meanwhile, his counterpart over at Bing has been let go from his duties at Microsoft.

    When Cutts announced his leave, he didn’t really make it sound like he wouldn’t be back, but rather like he would be taking a nice,long, much-deserved vacation. He wrote on his blog:

    I wanted to let folks know that I’m about to take a few months of leave. When I joined Google, my wife and I agreed that I would work for 4-5 years, and then she’d get to see more of me. I talked about this as recently as last month and as early as 2006. And now, almost fifteen years later I’d like to be there for my wife more. I know she’d like me to be around more too, and not just physically present while my mind is still on work.

    So we’re going to take some time off for a few months. My leave starts next week. Currently I’m scheduled to be gone through October. Thanks to a deep bench of smart engineers and spam fighters, the webspam team is in more-than-capable hands. Seriously, they’re much better at spam fighting than I am, so don’t worry on that score.

    Scheduled to be gone through October. See? Pretty much sounds like a vacation. As you know, October has since come and gone. On October 31, Cutts provided another update, saying he was extending his leave, and wouldn’t be back at Google this year.

    Ok, fine. Cutts has been at Google for fourteen years, and can probably take a considerable amount of time off with no problem. But he’d be back in the swing of things in the new year, right? Well, he might be back, but what he’ll be doing remains to be seen.

    Cutts appeared on the web chat show This Week in Google, hosted by Leo Laporte, who asked him if he’ll go back to the same role, or if this is a chance for him to try something different. This part of the conversation starts at about 9 minutes and 50 seconds in to the video below (h/t: Search Engine Roundtable).

    “Well, I really have been impressed with how well everyone else on the team is doing, and it’s created a little bit of an opportunity for them to try new things, explore different stuff, you know, approach problems from a different way, and so we’ll have to see how it goes,” Cutts responded. “I loved the part of my job that dealt with keeping an eye on what important news was happening related to Google, but you know, it’s not clear that having me as a lightning rod, you know for, you know unhappy black hat SEOs or something is the best use of anybody’s time compared to working on other things that could be making the world better for Google or in general. So we’ll see how it all works.”

    It doesn’t really sounds like he intends to go back to the classic Matt Cutts role. In fact, later in the discussion, he referred to the initial leave as the “official” leave, implying that the one he’s now on is open-ended.

    Laporte asked him if he has the ability at the company to just do something different if he wants to.

    He said, “The interesting thing is that at Google they try to get you and go do different projects, so the product managers, they encourage you to rotate every two or three years, and so it’s relatively rare to find people who have been around forever in a specific area. You’ll find Amit [Singhal] in search, Sridhar [Ramaswamy], you know, some of these people that are really, really senior, you know – higher ranking than me for sure – they do stick around in one area, but a lot of other people jump to different parts of the company to furnish different skills and try different things, which is a pretty good idea, I think.”

    Again, it sounds like he would really like to do something different within the company.

    He also reiterated his confidence in the current webspam team. On his “colleagues” (he prefers that term to “minions”), he said, “I just have so much admiration for you know, for example, last year, there was a real effort on child porn because of some stuff that happened in the United Kingdom, and a lot of people chipped in, and that is not an easy job at all. So you really have to think hard about how you’re gonna try to tackle this kind of thing.”

    Jeff Jarvis, who was also on the show, asked Cutts what other things interest him.

    Cutts responded, “Oh man, I was computer graphics and actually inertial trackers and accelerometers in grad school. At one point I said, you know, you could use commodity hardware, but as a grad student, you don’t have access to influence anybody’s minds, so why don’t I just go do something else for ten years, and somebody else will come up with all these sensors, and sure enough, you’ve got Kinect, you have the Wii, you know, the iPhone. Now everybody’s got a computer in their pocket that can do 3D sensing as long as write the computer programs well. So there’s all kinds of interesting stuff you could do.”

    Will we see Matt working on the Android team? As a matter of fact, Laporte followed that up by mentioning Andy Rubin – the guy who created Android and brought it to Google – leaving the company. News of that came out last week.

    Matt later said, “I’ll always have a connection and soft spot for Google…”

    That’s actually a bit more mysterious of a comment. I don’t want to put any words in the guy’s mouth, but to me, that sounds like he’s not married to the company for the long haul.

    Either way, webmasters are already getting used to getting updates and helpful videos from Googlers like Pierre Far and John Mueller. We’ve already seen Google roll out new Panda and Penguin updates since Cutts has been on leave, and the SEO world hasn’t come crumbling down.

    I’m guessing Cutts is getting less hate mail these days. He must have been getting tired of disgruntled website owners bashing him online all the time. It’s got to be nice to not have to deal with that all the time.

    As I said at the beginning of the article, it’s really not clear what Matt’s future holds, so all we can really do is listen to what he’s said, and look for him to update people further on his plans.

    In the meantime, if you miss him, you can peruse the countless webmaster videos and comments he’s made over the years that we’ve covered here.

    Do you expect Matt Cutts to return to search in any capacity? Do you expect him to return to Google? Should he? Do you miss him already? Let us know what you think.

  • Matt Cutts Won’t Be Back At Google Any Time Soon

    Back in July, Google’s head of webspam Matt Cutts announced that he was taking an extended leave from work to enjoy his personal life. On Friday, he revealed in a tweet (via Search Engine Roundtable) that he won’t be back to work at all this year.

    Cutts didn’t really elaborate on why he’s extending his leave, but if you could do it, why not, right? He did say this on his blog back in July:

    I wanted to let folks know that I’m about to take a few months of leave. When I joined Google, my wife and I agreed that I would work for 4-5 years, and then she’d get to see more of me. I talked about this as recently as last month and as early as 2006. And now, almost fifteen years later I’d like to be there for my wife more. I know she’d like me to be around more too, and not just physically present while my mind is still on work.

    So we’re going to take some time off for a few months. My leave starts next week. Currently I’m scheduled to be gone through October. Thanks to a deep bench of smart engineers and spam fighters, the webspam team is in more-than-capable hands. Seriously, they’re much better at spam fighting than I am, so don’t worry on that score.

    In Matt’s absence, the industry had relied on updates from people like Google Webmaster Trends analysts John Mueller and Pierre Far. There have been both new Panda and Penguin updates to roll out during Matt’s leave.

    It remains to be seen when Cutts will return, but there’s not really that much of 2014 left. I’d expect him to return after the New Year. We’ll see.

    Webmasters must be itching for more of Cutts’ famous YouTube videos.

    Image via YouTube

  • Google Is Not Going To Be Updating Toolbar PageRank Anymore

    It looks like Google Toolbar PageRank may officially be a thing of the past. This will no doubt please some, while upsetting others, but for better or worse, don’t expect it to be updated anymore.

    Do you think Toolbar PageRank should die, or do you still find a use for it? Let us know in the comments.

    Over the last couple of years, Google has already been updating PageRank less frequently. In fact, it’s not even been updated this year at all. The last update came in December.

    Even before that, Google had given indication that it wouldn’t update it before the end of last year, if at all, though it ultimately did. By that point, many had assumed Toolbar PageRank was going away because it had been so long since the previous update after years of regularity. Before the December update, it hadn’t been updated since the prior February. Historically, they had updated it every three or four months.

    Google’s Matt Cutts tweeted a year ago that he would be surprised if there was another PR update before 2014. Well, there was, but that was the last one. It’s now been ten months.

    Google’s John Mueller actually addressed the lack of an update in a Google+ Hangout (via Search Engine Roundtable).

    PageRank is something that we haven’t updated for I think over a year now, and we’re probably not going to be updating it going forward, at least in the Toolbar PageRank…

    He said that at 20 minutes and 30 seconds into this video.

    Of course Mueller is incorrect in that it’s been over a year, but he seems to be under the impression that Toolbar PageRank is dead. He wasn’t exactly making an announcement, but discussing it in relation to somebody’s question about a particular site’s rankings, so it’s probably not out of the realm of possibility that an another update could sneak through, but it sounds like it’s not going to happen.

    A year ago, Cutts discussed PageRank in this video:

    “Over time, the Toolbar PageRank is getting less usage just because recent versions of Internet Explorer don’t really let you install toolbars as easily, and Chrome doesn’t have the toolbar so over time, the PageRank indicator will probably start to go away a little bit,” he said.

    In another video earlier in the year, he said, “Maybe it will go away on its own or eventually we’ll reach the point where we say, ‘Okay, maintaining this is not worth the amount of work.’”

    So the writing has been on the wall for quite some time. Still, people have continued to monitor PageRank, and look forward to seeing that data refreshed.

    The last update was actually kind of a side effect of sorts. As Cutts noted at the time, the team was fixing a different backend service, and did a PR update along the way. He said it wasn’t an accident, but that it was just easier for them to push the new PR data rather than keeping the old data. Maybe that will happen again.

    Do you want to see Google continue to update Toolbar PageRank? Let us know in the comments.

  • Matt Cutts Is Disappearing For A While

    Just ahead of the holiday weekend, Google’s head of webspam Matt Cutts announced that he is taking leave from Google through at least October, which means we shouldn’t be hearing from him (at least about Google) for at least three months or so. That’s a pretty significant amount of time when you consider how frequently Google makes announcements and changes things up. Is the SEO industry ready for three Matt Cutts-less months?

    Cutts explains on his personal blog:

    I wanted to let folks know that I’m about to take a few months of leave. When I joined Google, my wife and I agreed that I would work for 4-5 years, and then she’d get to see more of me. I talked about this as recently as last month and as early as 2006. And now, almost fifteen years later I’d like to be there for my wife more. I know she’d like me to be around more too, and not just physically present while my mind is still on work.

    So we’re going to take some time off for a few months. My leave starts next week. Currently I’m scheduled to be gone through October. Thanks to a deep bench of smart engineers and spam fighters, the webspam team is in more-than-capable hands. Seriously, they’re much better at spam fighting than I am, so don’t worry on that score.

    He says he wont’ be checking his work email at all while he’s on leave, but will have some of his outside email forwarded to “a small set of webspam folks,” noting that they won’t be replying.

    Cutts is a frequent Twitter user, and didn’t say whether or not he’ll be staying off there, but either way, I wouldn’t expect him to tweet much about search during his leave. If you need to reach Google on a matter that you would have typically tried to go to Matt Cutts about, he suggests webmaster forums, Office Hours Hangouts, the Webmaster Central Twitter account, the Google Webmasters Google+ account, or or trying other Googlers.

    He did recently pin this tweet from 2010 to the top of his timeline:

    So far, he hasn’t stopped tweeting, but his latest – from six hours ago – is just about his leave:

    That would seem to suggest he doesn’t plan to waste much of his time off on Twitter.

    So what will Matt be doing while he’s gone? Taking a ballroom dance class with his wife, trying a half-Iornman race, and going on a cruise. He says they might also do some additional traveling ahead of their fifteen-year wedding anniversary, and will spend more time with their parents.

    Long story short, leave Cutts alone. He’s busy.

    Image via YouTube

  • Google Continues Link Network Attack

    Google Continues Link Network Attack

    It would appear that Google’s attack on European link networks is not over (if it ever will be).

    Google has been penalizing link networks on the Internet with a vengeance over the past year or so, with much of the focus on Europe. The company says it has now penalized two more from Poland.

    This week, Google posted about reconsideration requests on its Poland blog, and then Googler Karolina Kruszyńska told Rusty Brick they took action on two networks in Poland:

    She didn’t name the networks (at least publicly). Google’s Matt Cutts also tweeted about it:

    I wonder who those people are.

    Back in February, Google said it was focusing on networks in Poland. Since then, it was gone after various other networks in Europe, and also in Japan.

    Image via YouTube

  • Google Looks At Apparent IE Sponsored Post Spam

    Tech blogger/investor Michael Arrington revealed that someone who claimed to be a “social strategist on behalf of Microsoft” tried to get him to write about Internet Explorer for payment.

    The message he got says:

    Hi Michael,

    I work as a social strategist on behalf of Microsoft, and I wanted to invite you to collaborate on a sponsored post opportunity for Internet Explorer.

    We love your aesthetic and blogging style, and think you’d be the perfect partner to spread the word on the new Internet Explorer browsing experience!

    The new Internet Explorer is a brand new experience with many different features. This reworked Internet Explorer lets you search smarter and do more with its cool new features, such as multitasking, pinnable sites, and full-screen browsing.

    In this program, we are looking to spread the word about the new Internet Explorer web experience in a cool, visual way, which is where you come in! Internet Explorer has teamed up with many partners in gaming, entertainment, and more, and we’d love to see you talk about your opinions on these collaborations.

    If you accept our invitation to work on this program, we would like for you to write a blog post by July 10th, in addtion to sharing links to the new Internet Explorer across your social channels.

    Compesnsation for this post is available, and there will also be ample opportunities for fun prizes and rewards throughout the duration of the program.

    To learn all about the details of this program, please visit this page (http://unbouncepages.com/7975010c-edb3-11e3-b3e0-12314000cce6/).

    I look forward to working together.

    As Arrington notes, “This is just layers of stupid.”

    This is, after all, the founder of TechCrunch, who has referred to people being paid to shill products on their blogs as “pollution” in the past.

    When Arrington responded, asking if this was real, they replied that they weren’t sure how Arrington wound up on the list, and “Go TechCrunch!”

    The URL in the message has since been taken offline, and Google is even investigating what could be webpspam from its biggest competitor.

    Google’s Matt Cutts tweeted:

    He was then in contact with SocialChorus program strategist Gregg Hanano.

    As you may recall, Google actually had to penalize its own Chrome browser a while back for pretty much the same thing. The story there was that an outside agency was soliciting such posts on the company’s behalf.

    It doesn’t look like Internet Explorer has suffered such a penalty so far.

    Of course, Google’s competition with Microsoft adds a whole other layer to this. Microsoft is a big part of the FairSearch lobbying group that constantly tries to see antitrust regulation brought against Google.

    To be continued…

  • Google Launches New Version Of Payday Loan Algorithm

    Last month, Google rolled out two major updates to its algorithm around the same time – new versions of the famous Panda update and the “Payday Loans” update, which is one of its ways of fighting spam.

    A newer version of the latter began rolling on Thursday afternoon.

    Google’s head of webspam Matt Cutts announced the update at the Search Marketing Expo in front of a packed house.

    “Matt Cutts explained that this goes after different signals,” recounts Barry Schwartz at SMX sister site Search Engine Land, who was in attendance. “The 2.0 version targeted spammy sites, whereas version 3.0 targets spammy queries.”

    It will target queries like “payday loans,” “casinos,” “viagra,” etc., he says.

    According to this recap of Cutts’ announcements (as tweeted by Cutts himself), he referred to the new update as Payday Loan 2.0 with last month’s being 2.0A if that helps you for any reason whatsoever.

    Also according to that recap, Google is working on improving reconsideration requests so web spam analysts can provide additional feedback. Also, Google is close to getting IE 8 referring data back. It will still show mostly as not provided, it says, but will correctly show the visitor as coming from Google search.

    Image via MYA (Twitter)

  • Here’s Another Matt Cutts Floating Head Video (About The Most Common SEO Mistake)

    We’ll just keep this one short like the video itself. The most common SEO mistake you can make, according to Matt Cutts, is not having a website. Hopefully you feel you’ve gotten your money’s worth on that one.

    Once again, Cutts uses the ol’ floating head trick.

    I wonder how many more of these things he’s got.

    Image via YouTube

  • Google Talks Determining Quality When There Aren’t Links

    Google has a new Webmaster Help video out talking about how it looks at quality of content that doesn’t have many links pointing to it.

    Specifically, Matt Cutts takes on the following question:

    How does Google determine quality content if there aren’t a lot of links to a post?

    “In general, that sort of reverts back to the way search engines were before links,” he says. “You’re pretty much judging based on the text on the page. Google has a lot of stuff to sort of say OK, the first time we see a word on a page, count it a little bit more. The next time, a little more, but not a ton more. And that after a while, we say, ‘You know what? We’ve seen this word. Maybe this page is about this topic,’ but it doesn’t really help you to keep repeating that keyword over and over and over again. In fact, at some point, we might view that as keyword stuffing, and then the page would actually do less well – not as well as just a moderate number of mentions of a particular piece of text.”

    He continues, “We do have other ways. In theory we could say, ‘Well, does it sit on a domain that seems to be somewhat reputable? There are different ways you can try to assess the quality of content, but typically, if you go back to a user is typing possibly some really rare phrase, if there are no other pages on the web that have that particular phrase, even if there’s not that any links, then that page can be returned because we think it might be relevant. It might be topical to what the user is looking for. It can be kind of tough, but at that point, we sort of have to fall back, and assess based on the quality of the content that’s actually on the text – that’s actually on the page.”

    A few years ago, after the Panda update was first launched, Google shared a list of questions one could ask themselves about their content to get an idea of how Google might view it in terms of quality. You might want to check that out if you haven’t yet.

    Image via YouTube

  • Google’s Transparency Called Into Question Again

    Though it’s back in Google’s results now, another company is making headlines for being penalized by Google. This time it’s Vivint, which produces smart thermostats, and competes with Nest, which Google acquired earlier this year.

    PandoDaily’s James Robinson wrote an article about it, noting that Vivint had received warnings from Google about external links that didn’t comply with its quality guidelines, but didn’t confirm what the links were. Rather, the company was “left to fish in the dark to figure out what i had done to upset its rival.”

    As Robinson correctly noted, Rap Genius was removed from Google’s search results last year for violating guidelines, and was back in business within two weeks. At the time, Google was accused by some of employing a double standard for letting the site recover so quickly compared to others.

    Google’s Matt Cutts had some comments about the Pando article on Hacker News. He wrote:

    It’s a shame that Pando’s inquiry didn’t make it to me, because the suggestion that Google took action on vivint.com because it was somehow related to Nest is silly. As part of a crackdown on a spammy blog posting network, we took action on vivint.com–along with hundreds of other sites at the same time that were attempting to spam search results.

    We took action on vivint.com because it was spamming with low-quality or spam articles…

    He listed several example links, and continued:

    and a bunch more links, not to mention 25,000+ links from a site with a paid relationship where the links should have been nofollowed.
    When we took webspam action, we alerted Vivint via a notice in Webmaster Tools about unnatural links to their site. And when Vivint had done sufficient work to clean up the spammy links, we granted their reconsideration request. This had nothing whatsoever to do with Nest. The webspam team caught Vivint spamming. We held them (along with many other sites using the same spammy guest post network) accountable until they cleaned the spam up. That’s all.

    He said later in the thread that Google “started dissecting” the guest blog posting network in question in November, noting that Google didn’t acquire Nest until January. In case you’re wondering when acquisition talks began, Cutts said, “You know Larry Page doesn’t have me on speed dial for companies he’s planning to buy, right? No one involved with this webspam action (including me) knew about the Nest acquisition before it was publicly announced.”

    “Vivint was link spamming (and was caught by the webspam team for spamming) before Google even acquired Nest,” he said.

    Robinson, in a follow-up article, takes issue with Cutts calling Pando’s reporting “silly,” and mockingly says Cutts “wants you to know Google is totally transparent.” Here’s an excerpt:

    “It’s a shame that Pando’s inquiry didn’t make it to me,” Cutts writes, insinuating we didn’t contact the company for comment.

    Pando had in fact reached out to Google’s press team and consulted in detail with the company spokesperson who was quoted in our story. It is now clear why Google didn’t pass on our questions to Cutts.

    He goes on to say that Cutts’ assessment of VIvint’s wrongdoing is “exactly what we described in our article — no one is disputing that Vivint violated Google’s search rules.” He also calls Cutts’ comments “a slightly simplistic version of events, given the months-long frustration Vivint spoke of in trying to fix the problem.”

    Robinson concludes the article:

    The point of our reporting is to highlight the unusual severity of the punishment (locked out for months, completely delisted from results until this week) given Vivint’s relationship to a Google-owned company and the lack of transparency Google offers in assisting offending sites. Multiple sources at Vivint told us that the company was told that it had “unnatural links” but was left to guess at what these were, having to repeatedly cut content blindly and ask for reinstatement from Google, until it hit upon the magic recipe.

    To these charges, Cutts has no answer. That’s a shame.

    Now, I’m going to pull an excerpt from an article of my own from November because it seems highly relevant here:

    Many would say that Google has become more transparent over the years. It gives users, businesses and webmasters access to a lot more information about its intentions and business practices than it did long ago, but is it going far enough? When it comes to its search algorithm and changes to how it ranks content, Google has arguably scaled back a bit on the transparency over the past year or so.

    Google, as a company, certainly pushes the notion that it is transparent. Just last week, Google updated its Transparency Report for the eighth time, showing government requests for user information (which have doubled over three years, by the way). That’s one thing. For the average online business that relies on Internet visibility for customers, however, these updates are of little comfort.

    A prime example of where Google has reduced its transparency is the monthly lists of algorithm changes it used to put out, but stopped. Cutts said the “world got bored” with those. Except it really didn’t as far as we can tell.

    Image via YouTube

  • Matt Cutts Talks Google Link Extraction And PageRank

    In a new video, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of webspam, discussed how Google views two links with different anchor text on one page pointing to the same destination, and how that affects PageRank.

    The explanation is Cutts’ response to the following submitted question:

    What impact would two links on a page pointing to the same target, each using different anchor text, have on the flow of PageRank?

    He said, “This is kind of an example of what I think of as dancing on the head of a pin. I’ll try to give you an answer. If you’re telling me that the most important thing for your SEO strategy is knowing what two links from one page do – you know, I understand if people are curious about it – but you might want to step back, and look at the higher mountain top of SEO, and your SEO strategy, and the architecture of your site, and how is the user experience, and how is the speed of the site, and all of that sort of stuff because this is sort of splitting hairs stuff.”

    “So, with that said,” he continued, “looking at the original PageRank paper, if you had two links from one page to another page, both links would flow PageRank, and so the links – the amount of PageRank gets divided evenly (in the original PageRank paper) between all the outgoing links, and so it’s the case that if two links both go to the same page then twice as much PageRank would go to that page. That’s in the original PageRank paper. If they have different anchor text, well that doesn’t affect the flow of PageRank, which is what your question was about, but I’ll go ahead and try to answer how anchor text might flow.”

    “So we have a link extraction process, which is we look at all the links on a page, and we extract those, and we annotate or we fix them to the documents that they point to. And that link extraction process can select all the links, or it might just select one of the links, so it might just select some of the links, and that behavior changes over time. The last time I checked was 2009, and back then, we might, for example, only have selected one of the links from a given page. But again, this is the sort of thing where if you’re really worried about this as a factor in SEO, I think it’s probably worthwhile to take a step back and look at high order bits – more important priorities like how many of my users are actually making it through my funnel, and are they finding good stuff that they really enjoy? What is the design of my homepage? Do I need to refresh it because it’s starting to look a little stale after a few years?”

    There’s that mention of stale-looking sites again.

    The main point here is that you should spend less time nitpicking small things like how much PageRank is flowing from two links on a single page, and what anchor text they’re using, and focus on bigger-picture things that will make your site better. This is pretty much the same message we always hear from the company.

    Perhaps that’s the real reason that Google stopped putting out those monthly lists of algorithm changes.

    Image via YouTube

  • Google: Panda 4.0 Brings in ‘Softer Side,’ Lays Groundwork For Future

    Back in March, Google’s Matt Cutts spoke at the Search Marketing Expo, and said that Google was working on the next generation of the Panda update, which he said would be softer and more friendly to small sites and businesses.

    Last week, Google pushed Panda 4.0, which Cutts reiterated is a bit softer than previous versions, and also said will “lay the groundwork” for future iterations.

    Barry Schwartz at SMX sister site Search Engine Land, who was in attendance at the session in which Cutts spoke about the update, gave a recap of his words at the time:

    Cutts explained that this new Panda update should have a direct impact on helping small businesses do better.

    One Googler on his team is specifically working on ways to help small web sites and businesses do better in the Google search results. This next generation update to Panda is one specific algorithmic change that should have a positive impact on the smaller businesses.

    It’s interesting that Google even announced the update at all, as it had pretty much stopped letting people know when new Panda refreshes were launched. The world is apparently not bored enough with Panda updates for Google to stop announcing them entirely.

    Here’s a look at Searchmetrics’ attempt to identify the top winners and losers of Panda 4.0.

    Image via YouTube

  • Google Launches Two Algorithm Updates Including New Panda

    Google makes changes to its algorithm every day (sometimes multiple changes in one day).

    When the company actually announces them, you know they’re bigger than the average update, and when one of them is named Panda, it’s going to get a lot of attention.

    Have you been affected either positively or negatively by new Google updates? Let us know in the comments.

    Google’s head of webspam Matt Cutts tweeted about the updates on Tuesday night:

    Panda has been refreshed on a regular basis for quite some time now, and Google has indicated in the past that it no longer requires announcements because of that. At one point, it was actually softened. But now, we have a clear announcement about it, and a new version number (4.0), so it must be significant. For one, this indicates that the algorithm was actually updated as opposed to just refreshed, opening up the possibility for some big shuffling of rankings.

    The company told Search Engine Land that the new Panda affects different languages to different degrees, and impacts roughly 7.5% of queries in English to the degree regular users might notice.

    The other update is the what is a new version of what is sometimes referred to as the “payday loans” update. The first one was launched just a little more than a year ago. Cutts discussed it in this video before launching it:

    “We get a lot of great feedback from outside of Google, so, for example, there were some people complaining about searches like ‘payday loans’ on Google.co.uk,” he said. “So we have two different changes that try to tackle those kinds of queries in a couple different ways. We can’t get into too much detail about exactly how they work, but I’m kind of excited that we’re going from having just general queries be a little more clean to going to some of these areas that have traditionally been a little more spammy, including for example, some more pornographic queries, and some of these changes might have a little bit more of an impact on those kinds of areas that are a little more contested by various spammers and that sort of thing.”

    He also discussed it at SMX Advanced last year. As Barry Schwartz reported at the time:

    Matt Cutts explained this goes after unique link schemes, many of which are illegal. He also added this is a world-wide update and is not just being rolled out in the U.S. but being rolled out globally.

    This update impacted roughly 0.3% of the U.S. queries but Matt said it went as high as 4% for Turkish queries were web spam is typically higher.

    That was then. This time, according to Schwartz, who has spoken with Cutts, it impacts English queries by about 0.2% to a noticeable degree.

    Sites are definitely feeling the impact of Google’s new updates.

    Here are a few comments from the WebmasterWorld forum from various webmasters:

    We’ve seen a nice jump in Google referrals and traffic over the past couple of days, with the biggest increase on Monday (the announced date of the Panda 4.0 rollout). Our Google referrals on Monday were up by 130 percent….

    …

    I am pulling out my hair. I’ve worked hard the past few months to overcome the Panda from March and was hoping to come out of it with the changes I made. Absolutely no change at all in the SERPS. I guess I’ll have to start looking for work once again.

    …

    While I don’t know how updates are rolled out, my site that has had panda problems since April 2011first showed evidence of a traffic increase at 5 p.m. (central, US) on Monday (5/19/2014).

    …

    This is the first time I have seen a couple sites I deal with actually get a nice jump in rankings after a Panda…

    It appears that eBay has taken a hit. Dr. Peter J. Meyers at Moz found that eBay lost rankings on a variety of keywords, and that the main eBay subodmain fell out of Moz’s “Big 10,” which is its metric of the ten domains with the most real estate in the top 10.

    “Over the course of about three days, eBay fell from #6 in our Big 10 to #25,” he writes. “Change is the norm for Google’s SERPs, but this particular change is clearly out of place, historically speaking. eBay has been #6 in our Big 10 since March 1st, and prior to that primarily competed with Twitter.com for either the #6 or #7 place. The drop to #25 is very large. Overall, eBay has gone from right at 1% of the URLs in our data set down to 0.28%, dropping more than two-thirds of the ranking real-estate they previously held.”

    He goes on to highlight specific key phrases where eBay lost rankings. It lost two top ten rankings for three separate phrases: “fiber optic christmas tree,” “tongue rings,” and “vermont castings”. Each of these, according to Meyers, was a category page on eBay.

    eBay also fell out of the top ten, according to this report, for queries like “beats by dr dre,” “honeywell thermostat,” “hooked on phonics,” “batman costume,” “lenovo tablet,” “george foreman grill,” and many others.

    It’s worth noting that eBay tended to be on the lower end of the top ten rankings for these queries. They’re not dropping out of the number one spot, apparently.

    Either way, this is isn’t exactly good news for eBay sellers. Of course, it’s unlikely that Google was specifically targeting eBay with either update, and they could certainly bounce back.

    Have you noticed any specific types of sites (or specific sites) that have taken a noticeable hit? Do Google’s results look better in general? Let us know in the comments.

    Image via Thinkstock

  • Google Responds To Link Removal Overreaction

    People continue to needlessly ask sites that have legitimately linked to theirs to remove links because they’re afraid Google won’t like these links or because they simply want to be cautious about what Google may find questionable at any given time. With Google’s algorithms and manual penalty focuses changing on an ongoing basis, it’s hard to say what will get you in trouble with the search engine down the road. Guest blogging, for example, didn’t used to be much of a concern, but in recent months, Google has people freaking out about that.

    Have you ever felt compelled to have a natural link removed? Let us know in the comments.

    People take different views on specific types of links whether they’re from guest blog posts, directories, or something else entirely, but things have become so bass ackwards that people seek to have completely legitimate links to their sites removed. Natural links.

    The topic is getting some attention once again thanks to a blog post from Jeremy Palmer called “Google is Breaking the Internet.” He talks about getting an email from a site his site linked to.

    “In short, the email was a request to remove links from our site to their site,” he says. “We linked to this company on our own accord, with no prior solicitation, because we felt it would be useful to our site visitors, which is generally why people link to things on the Internet.”

    “For the last 10 years, Google has been instilling and spreading irrational fear into webmasters,” he writes. “They’ve convinced site owners that any link, outside of a purely editorial link from an ‘authority site’, could be flagged as a bad link, and subject the site to ranking and/or index penalties. This fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) campaign has webmasters everywhere doing unnatural things, which is what Google claims they’re trying to stop.”

    It’s true. We’ve seen similar emails, and perhaps you have too. A lot of sites have. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable says he gets quite a few of them, and has just stopped responding.

    It’s gotten so bad that people even ask StumbleUpon to remove links. You know, Stumbleupon – one of the biggest drivers of traffic on the web.

    “We typically receive a few of these requests a week,” a spokesperson for the company told WebProNews last year. “We evaluate the links based on quality and if they don’t meet our user experience criteria we take them down. Since we drive a lot of traffic to sites all over the Web, we encourage all publishers to keep and add quality links to StumbleUpon. Our community votes on the content they like and don’t like so the best content is stumbled and shared more often while the less popular content is naturally seen less frequently.”

    Palmer’s post made its way to Hacker News, and got the attention of a couple Googlers including Matt Cutts himself. It actually turned into quite a lengthy conversation. Cutts wrote:

    Note that there are two different things to keep in mind when someone writes in and says “Hey, can you remove this link from your site?”

    Situation #1 is by far the most common. If a site gets dinged for linkspam and works to clean up their links, a lot of them send out a bunch of link removal requests on their own prerogative.

    Situation #2 is when Google actually sends a notice to a site for spamming links and gives a concrete link that we believe is part of the problem. For example, we might say “we believe site-a.com has a problem with spam or inorganic links. An example link is site-b.com/spammy-link.html.”

    The vast majority of the link removal requests that a typical site gets are for the first type, where a site got tagged for spamming links and now it’s trying hard to clean up any links that could be considered spammy.

    He also shared this video discussion he recently ad with Leo Laporte and Gina Trapani.

    Cutts later said in the Hacker News thread, “It’s not a huge surprise that some sites which went way too far spamming for links will sometimes go overboard when it’s necessary to clean the spammy links up. The main thing I’d recommend for a site owner who gets a fairly large number of link removal requests is to ask ‘Do these requests indicate a larger issue with my site?’ For example, if you run a forum and it’s trivially easy for blackhat SEOs to register for your forum and drop a link on the user profile page, then that’s a loophole that you probably want to close.
    But if the links actually look organic to you or you’re confident that your site is high-quality or doesn’t have those sorts of loopholes, you can safely ignore these requests unless you’re feeling helpful.”

    Side note: Cutts mentionedin the thread that Google hasn’t been using the disavow links tool as a reason not to trust a source site.

    Googler Ryan Moulton weighed in on the link removal discussion in the thread, saying, “The most likely situation is that the company who sent the letter hired a shady SEO. That SEO did spammy things that got them penalized. They brought in a new SEO to clean up the mess, and that SEO is trying to undo all the damage the previous one caused. They are trying to remove every link they can find since they didn’t do the spamming in the first place and don’t know which are causing the problem.”

    That’s a fair point that has gone largely overlooked.

    Either way, it is indeed clear that sites are overreacting in getting links removed from sites. Natural links. Likewise, some sites are afraid to link out naturally for similar reasons.

    After the big guest blogging bust of 2014, Econsultancy, a reasonably reputable digital marketing and ecommerce resource site, announced that it was adding nofollow to links in the bios of guest authors as part of a “safety first approach”. Keep in mind, they only accept high quality posts in the first place, and have strict guidelines.

    Econsultancy’s Chris Lake wrote at the time, “Google is worried about links in signatures. I guess that can be gamed, on less scrupulous blogs. It’s just that our editorial bar is very high, and all outbound links have to be there on merit, and justified. From a user experience perspective, links in signatures are entirely justifiable. I frequently check out writers in more detail, and wind up following people on the various social networks. But should these links pass on any linkjuice? It seems not, if you want to play it safe (and we do).”

    Of course Google is always talking about how important the user experience is.

    Are people overreacting with link removals? Should the sites doing the linking respond to irrational removal requests? Share your thoughts in the comments.

    Image via Twit.tv

  • What Have Google’s Biggest Mistakes Been?

    What Have Google’s Biggest Mistakes Been?

    Do you feel like Google makes many mistakes when it comes to trying to improve its search results? Do you think they’ve gone overboard or not far enough with regards to some aspect of spam-fighting?

    In the latest Google Webmaster Help video, head of webspam Matt Cutts talks about what he views as mistakes that he has made. He discusses two particular mistakes, which both involve things he thinks Google just didn’t address quickly enough: paid links and content farms.

    What do you think is the biggest mistake Google has made? Share your thoughts in the comments.

    The exact viewer-submitted question Cutts responds to is: “Was there a key moment in your spam fighting career where you made a mistake that you regret, related to spam?”

    Cutts recalls, “I remember talking to a very well-known SEO at a search conference in San Jose probably seven years ago (give or take), and that SEO said, ‘You know what? Paid links are just too prevalent. They’re too common. There’s no way that you guys would be able to crack down on them, and enforce that, and come up with good algorithms or take manual action to sort of put the genie back in the bottle,’ as he put it. That was when I realized I’d made a mistake that we’d allowed paid links that pass PageRank to go a little bit too far and become a little bit too common on the web.”

    “So in the early days of 2005, 2006, you’d see Google cracking down a lot more aggressively, and taking a pretty hard line on our rhetoric about paid links that pass PageRank,” he continues. “At this point, most people know that Google disapproves of it, it probably violates the Federal Trade Commission’s guidelines, all those sorts of things. We have algorithms to target it. We take spam reports about it, and so for the most part, people realize, it’s not a good idea, and if they do that, they might face the consequences, and so for the most part, people try to steer clear of paid links that pass PageRank at this point. But we probably waited too long before we started to take a strong stand on that particular issue.”

    Yes, most people who engage in paid links are probably aware of Google’s stance on this. In most cases, gaming Google is probably the ultimate goal. That doesn’t mean they’re not doing it though, and it also doesn’t mean that Google’s catching most of those doing it. How would we know? We’re not going to hear about them unless they do get caught, but who’s to say there aren’t still many, many instances of paid links influencing search results as we speak?

    The other mistake Cutts talks about will be fun for anyone who has ever been affected by the Panda update (referred to repeatedly as the “farmer” update in its early days).

    Cutts continues, “Another mistake that I remember is there was a group of content farms, and we were getting some internal complaints where people said, ‘Look, this website or that website is really bad. It’s just poor quality stuff. I don’t know whether you’d call it spam or low-quality, but it’s a really horrible user experience.’ And I had been to one particular page on one of these sites because at one point my toilet was running, and I was like, ‘Ok, how do you diagnose a toilet running?’ and I had gotten a good answer from that particular page, and I think I might have over-generalized a little bit, and been like, ‘No, no. There’s lots of great quality content on some of these sites because look, here was this one page that helped solve the diagnostic of why does your toilet run, and how do you fix it, and all that sort of stuff.’”

    “And the mistake that I made was judging from that one anecdote, and not doing larger scale samples and listening to the feedback, or looking at more pages on the site,” he continues. “And so I think it took us a little bit longer to realize that some of these lower-quality sites or content farms or whatever you want to call them were sort of mass-creating pages rather than really solving users’ needs with fantastic content. And so as a result, I think we did wake up to that, and started working on it months before it really became wide-scale in terms of complaints, but we probably could’ve been working on it even earlier.”

    The complaints were pretty loud and frequent by the time the Panda update was first pushed, but it sounds like it could have been rolled out (and hurt more sites) a lot earlier than it eventually did. You have to wonder how that would have changed things. Would the outcome have been different if it had been pushed out months before it was?

    “Regardless, we’re always looking for good feedback,” says Cutts. “We’re always looking for what are we missing? What do we need to do to make our web results better quality, and so anytime we roll something out, there’s always the question of, ‘Could you have thought of some way to stop that or to take better action or a more clever algorithm, and could you have done it sooner? I feel like Google does a lot of great work, and that’s very rewarding, and we feel like, ‘Okay, we have fulfilled our working hours with meaningful work,’ and yet at the same time, you always wonder could you be doing something better. Could you find a cleaner way to do it – a more elegant way to do it – something with higher precision – higher recall, and that’s okay. It’s healthy for us to be asking ourselves that.”

    It’s been a while since Google pushed out any earth-shattering algorithm updates. Is there something Google is missing right now that Cutts is going to look back on, and wonder why Google didn’t do something earlier?

    Would you say that Google’s results are better as a result of its actions against paid links and content farms? What do you think Google’s biggest mistake has been? Let us know in the comments.

  • Google: Links Will Become Less Important

    Links are becoming less important as Google gets better at understanding the natural language of users’ queries. That’s the message we’re getting from Google’s latest Webmaster Help video. It will be a while before links become completely irrelevant, but the signal that Google’s algorithm was basically based upon is going to play less and less of a role as time goes on.

    Do you think Google should de-emphasize links in its algorithm? Do you think they should count as a strong signal even now? Share your thoughts.

    In the video, Matt Cutts takes on this user-submitted question:

    Google changed the search engine market in the 90s by evaluating a website’s backlinks instead of just the content, like others did. Updates like Panda and Penguin show a shift in importance towards content. Will backlinks lose their importance?

    “Well, I think backlinks have many, many years left in them, but inevitably, what we’re trying to do is figure out how an expert user would say this particular page matched their information needs, and sometimes backlinks matter for that,” says Cutts. “It’s helpful to find out what the reputation of a site or of a page is, but for the most part, people care about the quality of the content on that particular page – the one that they landed on. So I think over time, backlinks will become a little less important. If we could really be able to tell, you know, Danny Sullivan wrote this article or Vanessa Fox wrote this article – something like that, that would help us understand, ‘Okay, this is something where it’s an expert – an expert in this particular field – and then even if we don’t know who actually wrote something, Google is getting better and better at understanding actual language.”

    “One of the big areas that we’re investing in for the coming few months is trying to figure out more like how to do a Star Trek computer, so conversational search – the sort of search where you can talk to a machine, and it will be able to understand you, where you’re not just using keywords,” he adds.

    You know, things like this:

    Cutts continues,”And in order to understand what someone is saying, like, ‘How tall is Justin Bieber?’ and then, you know, ‘When was he born?’ to be able to know what that’s referring to, ‘he’ is referring to Justin Bieber – that’s the sort of thing where in order to do that well, we need to understand natural language more. And so I think as we get better at understanding who wrote something and what the real meaning of that content is, inevitably over time, there will be a little less emphasis on links. But I would expect that for the next few years we will continue to use links in order to assess the basic reputation of pages and of sites.”

    Links have always been the backbone of the web. Before Google, they were how you got from one page to the next. One site to the next. Thanks to Google, however (or at least thanks to those trying desperately to game Google, depending on how you look at it), linking is broken. It’s broken as a signal because of said Google gaming, which the search giant continues to fight on an ongoing basis. The very concept of linking is broken as a result of all of this too.

    Sure, you can still link however you want to whoever you want. You don’t have to please Google if you don’t care about it, but the reality is, most sites do care, because Google is how the majority of people discover content. As a result of various algorithm changes and manual actions against some sites, many are afraid of the linking that they would have once engaged in. We’ve seen time after time that sites are worried about legitimate sites linking to them because they’re afraid Google might not like it. We’ve seen sites afraid to naturally link to other sites in the first place because they’re afraid Google might not approve.

    No matter how you slice it, linking isn’t what it used to be, and that’s largely because of Google.

    But regardless of what Google does, the web is changing, and much of that is going mobile. That’s a large part of why Google must adapt with this natural language search. Asking your phone a question is simply a common way of searching. Texting the types of queries you’ve been doing from the desktop for years is just annoying, and when your phone has that nice little microphone icon, which lets you ask Google a question, it’s just the easier choice (in appropriate locations at least).

    Google is also adapting to this mobile world by indexing content within apps as it does links, so you if you’re searching on your phone, you can open content right in the app rather than in the browser.

    Last week, Facebook made an announcement taking this concept to another level when it introduced App Links. This is an open source standard (assuming it becomes widely adopted) for apps to link to one another, enabling users to avoid the browser and traditional links altogether by jumping from app to app.

    It’s unclear how Google will treat App Links, but it would make sense to treat them the same as other links.

    The point is that linking itself is both eroding and evolving at the same time. It’s changing, and Google has to deal with that as it comes. As Cutts said, linking will still play a significant role for years to come, but how well Google is able to adapt to the changes in linking remains to be seen. Will it be able to deliver the best content based on links if some of that content is not being linked to because others are afraid to link to it? Will it acknowledge App Links, and if so, what about the issues that’ having? Here’s the “standard” breaking the web, as one guy put it:

    What if this does become a widely adopted standard, but proves to be buggy as shown above?

    Obviously, Google is trying to give you the answers to your queries on its own with the Knowledge Graph when it can. Other times it’s trying to fill in the gaps in that knowledge with similarly styled answers from websites. It’s unclear how much links fit into the significance of these answers. We’ve seen two examples in recent weeks where Google was turning to parked domains.

    Other times, the Knowledge Graph just provides erroneous information. As Cutts said, Google will get better and better at natural language, but it’s clear this is the type of search results it wants to provide whenever possible. The problem is it’s not always reliable, and in some cases, the better answer comes from good old fashioned organic search results (of the link-based variety). We saw an example of this recently, which Google ended up changing after we wrote about it (not saying it was because we wrote about it).

    So if backlinks will become less important over time, does that mean traditional organic results will continue to become a less significant part of the Google search experience? It’s certainly already trended in that direction over the years.

    What do you think? How important should links be to Google’s ranking? Share your thoughts in the comments.

    Images via YouTube, Google