WebProNews - Matt Cutts

Where Google Stands on the "Keywords" Meta Tag

Chris Crum — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:48:04 +0000

Google does not use the "keywords" meta tag in its web search ranking. Google's Matt Cutts explains this in a Webmaster Central video. This is not breaking news, by any means, but there are a lot of people out there that still put a lot of stock into this.

In fact, Cutts mentions that people have sued each other for meta tag keyword theft, when really this is just a waste of everybody's time, because they don't even play a role in the ranking of sites on Google. Have you been under the impression that the keywords meta tag was important to ranking in Google? Comment here.

"About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called "off-page" factors such as the links pointing to a web page," says Cutts. "In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag."

Just because Google ignores the "keywords" meta tag, that doesn't mean it ignores all meta tags. In fact, there are several that the search engine definitely uses. For one, Google sometimes uses the "description" meta tag as the text for search results snippets. But even then, the "description" meta tag isn't used to influence ranking.

Google also recognizes the "google," "robots," "verify-v1," "content type," and "refresh" meta tags. Information about how Google understands these can be found at this page in the Webmaster Tools help center.

"It's possible that Google could use this information in the future, but it's unlikely," Cutts says of the "keywords" meta tag. "Google has ignored the keywords meta tag for years and currently we see no need to change that policy."

So the moral of the story is, if a competitor is jacking your keywords, and using them in their own "keywords" meta tag, this will have no effect whatsoever in how they rank in Google when compared to your site. Cutts says other search engines might use the information, but Google doesn't.

Google does note that its enterprise Search Appliance has the ability to match meta tags, but this is of course separate from Google web search.

As I have said before, these videos and other tips Google frequently gives out are worth paying attention to for any webmaster looking to rank well. Whether they're talking about duplicate content, meta tags, or paid links, they're all aimed at telling webmasters how it is, and clarifying any misconceptions to the contrary. Whether you agree with Google's methods in all cases or not, the tips are for your benefit.

Like it or not, Google controls what people find on the web when they search. The company's huge market share is just something that is. There is always the possibility that could change in the future, but at this point, it looks like webmasters are not going to be able to ignore Google for a long time, if they hope to be found on the web by searchers.

We realize (and Google surely does too) that many well-seasoned marketers already know that Google ignores the "keywords" meta tag, but webmasters are born everyday, and not all of them have been so heavily seasoned to this point, and that's why Google puts this information out there. There is always misinformation (particularly when it comes to search), and sometimes the record just has to be set straight. Who better to do that than Google itself?

Do you find Google's Webmaster Central videos useful or do you think they're mostly just retreads of things you already know? Share your thoughts here.

FTC Guidelines Raise Big Blogging Questions

Chris Crum — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:25:04 +0000

Update 2: Now Cleland says, "If people think that the FTC is going to issue them a citation for $11,000 because they failed to disclose that they got a free box of Pampers, that's not true. That's not going to happen today, not ever." (via)

Update: The FTC is now saying that the $11,000 fine is not accurate, at least for the first violation. Fast company got some responses from Richard Cleland, assistant director, division of advertising practices at the FTC, who says:

“That $11,000 fine is not true. Worst-case scenario, someone receives a warning, refuses to comply, followed by a serious product defect; we would institute a proceeding with a cease-and-desist order and mandate compliance with the law. To the extent that I have seen and heard, people are not objecting to the disclosure requirements but to the fear of penalty if they inadvertently make a mistake. That’s the thing I don’t think people need to be concerned about. There’s no monetary penalty, in terms of the first violation, even in the worst case. Our approach is going to be educational, particularly with bloggers. We’re focusing on the advertisers: What kind of education are you providing them, are you monitoring the bloggers and whether what they’re saying is true?” [empahsis added]

Cleland addresses more of the concerns here.

Original Article: The Federal Trade Commission has released its revised guidelines concerning the use of endorsements and testimonials in advertising. The revisions include a focus on "bloggers" and social media users, requiring them to properly disclose when they have received payment in the form of either money or product from a company or organization and produce content regarding said company or organization. The word is that bloggers can be fined up to $11,000 per post for not disclosing.

Have you ever mentioned a free product you received online and not disclosed it? Comment here.

The reasoning behind the guidelines seems noble enough - provide transparency and keep consumers safe from hokey information. However, the concept of the government dictating how this happens does not sit well with a lot of people. The revisions (which can be found in this 81 page document [pdf], should you care to peruse them [they start around page 55]) have ruffled quite a few feathers and the conversation has become one about free speech.

Well-known author/editor/publisher Jeff Jarvis makes a really good point. He says the FTC assumes that the Internet is a medium. "It’s not. It’s a place where people talk. Most people who blog, as Pew found in a survey a few years ago, don’t think they are doing anything remotely connected to journalism. I imagine that virtually no one on Facebook thinks they’re making media. They’re connecting. They’re talking," he says. "So for the FTC to go after bloggers and social media – as they explicitly do – is the same as sending a government goon into Denny’s to listen to the conversations in the corner booth and demand that you disclose that your Uncle Vinnie owns the pizzeria whose product you just endorsed."

It's not hard to find echoes of Jarvis's sentiment all over the web. Although, I don't believe I've seen it as eloquently put as with the Denny's analogy. Still, not everyone sees the FTC regulations as a bad thing. In fact, Google's Matt Cutts stepped into the conversation with Jeff Jarvis, expressing a bit more enthusiasm for the guidelines.

"As a Google engineer who has seen the damage done by fake blogs, sock puppets, and endless scams on the internet, I’m happy to take the opposite position: I think the FTC guidelines will make the web more useful and more trustworthy for consumers," he says. "Consumers don’t want to be shilled and they don’t want payola; they want a web that they can trust. The FTC guidelines just say that material connections should be disclosed. From having dealt with these issues over several years, I believe that will be a good thing for the web."

Commenters essentially tell Matt the whole thing would smell a lot better if he were the one regulating it. The reasoning for this is that Matt is involved with the industry. He is not a government worker that has been one his whole life. He's been in the field. He knows the score. The argument coming from most of the opposition is not about the fundamental principle of making content more trustworthy for consumers. At the root of it, it appears that people are much more concerned about a government body of regulators who aren't necessarily involved with online content production telling them how it is, when there are many, many questions about what falls under the criteria.

A number of these questions are nicely placed in an "open letter to the FTC" from Ron Hogan at MediaBistro's GalleyCat. Here are a few of them:

- If an unpaid blogger at the Huffington Post "endorses" a consumer product without meeting the FTC guidelines for disclosure of "material connections" to the makers of that consumer product, who's liable: the blogger or the Huffington Post?

- If a blogger prints out a series of blog posts and distributes those printed copies, is he now the publisher of a newspaper or magazine? If so, the Village Voice is distributed for free, so can a blogger/publisher distribute his newspaper or magazine for free, too?

- What if a blogger confines herself to stating demonstrably proven facts about a book, its author, its contents, and the matter of its publication? Does the FTC consider that an endorsement? What if she confines herself to stating such facts and includes links to an ecommerce site? Has her writing somehow been transformed from a statement of fact to an endorsement?

There are plenty more where that came from. The list goes on. You can probably think of a few yourself. It may be hard for the guidelines to be enforced. The FTC does acknowledge that its guidelines aren't exactly the law themselves. The FTC says:

The Guides are administrative interpretations of the law intended to help advertisers comply with the Federal Trade Commission Act; they are not binding law themselves. In any law enforcement action challenging the allegedly deceptive use of testimonials or endorsements, the Commission would have the burden of proving that the challenged conduct violates the FTC Act.

It should also be noted that the rules presumably apply to publications beyond bloggers and social media users, but for some reason it appears that "bloggers" are the ones with whom the FTC had on its collective mind when drafting these guidelines. You have to wonder if they are able to come up with a definition for "blogging" (others have had trouble in the past. Even those directly involved in the online content industry). The rules are scheduled to take effect on December 1st.

What questions do you have about the FTC's guidelines? Share them here.

Why Your Email Address May Show up in Google Search Results

Chris Crum — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:11:41 +0000

Matt Cutts has provided some useful information for webmasters in the last few videos that have been uploaded to Google's Webmaster Central YouTube channel. It should be noted that this channel is designed to answer questions and provide useful tips for webmasters regarding their site's performance in Google. The topics are not always breaking news. Some you may know, but there are always other people out there that don't know the information. Google recently announced that the channel had received its millionth video view.

1. In the first clip, Cutts discusses the topic of obfuscating email addresses. A common way to display email addresses for contact purposes on the wab has been to include "mailto:" link. This has of course been exploited by spammers, so people have turned to other ways to keep this from happening.

One way people have tried to get around this is by using javascript. This has generally worked well in the past, but Cutts talks about how Google is getting smarter, and may now execute the javascript, leading to email addresses being shown in search results. Cutts says you may want to find another way to do it.

2. In the next clip, Cutts answers a question about the relationship between the size of a site and the authority Google gives it. Basically, according to Matt, there is no relationship. It's more about links. It's not about the size of a site. If you have a million pages, but only a couple links, you're not going to be considered an authoritative site in Google's eyes. If Google awarded a site for having a lot of pages, there would be people cranking out pages just for the sake of gaining authority, and this would essentially contribute to the web being a "cesspool."

3. In the third one, Matt answers a question about Google showing local results for generic terms even when a town is not specified. They ask, "Is Google going to tart displaying different results based on location of the IP (even when logged out)?"

Cutts says that he wouldn't be surprised, and that if Google finds something that's nearby and thinks it would be a helpful result, it will probably show it.

4. Finally, somebody asks if a link back to a press article about a company will be perceived as a "reciprocal link" and therefore give less weight to the inbound link.

If two sites link to each other, they are by definition reciprocal links, as Matt says, but if you link to everyone that links to you, you're basically just "tooting your own horn."

Some people have criticized the clarity of Matt's answers in some of the above clips in the comments on their YouTube video pages. Do you feel like the questions have been answered? Do you find Google's Webmaster Central YouTube channel to be a valuable source of information?

Related Articles:

> Matt Cutts Head Shaving Footage Revealed

> Geo-Targeting for Google with Webmaster Tools

> Where Google Stands on the "Keywords" Meta Tag

> Why Your Robots.txt Blocked URLs May Show up in Google

> This Cesspool We Call the Internet

The SEO's Toolkit Part Three of Three: Resources

Dave Davies — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:42:02 +0000

Welcome to part three of this three part series on SEO tools and resources. In the last two articles we discussed the variety of Firefox extensions used for SEO as well as an assortment of other free or affordable SEO tools. In this article we'll discuss some of the resources you'll want to access on a regular basis to keep up to date and informed on the goings-on in the search engine and SEO realm.

We're doing to cover a few different types of resources below and I'm going to try to keep this article to a reasonable length so let's begin ...

Media

when there's a breaking story or you want an expert opinion on a subject, a good first place to hit is the media sources in that industry. The SEO industry is no different and there are some amazing albeit often unconventional media sources. Some of my favorite are:

Webmaster Radio

Webmaster Radio is an Internet-based radio station with some great programing ranging from affiliate marketing to PPC to organic optimization and much more. With shows hosted by experts in their fields from Danny Sullivan (Search news) to Dave Szetela (PPC) you'll solid information that is well-sounded. I'd list my favorite shows however what I like may be different than you and what I need to know may be different than what you need to know so look through their programming and either listen through your work day as I often do or download the podcasts for later listening.

WebProNews

WebProNews offers up-to-the-minute information on virtually every event. They have reporters writing constantly and have other scoring SEO blogs and other news sources, compiling the information in one place for easy access. They also have great articles by third-party writers and a very active readership that is proactive in their commenting. Definitely near the top of my go-to list when I'm looking for news and current feedback.

Addme

This site is difficult to classify as it fits into a couple categories but I decided to include under media as that's my primary use. They include tools, resources, a directory and much more on their site. My primary use of this site is for the articles and newsletter.

Search Engine Watch

No list of SEO resources would be complete without including Search Engine Watch. This site is the one that started it all. Search Engine Watch provides everything from fantastic articles to breaking news to search engine stats and an awesome forum. A definite bookmark.

Blogs

As with many industries – blogs are a great way to keep informed on the latest goings-on in the SEO realm. The trick, however, is figuring out which blogs are worth reading and which authors are truly knowledgeable. Over the years I've read many blogs and to be honest – I still do. Below are some of the key blogs I reference on a regular basis.

SEO Book Blog

Aaron Wall over at SEO Book has an excellent blog worth reading on a regular basis. I have yet to visit his blog and not find some tid-bit of information that was worth reading either because of the information itself or because often he's just entertaining. Another to add to your weekly reading list.

Matt Cutts Blog

It's nice to get it from the horse's mouth. For those who don't know – Matt Cutts is the head of Google's Webspam team. He blogs about Google, technology and occasionally his cat. One has to read what he writes knowing that he's a Google employee and as such can't really give away the farm BUT he gives tons of great advice, insight and tips. The perk being – this time you don't have to ask if following his advice will get you banned. :)

SEO By The Sea

Bill Slawski (the author) focuses his attentions on the more technical side of things with tales of patents, algorithmic possibilities, statistics and functionalities. For many, his would be one of the more dry blogs if not for his gift with words and ability to make even the most bland of subject, palatable. You don't need to visit his blog daily but adding it to your weekly journey through the web is recommended.

SEOmoz Blog

What blog list would be complete without the inclusion of the SEOmoz blog. Rand Fishkin and crew keep their visitors up-to-date of some great research, news and SEO tips. From opinion pieces to months-long whitepapers you'll find useful information. Again – not necessary to visit every day but a weekly pass is always worthwhile.

Forums

Forums are a great place to gather information, especially on current events such as ranking updates. That said, reading forums can be a risky thing. Almost anyone can join a forum and post their thoughts. While this format allows us to capture a wide range of information and knowledge – it also results in less qualified people giving advice as well. So while I recommend reading forums – I also recommend taking things with a grain of salt – at least until you figure out who's who.

SEO Chat Forums

The SEO chat forums are easily one of the largest and most popular of the SEO forums. They cover a HUGE array of issues from Google to social media to Alexa rankings to (hold your hats) Ask Jeeves (that's right – the forum's been around for THAT long). Users worth noting are rustybrick, fathom, and randfish.

DigitalPoint Forums

DigitalPoint also is an ancient forum (2000 – ancient by web standards at least). They cover a wide range of topics from SEO to PPC to affiliate programs. Some users worth noting there are shoemoney, daven, and of course digitalpoint. A great place to ask your questions. Heavily visited and they have a ranking system for their users so you can get a decent feel as to whether they're reliable.

SitePoint Forums

There are a variety of reasons I like SitePoint and I own a number of their books. Their forums focus on design and development (not SEO) but every SEO needs resources on the design and development side.

Newsletters & Other Resources

Of course there are other resources that every SEO or webmaster needs to be able to get their hands on. Here they are:

Google Webmaster Guidelines

These are the guidelines set out by Google telling you what you can and can't do and what tactics to look out for. Worth a look over periodically as the do change from time-to-time. If you're heading into the forums for advice you'll definitely want to gander at the guidelines first to make sure that if you get lead astray – at least you'll know what can get you banned or penalized first.

Sphinn

A social media site for SEO. Here you'll find user-submitted stories on a wide array of Internet Marketing topics. Obviously the quality and relevancy of the stories ranges from brilliant to utter crud but the cream usually rises to the top with good stories hitting page one. That said – an occasional peek at specific threads often reveals some hidden gems.

Search Engine Land Newsletter

Perhaps I should have included this in the media section above as it's a fine site unto itself but it was the newsletter component that I find most helpful and so I have decided to place it here. Sign up for their newsletter and you'll get daily notification as to when some of the major search engine events happen and some solid advice as to what it means for you.

High Rankings Newsletter

Jill over at High Rankings puts out a solid newsletter where she provides tips and advice including replies to visitor questions. While I may disagree with some of her points from time to time (the same can likely be said for more of the resources noted and I'm sure others can say the same about my writings and opinions) I've never seen her provide bad advice – my advice just might be different from time-to-time.

Conclusion

Obviously there are a ton more tools and resources available. In this series of articles I've tried to include those that apply to the broadest spectrum of people and that are the most helpful. I highly recommend hunting for your own – especially if you've got issues that you can't find help for here.

Good luck to all the DIYers out there.

Matt Cutts Head Shaving Footage Revealed

Chris Crum — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:17:21 +0000

Google puts out a lot of useful videos through its Webmaster Central YouTube channel. If you are a regular reader of WebProNews, you have probably seen some of them covered here. They generally offer helpful advice for webmasters that have questions about ranking in Google's search results.

Google has announced that the total views for the channel have now exceeded a million. That's not bad, considering that the channel was only released earlier this year.

Before reaching the million mark, the company had uploaded 154 videos to the channel, making up about 11 hours of "webmaster-focused media." In honor of the milestone, Google has shared the video footage of Matt Cutts getting his head shaved.

You may recall when Cutts revealed his freshly shaved head at Search Engine Strategies back in the summer:

Now you can see how it happened. He lost a bet, and he paid in hair. Watch below.

Geo-Targeting for Google with Webmaster Tools

Chris Crum — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 21:02:46 +0000

Google's Matt Cutts has posted a new video talking about how Google deals with geographic targeting. This is a subject he has tackled on more than one occasion in the past, but in this latest one, he is elaborating on it a bit more, and explains that Google is looking more and more at this stuff as time goes on.

This particular video deals specifically with using Webmaster Tools to tell Google what country your site is relevant to. Cutts says the team that deals with what sites are relevant for which countries is starting to show, for example, dot coms a little bit more for other countries' searchers.

He says one thing Google is trying to use as a signal is what users specify in Webmaster Central. For example, if you own a dot com but you're more relevant to a specific country like Australia, you can specify that.

"Now the one thing to be careful of is not to sort of mix that up," he says. "For example, there was a site that was talking about a directory of streets that was really, really relevant to Singapore. Whenever you loaded it up, even though it was a dot com, it pretty much started with the island of Singapore and that was all you saw. Well, this site, we thought was about Singapore and they went in to webmaster central and they sort of changed their setting to say, 'no, no we're relevant to the U.S.'"

"Now, if you do that, if we think that you're relevant to a specific country like Singapore and you change it to the dot U.S.," he adds. "What that can end up doing is you don't show up for people in Singapore as much as you might not show up as much for people in the united states."

So basically, don't use this as a way to try and optimize for other countries just to get more views from that country. What will happen is you will be more likely to not show up as much anywhere. Watch the video:

Here are a couple more geo-related videos from Cutts. They're all fairly short and to the point.

Why Your Robots.txt Blocked URLs May Show up in Google

Chris Crum — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 21:22:18 +0000

Matt Cutts has appeared in yet another Google Webmaster Video, and this time he has a whiteboard with him so he can illustrate what he's talking about. What he's talking about this time are uncrawled URLs in search results.

Cutts says Google gets a lot of complaints from webmasters who say the search engine is violating their robots.txt files, with which they intend to keep Google from crawling certain pages. Sometimes those URLs still end up in search results.

According to Matt, what is happening in most cases is that when someone's saying "I blocked example.com/go" in robots.txt, it turns out that the snippet Google returns in search results just brings back a URL with no text for the snippet. The reason for this is that Google didn't actually crawl the page.

"It did abide by robots.txt. You told us this page is blocked, so we did not fetch this page," says Matt. It is a URL reference. "We saw a link to it, but we didn't fetch the page itself," he explains.

Google didn't actually fetch the page itself, and that's why there's no text snippet. In case you were wondering what the point of showing them at all is, Cutts breaks out an example looking at the California DMV, whose site is: www.dmv.ca.gov.

Cutts notes that at one point the California Department of Motor Vehicles had a robots.txt that blocked all search engines. "Now these days pretty much every site is savvy enough, you know, at one point the New York Times and eBay and a whole bunch of different sites would use robots.txt," he says.

If someone searches for "California DMV" in Google, there's pretty much only one answer, he says. So that is the answer that Google wants to return. Luckily for Google a lot of people were linking to that page with the anchor text "California DMV". That helps Google be able to return the result without having to crawl the page.

Cutts also says that they can get descriptions from a directory like the Open Directory Project (DMOZ). He cites Nissan and Metallica.com as examples of sites that used to block Google with robots.txt. They had been listed in the Open Directory Project, however, and Google went and got the information from there to include as the snippet.

When this type of thing happens, it looks like the page was crawled, when in fact it wasn't. "So we are able to return something that can be very helpful to users without violating robots.txt by not crawling that page," says Cutts.

He also notes that when you don't want pages to show up, you can use the "noindex" meta tag at the top of the page. When Google sees this tag, it drops the page from its search results completely. Another option is the URL removal tool.

Google on What it Takes to Deliver Search Quality

Chris Crum — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:12:23 +0000

We often take for granted the results we get for any given web search. When we search, we expect to find what we are looking for. That's the way it should be. The average user doesn't normally consider what it takes for a search engine to deliver those results, but there are so many factors at play, working behind the scenes and coming together to (hopefully) deliver the user the information they seek.

"Spiffy features are great, but if they’re wrong or don’t trigger in some reasonable way that your mind can predict, the failure is worse somehow," says Google's Cutts on his blog. "The same holds true with the organic search results: a catastrophic search failure can stick in your mind much more than the 200 searches that worked well. Search quality evaluation is tricky because you need to take that factor plus hundreds more into account. It’s taken years for Google to really evaluate our quality well, and we still continue to learn important new things."

Are you more likely to remember searches that worked well or ones that didn't? Comment here.

Searchers expect greatness. It's not even something they consider. They just expect to get what they want. It's only when they don't get it that they really notice. But what does it take for a search engine to keep a user from noticing a flaw? What goes into providing quality results?

The search quality team for the most widely used search engine in the world has given a tremendous amount of insight in a series of lengthy interviews with the publication BusinessWeek.

Cutts says Google's strategy for search quality is a balance of the analytical and serendipity. This comes from a cross between a lot of evaluation metrics and a lot of feedback from both the inside and the outside. Google gets tons of feedback from users, but the search quality team also gets tons of feedback right from within the company. Cutts says they have a mailing list comprised of about 20,000 Google employees who are always complaining and leaving feedback.

The human element steps in in a variety of ways. Cutts says that when he is just out and about on his own time, he will come across places, things, and sites that he will look up to find out what kind of results Google delivers for them, and looks for ways to improve this. He says that Google has gotten better at things like spelling, morphology, synonyms, stemming ("where somebody types in 'runners' and maybe they meant 'runner,' or 'running'"), etc.

"We ran over 5,000 experiments last year," Google's Udi Mamber told BusinessWeek. "Probably 10 experiments for every successful launch. We launch on the order of 100 to 120 a quarter. We have dozens of people working just on the measurement part. We have statisticians who know how to analyze data, we have engineers to build the tools. We have at least five or 10 tools where I can go and see here are five bad things that happened."

Google may rely on the human element to some extent, but don't take that to mean that more emphasis is placed on this than the machine element. Cutts says Google certainly relies much more on computers and algorithms than any other major search engine (at least historically). He does reiterate a point he has made in the past, however, and that is that Google has become more willing to listen to feedback.

Google's strategy for improving search results consists of a mixture of humans, formulas, and experiments. These are the elements that it takes to deliver what Cutts says are fresher and more comprehensive results than those from other search engines.

Do you agree with Cutts that Google delivers "fresher and more comprehensive" results? Share your thoughts.

Cutts Reports Conflict Of Interest In Privacy/Advertising Study

Doug Caverly — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:40:21 +0000

Often, the source of a statement means everything. It might, for example, be more newsworthy if Gordon Brown labeled Americans "silly" than if (or when) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called us all evil pigs. And Matt Cutts would just like everyone to know that one source of a study on advertising isn't exactly Google's best friend.

This morning, a lot of headlines declared that at least two-thirds of Americans don't want to be tracked by advertisers online, even for the sake of more relevant ads or discounts. The articles got their figures from a new study.

But Cutts wrote on his blog, "One of the study's co-authors was Chris Jay Hoofnagle. Hoofnagle has served as the Senior Counsel and Director of the West Coast Office of Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). You haven't heard of EPIC? EPIC was the group that in 2004 argued that Gmail should be shut down: 'In a letter sent to California Attorney General Bill Lockyer on Monday, the Electronic Privacy Information Center argued that Gmail must be shut down because it 'represents an unprecedented invasion into the sanctity of private communications.'"

Cutts then added, "I can guess what you're saying. 'That was five years ago. People didn't know then how useful Gmail was going to be.' Okay, then did you know that EPIC lobbied the government to shut down Google Apps earlier this year?"

In light of this information, the fresh study doesn't look quite so ominous for Google and the online advertising industry.

Does Google Penalize Paid Links in Javascript?

Chris Crum — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 19:18:06 +0000

You may recall back at SMX Seattle earlier this year, Google's Matt Cutts talked at length about paid links. He touched upon the topic of Google being able to read javascript after giving out advice for so long to use javascript as a way to keep Google from reading paid links.

When asked about this, Matt said Googlebot had gotten smarter. He noted that Google began changing its messaging on the subject around 2007-2008 to stop mentioning javascript but to nofollow or do a redirect through a URL which is blocked through robots.txt.

Cutts noted that even on the onclick in javascript, the crawl and indexing team had submitted code so that it would respect a rel="nofollow". So you can put a rel="nofollow" attribute on a link that's running in javascript, and more often than not, Google will make sure it doesn't flow pagerank even if they're executing the javascript.

Cutts did say, however, that if you want to be completely safe, to nofollow or link through things that are blocked.

Cutts revisited the topic in a recent upload to the Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel, in response to the following user question:

Now that Google can crawl JavaScript links, what is going to happen with all those paid links that were behind JavScript code? Will Google start penalizing them?

Matt reiterated that Google has gotten better at crawling javascript, and that URLs you put into javascript that you didn't think would be crawled, might now possibly be crawled and indexed. He says the vast majority of people who do javascript links are ad networks and that Google handles these very well.

He then reiterated the use of nofollow, even within the javascript code, and the use of robots.txt to block out URls, and redirects.

"We find that the vast majority of paid links are typically not done with javascript," says Cutts. "They're typically completely straight text links. so that's where we've been spending the vast majority of our time."

Cutts says that Google is not currently penalizing paid javascript links, but they may start looking down the line. He says it hasn't been a big issue at all in his experience though.

"If you're selling text links, just make sure they don't flow page rank and they don’t effect search engines," he says.

Matt Cutts Extends Offer To Yahoo Engineers

Doug Caverly — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 13:32:02 +0000

In some areas and industries, non-compete clauses are a way of life; companies don't want their best and brightest working for competitors soon, if ever. California law isn't too keen on non-compete clauses, however, and it looks like Google wants to accelerate the rate at which Yahoo employees jump ship.

Matt Cutts, who is of course one of Google's most visible figures, mentioned (and perhaps bragged about) one defection on his blog last night. "I was talking to an excellent new Googler that joined from Yahoo this week, and that reminded me that I meant to do this post a little while ago," he wrote.

Cutts then segued into what sounds a lot like a job offer, continuing, "[I]f you're an excellent Yahoo engineer with solid experience in search, Google is hiring. If you want to apply for a Software Engineer (SWE) position in Mountain View, use this job page and the application will make it to the right recruiters. Thanks!"

It's a little bit hard to know what to make of the post; the act of advertising a single opening (or even several) on Cutts's blog seems like the HR equivalent of fishing with dynamite.

Still, the key point, as far as we can tell, is that Google's getting even more aggressive about draining Yahoo of talent.

Google on Notification of Webmaster Guideline Violations

Chris Crum — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:28:20 +0000

One thing that Google is pretty good at is providing resources for webmasters to learn from. The regular videos from Matt Cutts in which he answers user-submitted questions are no different. It just happens to be this very topic that is addressed in the latest upload.

Question: Whenever Google detects a violation of its Webmaster Guidelines, can we expect a feature to be added in Google Webmaster Central where it could help the webmasters learn what the issue was?

In his response, Cutts talks about Google providing advice in a scaleable way. As he says, the web has tens of millions of domains and billions of pages. "Even if we put everybody in the entire company on customer support, trying to talk one on one, we wouldn't have the resources where we could talk to every single webmaster, and have a prolonged dialogue," says Cutts.

So Google's strategy is to try to communicate to webmasters on a large scale, and let one person say something that a lot of people can learn from. They do that with these videos. They do it with their many blogs, their forums, etc.

So when it comes to things like violations of webmaster guidelines, they try to be scaleable in that as well. He says the company continues to look for ways where they can do that, but while they want to let people know about things, they don’t want to let the "bad guys" know they know about them, and have them start over and try to find new ways to cheat and be sneaky.

Cutts says Google gives more attention to mom & pop-type sites, and sites they think have good intentions, but may not realize some of the things they are doing are not good. An example he gives is letting webmasters know if their site has been hacked, or even if it's hackable. "Perhaps you're using an old version of Wordpress or some other piece of software..." he says.

So they send messages to a lot of webmasters. And they try to alert what they perceive to be the good guys. In other words, don't expect new features in Webmaster Central every time Google learns of a new issue.

Cutts does note that Google is always open to other ways to try and improve communication, and encourages suggestions in the forums and blog comments.

How Google Looks at Spam Complaints

Chris Crum — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:13:13 +0000

Google's Matt Cutts answered a user question about how the company handles spam complaints in the most recent video upload to the Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel. More specifically, the question was:

Is there a minimum number of spam complaints about a domain and/or SERP before Google reviews the complaint? Presumably you get thousands of spam complaints daily, are these sorted into any order to be reviewed? The most popular first?

Cutts says Google does order complaints, and that typically, they try to think about what the impact is on the user. So if they get a spam complaint on a site that a lot of users are going to see, it will get more attention from Google than a spam complaint on a site that almost never gets seen.

"We do look at a ton of spam complaints," says Cutts. "We do take action on a ton of spam complaints."

Google takes spam reports into account for future versions of its algorithms. Cutts says they look at these to determine how they should tackle certain things.

Whenever Google's looking at spam complaints they're trying to take manual action on, Cutts says they think about how they can best use their resources, and one of the ways to do that is to look at the complaints about the sites that would most affect users. "That's one of the ways we look at spam complaints," he says.

Digg Nofollow Links: Matt Cutts Approved

Chris Crum — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 12:53:55 +0000

Yesterday, Digg announced that it was changing the way it handles some links with regards to the nofollow attribute. The point of the changes is to cut down on Digg spam. Digg is now adding rel="nofollow" to any external link that they aren't sure they can "vouch for." This means:

    - External links from comments
    - External links from user profiles
    - External links from story pages "below a certain threshold of popularity"

Google's Matt Cutts posted his feelings on the matter to his blog. "I think this is pretty smart," says Cutts. "Digg isn’t adding nofollow to everything, just the links that they’re less sure about. Once a story looks real to them, I can imagine that they would lift the nofollow."

Cutts also shared a couple of videos he has done where he discusses how Google takes a similar approach, and answers two questions about Nofollow:

You may recall the topic of the first video from an article WebProNews ran about it this week. Cutts specifically talks about Google Knol, and how at first authors receive nofollowed links, but as the authors gain more turst, they sometimes remove the nofollows.

"So [the] new move by Digg is a positive change in my opinion, because Digg decreases the benefit for spammy stories but Digg still helps normal and high-quality stories in the search engines," says Cutts.

Digg said the decision was made after consultation with "leading experts" in the SEO/SEM and link spam fields. The company says it is looking out for content providers and the Digg community.

Is PageRank Affected by Google Links?

Chris Crum — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 23:30:42 +0000

In the latest Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel upload from Matt Cutts, he talks about whether or not Google places value on its own links with regards to Pagerank. Cutts took on the following user question:

Question: Does Google value its own links for PR/Linkjuice? Google Bookmarks, Google Profiles, etc. Reason - Google links never appear in Webmaster Tools.

Have you had similar questions about Google sites and PageRank? Comment.

Google has plenty of products that spawn links, so the question is certainly a legitimate one. You've got Google Bookmarks, Google Profiles, Google Knol, YouTube, Blogger, and many others. Matt doesn't go through each product and specify Google's practices for each one, but he gives a general explanation about Google's policies regarding links from Google-owned sites.

Cutts says he doesn't know about whether Google links never appear in Webmaster Tools, but in general, people hold Google to a very high standard. He gives the example that if Google delivers search results that aren't blocked by robots.txt, people find out about it and draw a lot of attention to it, whether that be by blogging or forums, or whatever.

"We try to be relatively careful," says Cutts.

With search results, Google tries to make sure they're properties aren't too spammable, and if they are worried that something might be potentially abused, they will often use a nofollow attribute.

Cutts says with Google Knol for example, most of the external links started out as nofollow, but then over time as they learned which Knol authors were more trustworthy, they lifted the nofollow on those Knol authors.

Google Knol has not received a whole lot of media attention since it was launched in late December 2007. It is a site where users can write articles on any number of topics that they feel they are experts on. An article is referred to as a knol, which Google defines as "a unit of knowledge."

"Sometimes we do flow pagerank, but we try to be relatively careful because we're mindful of the people who do try to abuse it," he says.

The video is below in case you'd rather hear it straight from Matt's mouth, but I think I've pretty much covered what he says in the above text. That said, it is only a minute and a half, so it won't take too long to watch.

Google has a lot of properties, and this might not answer everybody's questions on the subject, but I would bet that the trust factor mentioned with regards to Google Knol, could probably be applied to other products.

Did you find Matt's response to the question useful? Share your thoughts.

Chrome To Come Aboard Sony Computers

Doug Caverly — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:04:00 +0000

People who buy new Sony computers may now get an introduction to Google Chrome as part of the deal. Google and Sony have sealed a deal that will see Chrome preinstalled on some Sony products.

Additional details are scarce; it's unknown how much money (if any) changed hands, how long the partnership is supposed to last, and what regional markets the agreement should affect. A Google spokesman would only tell Jessica E. Vascellaro that the tie-up is a test.

It's an important one, however. Vascellaro noted, "[T]he agreement is Chrome's first distribution deal with a hardware maker. It's a serious step in Google's battle to loosen Microsoft's grip on the software through which people access the Internet."

If all goes well, it seems reasonable to assume that more deals will follow.

Then here's a bit more good news for Chrome fans: last night, Matt Cutts checked back in with fresh market share stats, and three different data-gathering firms indicated that Chrome's gained ground over the past 30 to 60 days. It's still, unfortunately for Google, around or under the four percent mark, but progress is progress.

Matt Cutts Talks Google Caffeine Update

Doug Caverly — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 20:30:16 +0000

Update: Hear what Matt Cutts has to say about Caffeine in this exclusive interview with WebProNews:

More WebProNews Videos

Original Article: Google may have a huge lead over its competitors in terms of market share, but the search giant isn't resting on its laurels. A next-generation infrastructure codenamed "Caffeine" has been unveiled, and it's already available for individuals to test.

Fair warning: don't expect Caffeine to introduce natural language recognition, search results from Twitter, or anything else too fancy. Matt Cutts cautioned, "The Caffeine update isn't about making some UI changes here or there. Currently, even power users won't notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we're rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure."

Still, he continued, "[S]ome of the search results do change, so we wanted to open up a preview so that power searchers and web developers could give us feedback."

Head over to http://www2.sandbox.google.com if you intend to take Cutts and Google up on their invitation. Keep an eye on characteristics including accuracy, comprehensiveness, and - perhaps especially - indexing speed. Then, if you've got anything constructive to say, use the "Dissatisfied? Help us improve" link at the bottom of the page and include the term "Caffeine" in your response.

Initial impressions have, as you can see below, been mostly positive.

Caffeine is likely to hit the mainstream in the near future. Cutts referred to this sneak peek as "a preview of how the search results will change over the next few weeks and months."

Matt Cutts Talks Video Universal Search Ranking

Chris Crum — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:08:39 +0000

As you may know, Google's Matt Cutts frequently answers user questions by posting videos to the Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel, and the latest one he tackled has to do with videos ranking for universal search on Google. Here is the question that Cutts received:

What factors influence a video universal result in Google? I have the same video - one on YouTube with high views, comments and ratings, yet the other one with low views and no comments is the one that ranks - why is this?

Cutts says that his first guess without knowing the specifics is that maybe the ranking video received links from a very reputable site, so it has more pagerank.

"We still do look at links. We still do look at pagerank whenever we're trying to rank things," says Cutts. "So if this is the one that happened to get written up in a very sort of reputable location, then it couple be that this one has more pagerank and that's why it outranks it."

Cutts says it's strange, because if the other video is getting the comments, and the high views and ratings, then it must be getting some good word of mouth from somewhere, but perhaps it's just not getting the links from reputable sources that the other one is.

The factors that influence a video universal result are often similar to factors that influence web search, according to Cutts. This means things like how well Google thinks a certain result will match in terms of topicality, and the reputation of a page are taken into consideration. Links can play a significant role in that.

Google's Matt Cutts on .com Relevancy in UK

Chris Crum — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:00:44 +0000

Some UK Google users have noticed that search results pages are showing more results from .com sites these days, than in the past. They are used to .co.uk sites getting better rank, and assuming that they are more relevant to their geographic location.

Certainly in some cases the .co.uk site would be more relevant to a UK searcher, but that is not always the case. Google's Matt Cutts has posted a video in which he answers a question on this subject from a user. The question was:

Why are the UK SERPS still really poor with irrelevant non UK sites (US/Aus/NZ) ranking very high on Google.co.uk since early June?

Cutts says it is true that searchers in the UK will see more .com results, and that is simply a product of Google getting better at determining geographic relevancy.

As Google gets better, they're more willing to show .com results if they're relevant to the country. "If the best result for a British searcher is something that ends in .com, we still want to show that to that British searcher," says Cutts.

According to Cutts, this is a change that Google will not likely reverse, although he does encourage users to let them know if they see such results that aren't relevant, because they would want to improve this.

The bottom line is that Google is just learning more these days about what sites are associated with what countries, and they're better at detecting it. The goal is to supply relevant results.

As a bonus, Cutts posted to his blog that he's already received some criticism about his answer in the above video and responded:

There’s a couple effects going on:

- first, we’ve been making changes that make it much more likely to see .coms in the UK. I’d say that’s 80-90% of the changes that people are seeing. Most of the generic TLDs (.com, .net, etc.) that are showing up now are .com sites like tescofinance.com and churchill.com that are relevant to the UK even though they don’t end in a .co.uk.

- I’ve been following some of the examples people have pointed out. I remember kiva.org in particular was mentioned and that probably is off-topic for the UK. I dug into that one, and it was an unrelated ranking experiment that was going on that we changed.

Do Meta Geo Tags Influence Google?

Chris Crum — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 18:13:25 +0000

Google's Matt Cutts frequently posts useful tips for webmasters on the Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel. The short clips generally offer valuable nuggets of info that can have an impact on your site's performance in Google.

In these videos, Matt always answers questions submitted by users, and in a recent one he answers the question: "How do meta geo tags influence search results?"

Noticed changes in your ranking based on geographic info? Discuss.

Cutts says it's not something Google really looks at at all. He says they do look at:

- IP Address
- gTLD
- ccTLD

He also points out that there's a feature in Google's Webmaster Tools where you can tell it that your site pertains to a specific country even though it's a dot com. "Typically the geotags that are in meta tags are not as useful and We don't tend to give those as much weight if at all," says Cutts. He suggests spending your time:

- trying to make sure you have the right domain name

- trying to make sure you have the right IP address if you can

- If you have content (even if it's geo-located) even if it's a sub-domain or a sub-directory, you can specify it in Google's Webamster Tools. You can tell it that certain content is relevant for a particular country.

These are good things to keep in mind if geographic information is important to your site. Have you used the Webmaster Tools Feature Cutts refers to? Tell us about it.

Matt Cutts Discusses "Google's Microsoft Moment"

Doug Caverly — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:28:29 +0000

As just about everybody knows, Google takes great care of its employees, has been something of a media darling, and uses "don't be evil" as the first three words of its official Code of Conduct. However, Google's not perfect, and Matt Cutts recently discussed a few potential problems related to its image.

Cutts drew on a post written by Anil Dash as a starting point. Dash's post is titled "Google's Microsoft Moment," which should give you an idea of where he headed (although Dash didn't say anything spiteful, and Cutts responded with the title of "Why Googlers should read Anil Dash's post").

Anyway, Cutts stated, "We still use 'don't be evil' as a guiding principle inside Google, but I've noticed fewer and fewer people outside Google mentioning the phrase. That raises the worrying possibility that people are starting to think of Google as just another big company."

And indeed, Google's got a market cap of roughly $133 billion, which is a hard figure to ignore. It's led to people analyzing the "bottom line" of the company's every move, finding profit motives in what look like philanthropic gestures.

Cutts acknowledged this by writing, "[M]any people outside the company perceive Google as a huge company with an outsized shadow. We can scare people, even when we're trying not to."

One other issue Cutts identified - and this ties to his "read Anil Dash's post" recommendation - is that Googlers can be offended by users' feedback. Cutts argued that spirited feedback proves users care, and should be interpreted as constructive criticism, not condemnation.

It's interesting to see such an honest discussion of a corporation's (perceived) faults posted by an employee on a public blog. Also interesting is the task with which Cutts charged his coworkers: "ask yourself how you can help make another one of those moments where you're proud to work at Google. I think those moments are a great way to keep from becoming just another large company."

Can a Redesign Affect Your Search Engine Rankings?

Chris Crum — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 12:05:21 +0000

Google's Matt Cutts has an interesting video up (one of many) on the Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel that deals with switching to a new content management system and how that can affect search engine rankings. Someone asks:

We are changing a farily large HTML site to CMS. What are the essentials to keep in mind so that we do not lose our search rankings?

Essentially the answer to the question is that you should test the waters before going all out with the entire site. When you're changing a lot of elements on your site, it can affect rankings, but more than likely, you will be fine.

The biggest piece of advice that Cutts offers is, "Try not to launch all of this at once."

"For example, if your CMS means that your layout has to change, you can mock that up," he continues. "You can try to make it so you change your HTML so that it looks like it would look like from your content management system. And then make sure that your rankings don't change. They shouldn't change very much at all, but you know, if you change a whole bunch of stuff on your page, that can affect how Google scores it."

Cutts suggests changing one directory at first to sort of "dip your foot into the water." It's a good idea to do a mock-up first and then:

- Do some A/B Testing
- Gauge users' reactions
- See how it affects search engine rankings

You can try changing one directory at first almost like "dipping your foot in the water." Basically, you don't want to spend a whole lot of time redesigning your site and changing it over to a new CMS, only to find that it kills your rankings. Test the waters, then if looks good, go for it.

Matt Cutts Answers Questions About Directories and Ranking

Chris Crum — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 10:22:56 +0000

As you may know, Google's Matt Cutts frequently answers questions from Google users on the Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel. There are a couple recent ones in which he addresses questions about directories and how they contribute to a site's rankings.

The first question is:

Will Google consider Yahoo! Directory and BOTW (Best of the Web) as sources of paid links? If no, why is this different from another site that sells links?

When Google looks at whether or not a directory is useful to users, Google looks at:

- What is the value-add?

- Do they go out and find entries on their own or do they only wait for people to come to them?

- How much do they charge?

- What is the editorial service that's being charged?

"If a directory takes $50 and every single person who ever applies in the directory automatically gets in for that $50, there's not as much editorial oversight as something like the Yahoo! Directory, where people do get rejected," says Cutts. "So if there is no editorial value-add there, then that is much closer to paid links."

The second question is:

We sell a software product, and there are 100s of software download directories on the web of varying quality. Could submitting our product to all of them hurt our rankings or domain trust/authority?

Answering this question, Cutts makes it clear that they are only talking about a software product ( .exe file), and not a website. "If it's only a software product, then I wouldn't really worry about it," he says. It wouldn't hurt your website to have a link from those directories, he says.

If the directories are low quality, Google tries not to score them highly, but it doesn't hurt to have your software listed in them.

Google Wants the Web to Function Like a Magazine

Chris Crum — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:33:52 +0000

Google has begun an initiative to help webmasters all over the web make their sites faster, and in turn make the entire web faster for everybody. This would reflect Google Co-founder Larry Page's vision of people being about to surf the web as quickly as if they were flipping through the pages of a magazine.

Google is embarking on what one Googler says will be "a series of difficult advocacy steps" to help companies, ISPs, and webmasters contribute to making the web faster. Google has started by launching a site at code.google.com/speed, which serves as a resource for webmasters with tutorials, tips, and performance tools. To emphasize what Google is trying to do, they have also released this video:

In addition, one of Google's familiar faces, Matt Cutts, is also pointing to a video in which he discusses page loading times and how they relate to search.

What impact do site load times have on Google's rankings? Cutts says the short answer is "none." If a site takes so long to load that Googlebot can't even get a copy of it, then that will hurt, but if it's a question of 1 seconds vs. 2 seconds, it is not a factor. Hear the rest of what Cutts has to say about it in the following clip:

A few tips Cutts gives for faster load times include:

- Don't include 40 different javascript files

- Don't include huge images when you're image size is only set to something small

- Gzip pages

It's really about user experience. Cutts says not to look at it from a search engine ranking perspective "right now." There is always the possibility that this will change in the future.

Getting the entire web to contribute to Google's faster-web initiative is probably impossible. I think it's a great concept, but there are simply too many people out there creating and abandoning sites, blogs, apps, etc. That said, I think there is plenty of room for Google (and all of is influence on the web) to make a huge difference.

Read more about ways Google plans to accomplish its goal

here. Of course they are open to ideas and discussion as well, and you can participate here. What do you think about the initiative? Share your thoughts with WebProNews readers.

Google's No-Follow Changes Explained

Mike McDonald — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:17:58 +0000

Last Tuesday, we discussed the idea of Google potentially making some changes to PageRank and it’s relationship to no-follow - particularly in the context of PageRank sculpting.

As a quick refresher, PageRank sculpting is the practice whereby you add no-follow attributes to less important links in order to emphasize links you deem more important. We used an analogy of a bucket withe holes in it. The holes represented your outbound links. Your website’s PageRank (link juice) flowed thru the holes. The fewer holes you had, higher the percentage of your link juice went thru the remaining holes (links). That's PageRank Sculpting in a nutshell. Dividing your link authority by a smaller number of links in order to maximize the authority you pass on.

At the end of our article, we mentioned that no official word on how Google was going to change the dynamic between no-follow and PageRank, but as of last night, we now know a little more. Matt Cutts made a post on his blog about the way Google has decided to deal with the issue. The biggest surprise in the post was actually Matt’s claim that this change went into effect “over a year ago” but nobody noticed.

Beyond that, Matt’s explanation of PR Sculpting fit pretty nicely into our analogy. Matt said “nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page”. Which basically means, if you plugged some of the holes in your bucket, the remaining holes received a higher percentage of your link authority. This statement is also significant because it pretty much (by definition) says unequivocally that Pagerank sculpting ‘worked’ conceptually at least. But that’s ‘worked’ with an emphasis on the past tense.

The change Google implemented ‘over a year ago’ according to Cutts. Made Google count the outbound links regardless of the no-follow attribute. To paraphrase Matt in his post, if you have 10 PageRank points on a page with 10 outbound links and you put no-follow on 5 of the links, each of your 5 remaining links would pass just 1 point of PageRank now. Prior to the change, each of your 5 links without no-follow would pass 2 points apiece. Now, your PR passing ability is spread out or divided by all of your links - regardless of their no-follow status.

Matt does a pretty good job of anticipating several questions that will doubtlessly arise from his post. I’ll Highlight a couple of the more important points below, but would also urge you to go check out the real thing (like you haven’t already...)

Whenever you are linking within your site, don’t use no-follow 
Q: Since PR is divided amongst outbound links, no-follow or not, should I turn off comments on my blog?  “A: I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.”

So, there you go. The debate that arose during SMX Advanced as to whether or not Google was changing how they handled no-follow in terms of PR sculpting has now been answered. The big surprise in all of this is that they apparently changed it all a while back, but at the end of the day it was pretty much the change we were anticipating anyway. Namely, no-follow links do not pass PR, no-follow links do not pass anchor text value, but no-follow links DO count toward your total of outbound links.

The obvious question this creates I suppose then is: why, then, should we no-follow anything?

Hear What Matt Cutts and Carol Bartz Have to Say

Chris Crum — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:50:07 +0000

There are a few interesting videos currently floating around right now that I thought would be worth sharing here. The first one is from Google's Matt Cutts at a site review session at Google I/O. The second one is of Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz at the All Things Digital Conference, and the third is the recent LinkedIn Tech Talk event.

Matt Cutts

The Cutts video is an hour long, but we know many of our readers will listen to pretty much anything he has to say. "About 38 minutes in, the session morphed into a general Q&A. So even if you don’t care about site reviews, the Q&A might be interesting to you," Cutts notes.

Carol Bartz

Kara Swisher at All Things Digital was kind enough to post this video of her interview with Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz. "Yes, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz did indeed drop the F-bomb on BoomTown quite expertly in an onstage interview at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference recently–and, yes, it was both expected and enjoyable," says Swisher.

LinkedIn Tech Talk

Last but not least, is the recent LinkedIn TechTalk. You'll find this one a bit techier (obviously), but a number of you will probably be interested in this as well. "It’s a tad long with a running time of nearly 61 minutes, but if you’re interested in SCALA it will be well worth it," says LinkedIn's Mario Sundar.

If you have thoughts on any of these videos, please feel free to discuss them in the comments section below. With that, I'll leave you to enjoy nearly 3 hours of content on one page (it's cool if you don't want to watch it all at once).

Do You Think Google Favors Big Brands?

Chris Crum — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 07:51:19 +0000

As you may know, Google's Matt Cutts regularly answers user questions in the form of YouTube videos at Google's Webmaster Central channel. One recent question he took on goes:

As far as big brands go, why is it that they seem to do well irregardless of relevance, content or links when analyzing keyword placement in search engine result pages?

This is not a new subject. You might recall a thought-provoking blog post from SEOBook author Aaron Wall on the subject a while back. WebProNews spoke with Wall and discussed the issue a little bit further in another article.

A little while later, Cutts posted one of his videos, and pretty much disputed the fact that Google gives weight to any sites just because of their brand. In that one, he said they focus more on things like trust, authority, reputation, pagerank, etc.

In this latest video, he dismisses the notion in a way that seems a little more concrete, indicating that Google does not rank based on brand. "I would not agree with the premise of you question," he says. He notes that small mom and pops complain that big brands are getting too much weight, while the big brands are complaining that they are not getting enough.

Essentially, Google's position on the matter is that they just try to deliver the pages that are the most useful to the user. If you consider those other words (trust, reputation, pagerank, etc.), it makes sense that big brands would rank higher frequently because the reason they have become big brands is likely that they have built a solid reputation, and people trust them because they know the brand, and this inspires linking, which leads to pagerank.

This makes sense to me. Would you agree? Talk about it in the comments.

Was Microsoft's Bingathon a Success?

Jeremy Muncy — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 02:57:21 +0000

Last night Hulu ran the live telethon style infomercial for Bing called the "Bingathon".

So how did it perform?

Well, it appears nothing "official" has been released yet. So let's see what some Twitter users (a co-host, industry professionals and everyday users) are saying about the Bingathon.

Did any of you watch the Bingathon? If so, what did you think about it? Tell us.

Olivia Munn, co-host of the live event with Jason Sudeikis, tweeted the following...

This shouldn't come as any shock that Microsoft is claiming an early victory. Think about it, what is the real measurement for success here? What other live telethon launch of a search engine is there for comparison?

Some of the search industries biggest names threw in their two cents about the Bingathon via Twitter...

So we've heard what a co-host had to say as well as people in the industry, but what does the everyday user have to say about the Bingathon?

Some Tweeters loathed the event...

...while some Twitterers were just happy for the 24 hour commercial free Hulu, provided by Bing.

Scanning through my #Bingathon search on Twitter I did notice that the overall feeling of the Bingathon wasn't very positive. With that said I was able to find a few Tweets of people who seemed to enjoy the event...

It's really hard to say for sure if the Bingathon was a success, but it did manage to get people talking... even though the talk wasn't 100% positive. So was this one of those "any press is good press" moments?

Does Google Recognize the Name of Your Business?

Chris Crum — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 19:56:13 +0000

People misspell their search engine queries all the time. That is why it can be incredibly helpful when Google steps and offers "did you mean suggestions."

Google actually offers a few different spell-check features in its search results. These come with the internal codenames: "Did you mean," "Chameleon" (mid-page suggestions), and "Spellmeleon," where a couple results are shown for the corrected query.

Chameleon:

Spellmeleon:

"Did you mean" comes up fairly often, and a problem that some businesses might face as a result of this is that Google doesn't understand that their name is a valid query, and offers a "Did you mean?" alternative. In this Web 2.0 world, where seemingly every start-up is some weird non-existent word, it's not hard to envision this happening fairly often.

One business owner actually sent a question about this into Google's Matt Cutts, who answered it in the following video uploaded to Google's Webmaster Central YouTube channel. The question presented to Matt was:

When I do a Google Search for my business name, Google suggests "Did you mean:" with some other company name. Is there anything we can do to keep that from happening?

Cutts says that there's nothing that he knows of that a business can do about this at this point. "The hope is that over time, we learn that sort of thing automatically," he says.

"Anything you can do to build the reputation of your business, so it's more well-known, so that you've got a lot of links pointing to you, and you're more easily found on the web..." Cutts suggests as a possible solution.

These are the kinds of things that signal Google to realize that it is a valid query, and that it's not something that they need to show a spelling suggestion for. So in theory, if you promote your business well enough, the "did you mean?" will not be an issue.

There aren't any special forms or anything you can fill out to notify Google at this point. So if this is a problem for you, you have a little work to do.

Google PageRank: Sullivan & Cutts discuss nofollow

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 10:10:31 +0000

PageRank sculpting is a pretty advanced SEO tactic, and it has been widely used by SEO pros since Google’s Matt Cutts described its use on YouTube, giving the strategy the official green light. At SMX Advanced in Seattle, the same harbinger of Google insider information offered a stunning revelation: Google changed the way it handled link structures intended for sculpting.

Coverage of SMX Advanced continues at WebProNews Videos. Stay with WebProNews for more updates and videos from the event this week.

An Explanation of PageRank Sculpting (If you know already, skip to next heading.)

PageRank sculpting works for sites that already have a high PageRank and, as a result, have a lot of “juice” to pass around. Webmasters looking to have more control over which pages appear in Google’s search results would thus harness the trust (juice) Google gave their site to boost certain pages they consider important while blocking other unimportant or less useful pages.

For example, a webmaster may find that a sign-in page or contact page appears in the search results but a page more useful to the end user digging around the Net doesn’t, perhaps because the Googlebot hasn't been able to locate it. The webmaster could help “sculpt” different pages’ rankings by adding a nofollow tag on links pointing to unimportant pages while linking to preferred pages.

In this sense, PageRank was seen as a finite amount of energy to divvy up among a certain number of pages. If you have 10 liters of PageRank juice to distribute, you could deprive one page of receiving any juice and evenly divide the rest among pages needing a boost. With six links, one is nofollowed, the rest normal, giving the Googlebot directions on where to crawl while passing on two liters of juice per page.

Google cleared this practice in 2007 by using it with YouTube. The video site links to random videos from the homepage, and as such, when the Googlebot came by, it would pass on the tremendous amount of juice YouTube carried to those random videos. Google used PageRank sculpting to keep it fair and prevent favoritism of certain videos in the search results.

That Was Then, This Is Now

Matt Cutts

Using the 10 liters of juice model, if a webmaster had ten links, blocks five, then five got two liters and five got none. If the webmaster unblocked five, then the juice was evenly redistributed. It also worked in reverse. If a webmaster had distributed the juice among the ten but decided to dam up five, then the juice would evenly redistribute two liters to the preferred five pages.

But, according to Matt Cutts, in a Q&A moderated by Danny Sullivan at SMX Advanced, that’s all changed. Now, if the webmaster dams up five, that half still receives nothing, but the remaining half remains at one liter each instead of being boosted up to two liters.

Now, instead of having a certain amount juice to distribute as a webmaster likes, Google allows only that select pages be deprived of juice. And where does that all that excess PageRank juice go? “You can almost think of it as just evaporating,” said Cutts, and one imagines the number of stomachs turning over at that moment.

It’s important to note that Cutts said Google would not penalize a site for PageRank sculpting, but Cutts did suggest the practice wasn’t a great use of a webmaster’s time unless using nofollow for sign-in pages, RSS subscribe links, et cetera.

Highlights From the Cutts Q&A Regarding PageRank Sculpting

Cutts on penalties

It's not gonna get you a penalty. You're not gonna get in trouble or anything. We're not gonna say "oh all of these internal links are nofollowed" or anything like that. However, it's not as effective, so it's definitely a better use of your time to go and make new content.

Cutts on sculpting

If you're using nofollow to change how PageRank flows around within your site, it's almost like a band-aid. It's better to make your site the way you want PageRank to flow from the beginning, and then it's good for users, and it's good for search engines.

So how you choose to link within your site is your own business, and I would tell people you can try to sculpt PageRank, but it's not gonna be as useful. So I would urge people to make new content or think about how to link within your site. Put your best products right up on your root page, and things like that. And that's gonna be a much better way to "sculpt" PageRank than using nofollow.

Cutts on site architecture

What we've been saying from the beginning is don't spend as much of your time on the PR sculpting aspect of it. Spend your time making good site architecture so that PageRank just flows wherever you want. That's why we've been saying use it sparingly. Don’t use it for links you can't vouch for. Don’t use it for user-generated content that you don't necessarily trust. And this is all up on the HTML documentation page made for rel="nofollow”.

Cutts on nofollow use:

If you are a power user and there's a specific page you don't want like a sign up page or a login page, that's a fine way to use nofollow.

For example if you look at mattcutts.com, the only thing I have nofollow on (I believe) is my subscribe link and that's because it goes to an RSS feed, which is really not all that useful for the main web index. So for me personally, I tend not to use nofollow on my own internal links

Chris Crum provided some notes for this article.