White hat search marketers read and follow Google Guidelines. What should they tell clients whose competitors use black hat techniques (such as using doorway pages) and whom continue to rank as a result of those techniques?

Do you you think Google does a good job catching webspam? Let us know in the comments.

“So first and foremost, I would say do a spam report, because if you’re violating Google’s guidelines in terms of cloaking or sneaky JavaScript redirects, buying links, doorway pages, keyword stuffing, all those kinds of things, we do want to know about it,” he says. “So you can do a spam report. That’s private. You can also stop by Google’s Webmaster forum, and that’s more public, but you can do a spam report there. You can sort of say, hey, I saw this content. It seems like it’s ranking higher than it should be ranking. Here’s a real business, and it’s being outranked by this spammer…those kinds of things.”

He notes that are both Google employees and “super users” who keep an eye on the forum, and can alert Google about issues.

“The other thing that I would say is if you look at the history of which businesses have done well over time, you’ll find the sorts of sites and the sorts of businesses that are built to stand the test of time,” says Cutts. “If someone is using a technique that is a gimmick or something that’s like the SEO fad of the day, that’s a little less likely to really work well a few years from now. So a lot of the times, you’ll see people just chasing after, ‘OK, I’m going to use guest books’, or iI’m going to use link wheels’ or whatever. And then they find, ‘Oh, that stopped working as well.’ And sometimes it’s because of broad algorithmic changes like Panda. Sometimes it’s because of specific web spam targeted algorithms.”

I’m sure you’ve heard of Penguin.

He references the JC Penney and Overstock.com incidents, in which Google took manual action. For some reason, he didn’t bring up the Google Chrome incident.

This is actually a pretty timely video from Cutts, as another big paid linking controversy was uncovered by Josh Davis (which Cutts acknowledged on Twitter). Google ended up de-indexing the SEO firm involved in that.

“So my short answer is go ahead and do a spam report,” Cutts continues. “You can also report it in the forums. But it’s definitely the case that if you’re taking those higher risks, that can come back and bite you. And that can have a material impact.”

He’s not joking about that. Overstock blamed Google for “an ugly year” when its revenue plummeted. Even Google’s own Chrome penalty led to some questions about the browser’s market share.

Cutts notes that Google is also happy to get feedback at conferences, on Twitter, online, blogs, forums, “if you’re seeing sites that are prospering and are using black hat techniques.”

“Now, it’s possible that they have some low-quality links, and there are some links that people aren’t aware of that we see that are actually high quality,” Cutts notes. “But we’re happy to get spam reports. We’re happy to dig into them. And then we’ll try to find either new algorithms to try to rank the things more appropriately in the future. Or we’re certainly willing to take manual action on spam if it’s egregious or if it violates our guidelines. We have a manual web spam team that is willing to respond to those spam reports.”

According to Cutts, you can even submit spam reports using Google Docs. Here’s a conversation he had on Twitter recently:

After Google launched the Penguin update, Cutts tweeted the following about post-Penguin spam reports:

Shortly thereafter, he tweeted:

I’m sure plenty more reports have rolled into Google since then, but it does seem like they process them fairly quickly.

Do you think Google has done a good job at cleaning up webspam? Share your thoughts.

Do you think this site deserved to get hit by Penguin? Let us know in the comments.

We spoke with James Farmer, Founder and CEO of Incsub, which runs the site. Farmer maintains that WPMU.org engages in no keyword stuffing, link schemes, and has no quality issues. In fact, the site has actually done well throughout Google’s series of Panda updates.

Farmer tells WebProNews, “We did great after Panda, it was like that update recognized we were decent folk… you can’t win them all huh?”

“Apart from not being able to guess what Google was going to do in April, 3 years ago, we haven’t done anything wrong,” he says.

Last week, Farmer received some second-hand info from Google’s Matt Cutts, who reportedly spoke with the Sydney Morning Herald about WPMU.org. According to Farmer, Cutts provided three problem links pointing to the site. These included a site pirating their software and two links from one spam blog using an old version of one of their WordPress themes with a link in the footer. Farmer reported that Cutts “said that we should consider the fact that we were possibly damaged by the removal of credit from links such as these.”

It’s pretty interesting that if such links were the problem that it could have such a tremendous impact. It’s no wonder there have been so many discussions about negative SEO (competitors attacking each other with these kinds of tactics) since Penguin launched.

The site has over 10,400+ Facebook likes, 15,600+ Twitter followers, 2,537 +1s and 4,276 FeedBurner subscribers, according to Farmer. Apparently not enough to outweigh some questionable links from third parties.

“How could a bunch of incredibly low quality, spammy, rubbish (I mean a .info site… please!) footer links have made that much of a difference to a site of our size, content and reputation, unless Google has been absolutely, utterly inept for the last 4 years (and I doubt that that’s the case),” Farmer wrote in his article on the matter.

When asked how many links he has out there just from footers for WordPress themes, he tells WebProNews, “Given that we stopped adding links years ago, actually not that many at all.”

“However, the challenge is that given that we provided themes to a lot of multisite installs, which have since become overrun with splogs, there’s an enormous amount of links from not that many actual root domains,” he adds. “I’d guesstimate 1-2K, 99% of clearly low quality sites.”

We asked if he’s heard from other WordPress theme creators, having similar issues.

“Actually no, although that doesn’t surprise me that much,” he says. “Not many folk are as open as us, and in this field they probably have good reason to be. WordPress terms are very, very competitive so I wouldn’t be surprised if 9/10 competitors had something to hide!”

Like many webmasters, Farmer just doesn’t know what to expect from Google, in terms of whether or not Google will consider the site to be one of the innocent casualties of Penguin.

“I have no idea, I would love it if they did. I guess the thing I’m begging for is some sort of qualitative mechanism (NOT the manual webspam web, faster approach) that allows quality operators, like us, to survive and carry on providing Google users exactly the kind of helpful content they need!”

Google does have a form users can submit to, if they think they’ve been wrongfully hit by the Penguin update.

Google’s Matt Cutts recently told Danny Sullivan that Google considers the Penguin update a success, despite the large number of complaints from those commenting on blogs and in forums. Of course, the Penguin update, much like the Panda update, should be periodically coming back around, giving sites a chance to make fixes and recover. That also means however, sites will also have more chances to get hit.

We asked Farmer if he thinks Penguin has helped or hurt search results in general, outside of his site’s issues.

“Especially in the WP field they have gone wild,” he emphasizes. “For example our flagship site WPMU DEV – if you go to search for that now a competitor writing something ridiculous about us and copyright appears above our massively popular Facebook page. It even looks like our YouTube channel has been demoted. Crazy stuff.”

We’ve certainly seen some other questionable search results following the update, and others have complained aplenty.

Do you think the search results have improved since Penguin? Should WPMU have been hit by Penguin? Share your thoughts.

Still, the whole thing is a pretty interesting story, and we’ve had a conversation with Davis on the subject that is still worth sharing. The whole thing even caught the attention of Matt Cutts, Google’s head of webspam:

The whole thing started when Davis was sent an email from a third party offering to pay him for placing a link to one of the company’s pages. Davis determined that this third party was linked to “a prominent enterprise Search Engine Optimization (SEO) company,” which would lead one to believe that it is part of the efforts of the SEO agency the main company (the beneficiary of the link) had hired.

I’m not going to rehash the entire thing here. If you want to know more about it, I suggest reading Davis’ report, but the whole thing raises some questions about hiring outside agencies to do your SEO. Google even had to penalize itself when a marketing agency had solicited paid links for Google’s Chrome browser. Google’s Chrome landing page suffered a 60-day penalty. Questions were raised about how this may have impacted Chrome’s market share.

Google takes this stuff seriously (even if the lines around paid links are blurry at times).

Davis tells WebProNews it’s difficult to tell if these links help the company at hand. “If you look around the [company's] site you will see that they have extensive onsite SEO optimization. They also have the advantage of businesses websites placing a [company] badge which links back to [company].”

“That said, some of their subpages don’t have many inbound links which may be the point of hiring an agency to do offsite SEO,” he adds.

We asked Davis if he thinks there is a lot more of this paid linking for big companies going on than most people realize.

“I think it is pretty dangerous to do paid backlinking explicitly for a large company, but I have come across some other smaller companies which seem to be doing it (maybe one other large one, but I am still researching that),” Davis tells us. “At 3000+ words I wasn’t about to try to tackle other companies, but it is possible it is going on.”

One might wonder if in-house SEO is the way to go, if it’s SEO companies responsible for engaging in paid linking on behalf of clients, without the clients knowing. There are surely many, many white hat SEO companies out there that would never do this, but how does a business know that they won’t be getting something like this?

“It is hard to say,” says Davis. “From small businesses all the way up to large corporations there are so many hours in the day. SEO seems to be one area where considerable oversight is needed as various black and grey hat techniques still seem to be part of some SEO companies’ toolboxes.”

As far as trust, Davis says, “Backlink monitoring is certainly a key. There are a number of enterprise grade resources that provide daily updates on links. In my case I was just using a crude, free backlink service, but this space is filled with vendors who offer high quality monitoring. Having a third party do an audit of links might also be needed when a large company’s reputation is at stake.”

The company in question, according to emails Davis received, is looking into the situation further. Something tells me that Google is too.

In light of all the link warnings Google has been sending out, and the Penguin update, a lot of webmasters are freaking out about their link profiles, and want to eliminate any questionable links that might be sending Google signals that could lead to lower rankings.

A user submitted the following question to Cutts:

Site A links to Site B because Site B has content that would be useful to Site A’s end users, and Google indexes the appropriate page. After the page is indexed, Site B’s content changes and becomes spammy. Does Site A incur a penalty in this case?

“OK, so let’s make it concrete,” says Cutts. “Suppose I link to a great site. I love it, and so I link to it. I think it’s good for my users. Google finds that page. Everybody’s happy. Users are happy. Life is good. Except now, that site that I linked to went away. It didn’t pay its domain registration or whatever, and now becomes maybe an expired domain porn site, and it’s doing some really nasty stuff. Am I going to be penalized for that? In general, no.”

“It’s not the sort of thing where just having a few stale links that happen to link to spam are going to get you into problems,” he continues. “But if a vast majority of your site just happens to link to a whole bunch of really spammy porn or off-topic stuff, then that can start to affect your site’s reputation. We look at the overall nature of the web, and certain amount of links are always going stale, going 404, pointing to information that can change or that can become spammy.”

“And so it’s not the case that just because you have one link that happens to go to bad content because the content has changed since you made that link, that you’re going to run into an issue,” he concludes. “At the same time, we are able to suss out in a lot of ways when people are trying to link to abusive or manipulative or deceptive or malicious sites. So in the general case, I wouldn’t worry about it at all. If you are trying to hide a whole bunch of spammy links, then that might be the sort of thing that you need to worry about, but just a particular site that happened to go bad, and you don’t know about every single site, and you don’t re-check every single link on your site, that’s not the sort of thing that I would worry about.”

Of course, a lot more people are worried about negative SEO practices, and inbound links, rather than the sites they’re linking to themselves.

More Penguin coverage here.

If you haven’t seen the video, you should. If it works as well as advertised we could see some incredible innovations utilizing this technology. If I could only get my hands on that Google money.

Matt Cutts is also pretty in with the ladies, and could even give Zuckerberg a pointer or two about spending money. Who knew.

As you can see from the video, the Leap is amazing. And saying that it has “Minority Report like interactions” is not far from the truth at all. Right now they are taking applications for developers, and I really wish I was a developer, cause this thing will have some really cool uses.

Leap has received over a thousand requests from developers, but they are expecting that number to grow exponentially now that it is getting some major news coverage. Their plan is to sift through the applicants in the next few months, starting off with developers in the fields of medicine , gaming, engineering, science, research, and education… I just want to type on an invisible keyboard.

Here are the artist’s renditions of Matt Cutts and Amit Singhal, the two most recognizable faces behind the Penguin and Panda updates:

Cutts and Singhal have both called the Penguin update a success.

Here are the Penguin and Panda pics:

Even the old school Florida update made an appearance in the project:

Then there’s the “Google Got Caught Pushing Illegal Drugs Update”:

I don’t think that was Google’s official name, but it refers to when Google had to forfeit $500 million as the result of a settlement with the Justice Department in relation to ads for Canadian pharmacies. The investigation behind this had authorities tracking a fugitive to Mexico, and he had advertised the unlawful sale of drugs using AdWords.

While that reads like Latin to someone like me, all of you venture capitalists and IPO folks understand Matt Cutts quite clearly. The thing is, his financial advice doesn’t stop there:

The link goes to a Paul Farrell article on MarketWatch, which discusses Dilbert creator Scott Adams’ financial forumla. Even this is simple enough for a non-finance expert like me to understand:

1. Make a will

2. Pay off your credit cards

3. Get term life insurance if you have a family to support

4. Fund your 401k to the maximum

5. Fund your IRA to the maximum

6. Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it

7. Put six months worth of expenses in a money-market account

8. Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement

9. If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio

Those 129 words Cutts refers to belongs to Adams’ “Unified Theory of Everything Financial,” and while the advice is sound, do newly-minted billionaires really need to worry about paying off credit cards? Who knows, maybe Facebook employees are like professional athletes and will spend all of their money on anything shiny, only to wind up broke a few years after they get out of the business. If that’s the case–doubtful–then all of advice in the world isn’t going to make much of a difference.

In other news, who knew Matt Cutts had groupies?

Update:

For those of you wondering why Cutts is giving advice to Facebook, the man himself explains:

He also reminds folks that yes, stocks do indeed fluctuate, which has been known to affect the bottom line, which helps supprt his bond investment suggestion. Of course, in regards to Mark Zuckerberg, a downward fluctuation would mean his worth dropped a few million dollars.

“So one of the secrets of Google is that rather than employing these mainframe machines, this heavy iron, big iron kind of stuff, if you were to go into a Google data center and look at an example rack, it would look a lot like a PC,” says Cutts. “So there’s commodity PC parts. It’s the sort of thing where you’d recognize a lot of the stuff from having opened up your own computer,and what’s interesting is rather than have like special Googlebot web crawling servers, we tend to say, OK, build a whole bunch of different servers that can be used interchangeably for things like Googlebot, or web serving, or indexing. And then we have this fleet, this armada of machines, and you can deploy it on different types of tasks and different types of processing.”

“So hardware wise, they’re not exactly the same, but they look a lot like regular commodity PCs,” he adds. “And there’s no difference between Googlebot servers versus regular servers at Google. You might have differences in RAM or hard disk, but in general, it’s the same sorts of stuff.”

On the software side, Google of course builds everything itself, as to not have to rely on third-parties. Cutts says there’s a running joke at Google along the lines of “we don’t just build the cars oursevles, and we don’t just build the tires ourselves. We actually vulcanize the rubber on the tires ourselves.”

“We tend to look at everything all the way down to the metal,” Cutts explains. “I mean, if you think about it, there’s data center efficiency. There’s power efficiency on the motherboards. And so if you can sort of keep an eye on everything all the way down, you can make your stuff a lot more efficient, a lot more powerful. You’re not wasting things because you use some outside vendor and it’s black box.”

A couple months ago, Google put out a blog post discussing its data center efficiency, indicating that they are getting even more efficient.

“In the same way that you might examine your electricity bill and then tweak the thermostat, we constantly track our energy consumption and use that data to make improvements to our infrastructure. As a result, our data centers use 50 percent less energy than the typical data center,” wrote Joe Kava, Senior Director, data center construction and operations at Google.

Cutts says Google uses a lot of Linux-based machines and Linux-based servers.

“We’ve got a lot of Linux kernel hackers,” he says. “And we tend to have software that we’ve built pretty much from the ground up to do all the different specialized tasks. So even to the point of our web servers. We don’t use Apache. We don’t use IIS. We use something called GWS, which stands for the Google Web Server.”

“So by having our own binaries that we’ve built from our own stuff and building that stack all the way up, it really unlocks a lot of efficiency,” he adds. “It makes sure that there’s nothing that you can’t go in and tweak to get performance gains or to fix if you find bugs.”

If you’re interested in how Google really works, you should watch this video too:

Google says the average search query travels as much as 1,500 miles.

Call it the anti-SEO help video of the decade, and if you’re a webmaster you can call it site suicide. You can laugh at this Matts Cutts parody video all you want, just don’t take any of its advice seriously.

“In addition to keyword stuffing, we look at links to porn sites. Not that many people tend to link that much to sites within the porn industry. That’s the sort of thing that’s going to be really rewarding for users, so link to porn sites. Could it be annoying? Yes, it could be annoying, but that’s perfectly fine.”

That’s one of the gems from this clever mashup from SEO guy Sam Applegate. He took (probably way to much) time to organize and analyze Cutt’s many videos and came up with this video on how to rank #1 in Google search. Except, as you may have derived from the last quote, this guide won’t have you ranking anywhere near #1.

“I do think that Bing or Blekko or Duck Duck Go are potentially doing illegal things like hacking sites,” says Cutts in fragments. Check it out below:

For his part, Cutts is aware of the video and his concern was with how much time it had to have taken its creator:

[h/t Search Engine Roundtable]

One Google luminary expressed his disappointment in the Iranian government: Google webspam master Matt Cutts.

For Iran’s government, slapping these kinds of muzzles on the beak of the internet is just business as usual. This year alone, authorities have blocked websites (including Gmail and YouTube), the internet, and, in a small act of comedic justice, even its own supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Still, that’s not to say that it’s an event unworthy of disapproval.

According to AFP, entities involved with the Iranian government are required to use email addresses ending with gov.ir to conduct business while universities need to use emails with the domain ac.ir. To be fair, though, this is far from being the worst example of Iran’s communication restrictions with the internet. More, isn’t it fairly common for businesses or universities to restrict what email clients an employee can use in order to conduct business correspondence? Regardless of who you are or where you are, you probably shouldn’t be using your personal Gmail or Yahoo email account to relate state secrets or even state not-so-secrets.

This restriction of foreign-based email providers for certain businesses and governments only looks bad in the context of Iran’s history of censorship and throttling of communication mediums but it’s hardly an egregious decision. Were this, say, Sweden who mandated that some businesses and governments needed to use state-sponsored emails in order to interact with clients, it would hardly be news-worthy.