Internet Marketing
Marketing With Out The Fluff

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 .

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.

As you may have read about by now, Google’s Matt Cutts participated in a fairly lengthy Q&A session at SMX Advanced in Seattle. One interesting question that Matt got was about how webmasters should deal with display:none and AJAX without being penalized by Google. Cutts recommends making sure that whenever you write your own mouseover code that you don’t roll your own custom solution, which he says might do some really weird things that nobody else has done before. "We write our algorithm so that we try to detect all the common idioms, so if you’re using a mouseover sort of thing where you mouseover this menu and there’s five more links here, or some text or stuff like that, we try to handle that in all the common cases," explains Cutts. "So whenever we’re parsing through css or looking through javascript, we’re trying to detect hidden text we try to specifically make sure we don’t accidentally trigger on somebody who’s got mouseover code, so if you’re using common mouseover code, go and find sites that are very well known, and you use code the same or similar to that, in terms of how the mouseover works, you should probably be fine," he adds. "We want the algorithm to trigger on when you use display:none and you’re sending it 9,999 pixels that way, and you’ve got four pages of text, and it’s really, really irritating and our users complain about that," Cutts continues. "So we do our best, and when we spot that there are problems, we try to iterate and improve the algorithm, but I dont’ think we have very big issues with false positives in terms of that." The summary of Matt’s advice here is that to be safe, just make sure you don’t write your own completely weird code from scratch. He says to look and see what other sites are doing. The guy who asked the question asked him if his advice is basically to just copy other people’s code. The audience found this amusing, and Cutts was quick to defuse the notion that this is what he is really saying.  "I think you’re oversimplifying it a little bit," Cutts said. "I don’t want you to commit theft on someone else’s code. But there are for example, libraries that are released… script.aculo.us and things like this that are well known that you can use that aren’t just copying other people’s code." What do you think of Matt’s advice when it comes to display:none and AJAX? Does this limit creativity with regard to code creation? Tell us what you think . Stay tuned to WebPronews for more coverage of the SMX Advanced conference from Seattle (that goes for articles and for video ). You will also be seeing more info from Matt’s Q&A session, specifically.

Everybody’s talking about Bing today since the Microsoft’s new search engine became unexpectedly available on a widescale. That includes Google, and more specifically Matt Cutts. An interesting conversation took place on Twitter today between Cutts and Betsy of the Bing account . Cutts was apparently doing a little ego searching on Bing and does not appear entirely impressed with the results. SEO Services Group has transcribed the conversation:   Matt Cutts: Congrats to @bing on the launch! Sad to see this not-so-relevant result at #4 for [matt cutts] though: http://bit.ly/4a8Q1Y Bing: @mattcutts anytime you want to give feedback to @bing, we’re here. I’m sitting with the devs at present. ^betsy Bing: @mattcutts I know you are disappointed in ego search stuff tonight w/ @bing, but try ‘mtv movie awards 2009′ and see what you get. ^ba Matt Cutts: Ouch. The #5 Bing result for [matt cutts] is spammy too: http://bit.ly/B2r5F It’s a YouTube->WordPress autogenerated blog. Matt Cutts: @bing okay. First web result was from 2008 instead of 2009, even with 2009 in query: http://bit.ly/SToK1 . Google nails it. Matt Cutts: @bing but doesn’t it bother you that [mtv movie awards] on Google gives great news results and 2009 url, but w/Bing I only see 2008, 2007, ? Bing: @mattcutts Uh – the first answer folks see is the news answer, not what you circled. Apparently twilight won. ^ba Matt Cutts: @bing by the way, Twilight did rock. I’m not ashamed to say it–glittery vampires rule!! That’s about it for the conversation between the two (so far), but Cutts referenced that number 4 result again later: To me, this just looks like Cutts stepping up to market Google in the wake of Bing’s launch. Bing’s getting a lot of attention right now, and it only makes sense that Google would want to make sure they don’t go thinking its better than their own search engine. It’s about protecting the brand. Whether this is Matt’s intention or not, Cutts pointing out shortcomings in Bing’s search results is going to resonate throughout the industry. He is practically the posterboy for Google, at least among the search and tech savvy crowd.  A lot of people follow Matt Cutts. A lot of people hang nearly everything on what he has to say (search-wise). Cutts has shed some light on some issues with Bing though. It’s a little early to burn the search engine at the stake. After all, it’s not even supposed to be launched yet, but after trying an ego search for myself (not something I performed in my first Bing runthrough ), I am also much happier with Google’s results. By the way, here are some more Bing findings . What are your thoughts on Bing? How do you like the search engine’s results compared to Google’s? Share your thoughts .

In a Q&A session at SMX Advanced in Seattle, Google’s Matt Cutts talked at length about paid links. He was asked several questions about this. Google recently announced it is now reading javascript and acting upon it. In the past, the advice given out has been if you have paid links, you should either nofollow those paid links or use javascript because Google didn’t read it. When asked about this, Matt says Googlebot has gotten smarter. He notes that Google began changing its messaging on this around 2007-2008 to stop mentioning javascript but to nofollow or do a redirect through a URL which is blocked through robots.txt. Cutts says this a very secure way to do it. Cutts says the interesting thing is that even on the onclick in javascript, the crawl and indexing team has submitted code so that it will respect a rel="nofollow" so you can put a rel="nofollow" attribute on a link that’s running in javascript and in the majority of cases Google will make sure it doesn’t float pagerank even if they’re executing the javascript. He says that if you want to be completely safe, nofollow or link through things that are blocked. Someone then asked Matt how long they have to fix their sites if they didn’t know about this. Cutts reponded by saying that javascript has not been a problem in the vast majority of cases. "If you look at the major ad networks, they tend to be doing redirects through or iframes on things that are blocked out on robots.txt anyway." He does say that Google should probably put up a blog post about it though. A Vanessa Fox article about how javascript is executed and crawled these days was also referenced. Cutts thinks the other search engines are moving in the direction of having more sophisticated bots as well. You may have heard that Google gave away Android phones at its recent developer conferences. This was brought up in comparison to paid links. Cutts basically says that it was not Google’s intent to acquire links, and that the move was more aimed at putting Android phones in the hands of developers to inspire the development of apps. Google doesn’t need paid links itself. He says they don’t even think about getting links as far as their own stuff. Cutts also talked about the Federal Trade Commission’s stance, which basically just looks to see if there is material connection to linking. Are you getting something of monetary value for a link? Contests were also brought up in this light. If you’re making people link to you to get into a contest where they can win a prize, that’s close to money for links. "If you’re doing a contest, don’t make it explicitly your role to try to get links," he says. From this part of the Q&A there seemed to be two main points that Cutts wanted to make clear: 1. There’s a spectrum of how money is involved and there’s a spectrum of how people are trying to manipulate or spam the search engines. The majority of the stuff Google sees is where there is money being paid directly for links. 2. As a webmaster, you can do whatever you want on your site. "It’s your site and it’s your choice," he says. Google also has the right to choose what they want to display in their index. If you are interested in learning about other things Cutts discussed in the Q&A, check out the following articles: – Duplicate Content not an Everyday Problem – How to Avoid Google Penalties with AJAX and display:none – Google ‘Evaporating’ Excess PageRank – Matt Cutts Opens Up About Google Penalties – How Google Handles Google Bowling

In a Q&A session at SMX Advanced in Seattle, Google’s Matt Cutts was asked the following question: How does Google look at the issue that I can buy suspect links and point them to my competitor? How does your algorithm track that? This practice is known as "Google Bowling". To get a better understanding of what Google Bowling (different from Google Bombing) is about, check out this article from Michael Pedone from 2005 about how competitors can sabotage you. Matt discussed how Google deals with this. In the session he said: The short answer is we try really hard to make sure that one person can’t Google bowl another person. You try to include it in your algorithm so much that you don’t want those links to count, but you don’t necessarily want anyone to be in a position where somebody else could try to hurt you…. We try to make it so that it doesn’t cause a drop in your rankings (if a competitor tries to hurt you). We try to do stuff algorithmically, we use manual means…we’ve been pretty clear that we do not like paid links and we take action on it, but at the same time, we try very hard to make it so that just because somebody else doesn’t like you, they can’t submarine your rankings and things like that. It’s good to know that Google is keeping the best interest of those being "bowled" in mind. It would be interesting to know people’s opinions about how well they’re actually handling this. Has this ever happened to you? Do you think Google does a good job handling it? Share your thoughts with other WebProNews readers . Also, stay tuned to WebPronews for more coverage of the SMX Advanced conference from Seattle (that goes for articles and for video ). You will also be seeing more info from Matt’s Q&A session, specifically.

Yesterday Google held its Searchology event and announced a number of new things. The big announcements, which were widely covered included: – Search Options – Google Squared – Richer Snippets – Android Sky Map Application Google’s Matt Cutts pulled some other interesting things from the event that some may have overlooked amidst the whirlwind of Google news. "I noticed several tidbits that I don’t think we’ve ever said in public before," says Cutts. First he mentions Google’s internal code names for spell-check features. These include the normal "Did you mean:" spell check link at the top of the results, but also the mid-page suggestions (codename: Chameleon): And the more aggressive Spellmeleon, which includes a couple results for the corrected query. Cutts says this is for when Google really thinks the user messed up. He also notes that this feature is a tremendous help for is webspam team because it pretty much eliminates the chances of users going on to results that spammers have targeted for typos. Other things Cutts pulled out of Searchology include: – mobile search results are blended between results from the mobile web and results from the regular web. – 1 in 4 searches triggers a universal/blended search result – 40% of searches on any given day are repeat searches for that user (a reason that SearchWiki can be useful) – Links to Jayant Madhavan’s paper on what Google is doing to crawl the deep web – Also links to each slide from the event The event was a big one for Google and Google enthusiasts in terms of items of interest. Google rolls out some new product or feature to a product nearly every day, but at Searchology we got a bunch of stuff to think about.  

Google has been accused of stealing the thunder of others on numerous occasions. The most recent example cited in a post from the VP of Marketing for Blekko is Google’s structured data product, which WebProNews covered here . Google’s Matt Cutts has posted a response/defense to the notion that Google is out to steal any thunder. He takes each point made by Mike Markson, the Blekko guy, and counters it with why Google was not "stealing any thunder." His response to that initial point is this: "I wasn’t familiar with this one, so I dropped an email to Ola Rosling, the Googler employee who wrote the blog post announcement," says Cutts. "It turns out that there’s a straightforward reason for the timing: the blog post was planned for a different day, but an early/unexpected baby arrival resulted in this blog post being rescheduled." Another instance mentioned by Markson was when Cuil announced that it indexed 120 billion documents, and 3 days before it Google announced it had a trillion. Cutts says Google passed a trillion a month before. There are several other items mentioned, but Cutts counters each one, though Markson is not entirely convinced by all of them as an update to his original post indicates. Is Google out to steal the thunder of others? Maybe, maybe not. Does Google have the right to do so? I don’t see why not. If potential competitors are announcing things that can persuade people that they are better than Google in some way, why would Google not want people to know that they are as good/better in that particular area when applicable? Wouldn’t you do the same for your business? Yes, Google is a very dominant force, but while they generally don’t turn out to be, how many of these things have been labeled "Google-killers?" Is Google supposed to roll over to the competition?  What do you think?

This week, it was announced that Google was making changes to search referral URLs . Basically, where URLs looked like this before: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search They will start looking more like this: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw You can read a bit more about that here . Web technologist Niall Kennedy suggested that this was probably a change being made to better track search actions and shield URL parameters from sites downstream. Alex Chitu at the blog Google Operating System had a different and frankly, more interesting theory , which is that it is a solution for the lack of referral information in a future Ajax interface. Matt Cutts recently explained in the following clip that Google was testing AJAX results on a small number of users to open up potentially faster searching capabilities. Listening to him discuss how this would affect analytics puts the URL changes a little bit more into perspective. Chitu’s theory was confirmed when a Google spokesperson told CNET that this was the reasoning for the referral URL change. "These guys are working hard to make things milliseconds faster. They’re always experimenting," the spokesperson said. In the above video, Cutts says the experiment is only available to less than 1% of Google users. Basically what it does is loads search results without loading the entire page each time a new search is performed. Milliseconds indeed.