Posts tagged Matt
Matt Cutts Explains How SafeSearch Works
Feb 6th
Google’s Matt Cutts answers a question about how SafeSearch works. The link Matt mentions is below the video. If you’re a website owner and you think that your content is mistakenly being filtered by SafeSearch, you can let us know here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/request.py?contact_type=safe_search. Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal
Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal
View full post on Search Engine Journal
Matt Cutts Convinces Some South Korean Govt. Websites To Stop Blocking Googlebot
Jan 31st
Matt Cutts, international diplomat? That might be the more appropriate title for Google’s chief spam cop. According to the Wall Street Journal, Cutts is in South Korea this week and, in a presentation Monday night for about 80 government officials, webmasters, lawyers and journalists, managed…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Matt Cutts Discusses How You Can Target Parts of One Website to Different Locations
Dec 27th
Google’s Matt Cutts discusses options in Google Webmaster Tools that allow you to geo-locate or geo-target for multiple locations. If you have one website and you need to target multiple locations this is a video you must see. Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal
Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal
View full post on Search Engine Journal
Communication, Matt Cutts and SEO: Three reasons not to hate Google – Memeburn
Dec 14th
|
Communication, Matt Cutts and SEO: Three reasons not to hate Google
Memeburn However, aggressive SEO does work — you can see it in scraper sites that spring up from nowhere and quickly gain first page positions. Google's biggest failure is in making dodgy SEO practices irrelevant. The variants of the Panda algorithm released … Are Your Google AdSense Ads Really Worth It? |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Google’s Matt Cutts: Good Content Trumps SEO
Dec 13th
This is a message that can’t possibly be repeated often enough: Good content trumps SEO. Don’t believe me? Fair enough, but how about the head of Google’s webspam team? In a short video today on Google’s Webmaster Central Channel, Cutts answers a question about SEO practices and whether “poor” sites with bad SEO are penalized by Google.
Sponsor
Reassuringly, no. Cutts dispels the idea that sites that don’t validate well will be dinged by Google despite good content. “Just because somebody dots every i and crosses every t and gets all their HTML structure right, doesn’t mean that it’s good content.”
“Even if you do brain-dead stupid things and shoot yourself in the foot, but have good content, we still want to return it,” says Cutts. In fact, Cutts says that Google tries to make it so that sites “don’t have to do SEO.” First and foremost is content, and there’s no bonus for having good SEO.
So if you’re planning that 2012 site budget, you might want to think twice about hiring that SEO expert and find a content expert instead.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Google’s Matt Cutts: Good Content Trumps SEO – ReadWriteWeb
Dec 13th
|
Google's Matt Cutts: Good Content Trumps SEO
ReadWriteWeb This is a message that can't possibly be repeated often enough: Good content trumps SEO. Don't believe me? Fair enough, but how about the head of Google's webspam team? … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Matt Cutts Explains What Google Means by “Trust”
Dec 9th
Ever wonder how Google’s “trust” works? Well Google’s Matt Cutts gives you some insight. This is not the whole story, but it does give you some great information you should keep in mind. Also, see related videos below. Some videos that are related: They don’t want us obsessed??? Really? Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal
Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal
View full post on Search Engine Journal
Learn About Cloaking From Google’s Matt Cutts [Video]
Dec 2nd
Matt says he wanted to create the definitive cloaking video; I think this is a great educational video. You can learn more about cloaking in Google’s Webmaster Tools help section. Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal
Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal
View full post on Search Engine Journal
#pubcon State of the Index with Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal
Nov 9th
Matt Cutts, Google’s head of quality control and webspam leader, was joined by Amit Singhal to present this morning’s PubCon keynote speech. Amit Singhal, who is one of Google’s primary algorithmic engineers, made a rare appearance and offered PubCon attendees a chance to better understand the programming and logic behind the number one search engine. In addition to the keynote, both Singhal and Cutts took the time to answer the audience’s questions following their presentations.
Matt Cutts: State of the Index
Cutts started out by mentioning a tweet he saw yesterday:
“I don’t know if search engines are relevant in 6 months.”
In response to the tweet, he demonstrated what he did yesterday when he saw it – he spit his water out all over the stage. In all seriousness, Cutts stated that SEO is a type of marketing, which appeals to human nature and said it will never go away – this is a constant. The only other constant in SEO is search is constantly changing. Although SEO has completely changed and is filled with new challenges, it is still and always will be about helping companies present themselves in the best light. Matt Cutts encouraged the audience:
“You do not want to go where search engines are; you want to go where search engines are going to be.”
SEO in 2010:
Even though it did not seem like the webspam team had a big presence in 2010, it was due to improving their approach to hacked sites. Since they were concentrating on this, they had less time to spend on “traditional” webspam.
SEO in 2011:
They have been working on limiting the appearance of low quality sites at high positions (Panda) and communication.
Panda has been an algorithmic change (not manual) and Cutts stated that Google understands no algorithm is perfect. If a site feels they have been improperly downgraded, he encouraged the site owner to communicate with Google. This will simultaneously improve the algorithm and potentially help the site’s rankings.
The communication effort has been stepped up in 2011. Now, if manual action has occurred against a site, you can submit a reconsideration request through Google Webmaster Tools and the webspam team will provide you guidance.
Where is Google/SEO Going?
Long-Term (10,000’ View):
These are long-term items that will affect sites for the foreseeable future and he recommends having a strategy in each of these areas
Mobile – A cell phone is a computer you carry with you everywhere.
Social – Google can only crawl the open web. If the Googlebot is blocked, then they cannot see it. However, social is an important aspect of Google eliminating spam and this will become a bigger and bigger portion of the algorithm
Local – Most purchases take place here and this will become bigger and bigger
Near Future (1,000’ View):
Better page understanding is important to Google in the near future. For example, Google is trying to understand how much content is above the fold so it can improve user experience.
Personalized search is steadily growing and will become bigger in the near future.
Google is going to continue rolling about better tools for searchers.
Google would like to become more transparent regarding changes (including algorithmic) and they don’t want Google to be a black box.
The webspam team is talking about the possibility of sending an alert to Google when something is published – this would let Google know who the author is.
Immediate Future (1’ View) – things to do
- Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools
- Sign up for email alerts from Google Webmaster Tools
- Set up “fat pings” when you publish new content: pubsubhubbub.appspot.com
- Subscirbe to:
- Webmaster Blog
- Inside Search blog
- Webmaster video Channel
Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal
View full post on Search Engine Journal
#pubcon Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal Answer Questions and Offer Advice
Nov 9th
Why is ranking data not available in Analytics?
Cutts: Over 96% of sites get all of their searches within the 1,000 limitation. The last 4% of sites would require 2-3 times more data storage.
Due to the Panda update, lower quality sites are outranking an authority site. Why?
Singhal: Google’s preference is always algorithmic – it is scalable across all sites, countries, and languages. Overall, the Panda update has been a very positive change – the scientific measurements say the Google user experience is better than it used to be. However, they understand that no algorithm is perfect and want people to submit reports of instances like this so they can improve the algorithm.
Cutts: Google is listening. Unfortunately, the changes take time to implement. They use the aggregated reports to try to improve the algorithm. The algorithm is under active development and they want to get it right.
When we search for appliances, why do we only get Sears and other major stores?
Cutts: The web is one of the only places where the small business can move faster than the big guys. The big companies are often big for reason and as a result they can outrank other pages. However, the search engine does give the small business a chance Google Webmaster Tools is somewhat of an equalizer though and small businesses should use this – i.e. big businesses are more likely to use text in images/flash and small businesses will know better. Also, small businesses should concentrate on the small niche.
Are they trying to make the algorithm so perfect that they are missing the user experience?
Singhal: All scientific measures and manual reviews indicate that the algorithm is getting better and that search quality is improving (improving search quality = more relevant, higher quality results).
Google Places Page that got shut down by competitor – is there a better process to stop this type of behavior?
Cutts: The web used to be the “wild west” and there is still a small element of this especially in local. The local area is changing fast and a combination of manual spam fighters and algorithmic changes will get this under control. They are open to ideas on how to prevent malicious deletions of other businesses. They are working on this.
Where is the balance between privacy and data with SSL encryption?
Cutts: The trend is search is becoming more personal and this should continue, which means this is important to Google. People are unhappy that they have lost some of their keyword data. However, if you download your data from Google Webmaster Tools, 96% of people can still see all of their keyword data. They will not back down on the SSL – if anything they may move forward and advertisers may not get the data in the future. People want to know that they are not being snooped on.
Are PRWeb and press releases considered black hat due to duplicate content?
Cutts: Press releases are going to other people and asking them to write about you. Instead, work hard to produce high quality content on your site and people will want to write about you. It is harder to fake natural than be natural.
Singhal: The content must be high-quality and useful from a reader’s perspective. If the content is high quality and you work hard for the users, it is OK.
If I do doorway pages will the whole site get penalized or just the doorway pages?
Cutts: Are you asking how to do doorway pages (incredulously)?!? There is an answer though – it depends on the amount of spam. If there is a huge amount of great content, they will probably only penalize the portion of the site that is using doorway pages. However, if
Singhal: Don’t do it man.
Everyone says I need more links. How do links improve the quality of the site? I don’t want to play this game and I don’t want to do this.
Cutts: What matters is bottom line. Links are a part of search – they represent online reputation. Although there are many tools that report links, none of the tools can tell you which links are trusted by Google (not even Google’s tools). While the link structure looks bad from the outside, the actual linkgraph that Google uses/trusts looks much better. When the New York Times complained about a site with 10,000 spammy links, Google investigated the site and not a single link had slipped through Google’s filter. Only the links Google trusts count.
Is Google going to give more data to webmasters?
Google can either give more data (i.e. 2000 queries instead of 1,000) or give a longer timeframe (i.e. 60 days). They are leaning toward more data – they figure people can just download data periodically and still have access to past data. In an informal survey of the audience they disagree – 60% want longer timeframe and 40% want more queries.
Follow SEJ on Twitter @sejournal
View full post on Search Engine Journal
