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Is This Google Algorithm Change About Content Farms or Not?

Chris Crum — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 02:11:51 +0000

Google has launched a change in its algorithm, following a post a week ago from Matt Cutts talking about the search engine’s approach to spam and content farms. However, it is still unclear whether this new update is the related to the "content farm" side of things. Matt Cutts wrote a post on his personal blog about the update, which he says pertains to "one thing" he mentioned in the original post. Cutts writes: My post mentioned that "we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content." That change was approved at our weekly quality launch meeting last Thursday and launched earlier this week. This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content. (emphasis added) As far as I can tell, it would appear that the "one thing" Cutts is referring to with this new update, is when he said in the previous post, "We’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content." In that first post, Cutts acknowledged that "pure webspam" has decreased over time, which to me sounds like a good reason that this new update would only impact "slightly over 2%" of queries. Though comments from Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt seem to lump "content farms" into this area, the original post from Cutts appears to reference content farms as a separate issue, and one which the company intends to put more focus on. Content farms, as defined by Cutts, are "sites with shallow or low-quality content." Read more on this here , where I pointed out that everyone thinks of Demand Media when they think of content farm, so it would make little sense to use this terminology if it didn’t include this kind of content – see below: Cutts says that with the new update, " less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. " That doesn’t sound like something that will affect the content farms described in the original post, where he said, "We hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content." Reports out there seem to be rolling this all into one thing, but that’s not how I’m reading it. As there seems to be confusion, as indicated by Rosenblatt’s comments, I’ve asked Cutts to clarify, and will update when he responds. The words "content farm" do not appear in the new post.

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Is This Google Algorithm Change About Content Farms or Not?

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If You’re Not Local, How Can You Compete in an Increasingly Local Google?

Chris Crum — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 23:02:39 +0000

There’s no question that Google has been putting a lot of focus on local results lately – from the release of products like Google Places and Hotpot (the company’s personalized and social recommendation engine) to an increasing amount of queries simply retrieving local results – often above other organic listings. We had an extensive conversation about this with industry veteran Bruce Clay at PubCon a couple months ago, and webmasters and SEOs have been stressing about it all over the web. In fact, just today, one consulting firm ran a press release talking about the competitive advantages local business owners have as a result of recent changes with Google. Do local businesses have the upper hand in Google? Tell us what you think . Consultant (and founder of the firm, LocalMarketingProfitFaucet says there’s a new type of Google Gold Rush. He’s referring to getting the prime listings from Google Places, which Google will often place at the top of the SERPs. "This change is having an immediate and positive impact on the local businesses shown in these Page 1 listings," says Adams. "The Internet-savvy business owners who understand how to take advantage of this are generating new customers for next-to-nothing. Meanwhile, a surprising number are still oblivious to the significance of this change. In fact, Google has revealed that only a tiny percentage of local businesses have even claimed their Google Places listing, let alone optimize it." "From our experience," Adams continues, "Google has always given preferential treatment to unique, multimedia content that is kept fresh and up to date. And of course, stay away from any black hat tactics that try to game the system. Google always catches up to these shenanigans. When they do, your listing could be banned with no warning and no second chances." If local businesses have the competitive advantage now, then some non-local businesses are wondering how they’re supposed to compete with that. After all, the far reach of the web has historically been an attractive reason to start a business in the first place. In a new video uploaded to Google’s Webmaster YouTube channel, Matt Cutts (head of the company’s webspam team) addressed a user-submitted question: "In a search environment where local is becoming increasingly important (and more full on the SERP), how can an out of town company compete with the local based (and locally housed) competition without lying to show up in these results?" Cutts responded by saying, "The entire page of web rankings is there that out of town people can compete on, so the idea of the local universal results is to show local businesses, so in some sense, there’s not really a way where if you’re out of town, you can sort of show up (within our guidelines), and show up as a local business." "Now, if you are a mobile business – so for example, maybe you’re a plumber, and you get into your pickup truck, and you drive around in a particular area – so if you’re a mobile business, then in Google Places you can specify a service area, which is roughly 50 miles around where you’re based, but that’s only if you actually have some base of operations there," he continues. "You can’t be based in Topeka and claim that you have a service area in Wyoming if you have no physical presence there." "I think that that’s a good idea. You do want to have local businesses show up, and I know that the team has really been paying a lot of attention to try and improve Maps quality, make it more robust, check on the authenticity of businesses, and that will only continue," adds Cutts. In other words, if you’re not a local business, there’s nothing much you can do about getting the kind of visibility the local businesses are getting, should Google deem the user’s query worthy of the local results. I might suggest finding queries related to your business that aren’t returning local results and giving these some more attention, and of course there’s always AdWords. If there’s a particular geographic market that you’re after, but you’re not based there, you may want to consider setting up shop. In the end, Google is just going to do what it thinks will help users. Whether or not you buy that is up to you, but they’re not going to deviate from that stance, and if it encourages more people to buy AdWords ads, then so be it. You can expect there to be a great amount of focus continued to be placed on local. The company even moved former VP of Search products, Marissa Mayer, to this area of focus, and with mobile becoming such a big part of the way people search, local is by default going to be a bigger part of what people are actually looking for. Has Google’s increased focus on local hurt your search rankings and visibility? Let us know in the comments .

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If You’re Not Local, How Can You Compete in an Increasingly Local Google?

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Why Google Won’t Reveal Secret Ranking Factors, But Gives Plenty of SEO Advice

Chris Crum — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 21:29:36 +0000

Google’s goal as a search engine is to provide users with the most relevant results for their queries and the best user experience. For this reason, Google keeps its 200+ ranking factors a secret. While some of them are well-known, others are not, and how much weight each is given is perhaps the biggest mystery. Google doesn’t want people to be able to game its system because this will have a negative impact on search results, and make the user experience poor. This is nothing new. Danny Sullivan recently asked Google CEO Eric Schmidt why they couldn’t at least list the factors, while keeping their weights secret. Schimidt basically said that this would be revealing business secrets. Fair enough. While one may understand why Google goes out of its way to keep this information under wraps, some may wonder why they go to the trouble of providing webmasters with SEO advice, tools, and resources. After all, Google is going to deliver the results as it sees fit right? This is the topic of a question someone sent into Google’s Matt Cutts who has provided a video with his response. The question is really coming from the angle that Google should rather not have people optimizing their sites, so they have to buy ads to gain visibility (more money for Google). Of course while Google may want you to buy ads, this is not the company’s approach. "Whenever the web does well, Google does well," says Cutts. "I don’t think that it has to be something like, ‘Oh, we help websites rank better and they don’t need to advertise,’" he says. "That’s sort of a short-sighted view. We say, ‘Look, we try to help people make the web a better experience, more people will be on the web, they’ll stay on the web longer, they’ll be happier, and…just the halo effect – the reflected effect of all of that is that people will search more, and then a few of the times they’ll click on the ads’". One YouTube commenter on the video says, "Or simply Google wants to ‘teach us’ SEO so people who search with Google find what they want. If a user search[es] for something and Google return[s] non-related results they wont use it. So Google needs US and WE need Google." Another commenter makes a pretty good point. In the video, Cutts mentions that Google could choose to show pop-up ads, and it could made them some money up front, but that this would annoy users, and they might not want to come back. The commenter says, "I consider YouTube ads embedded in videos just as annoying as pop up ads." I don’t think that person is alone. It’s not the greatest thing for user experience.

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Why Google Won’t Reveal Secret Ranking Factors, But Gives Plenty of SEO Advice

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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).

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Hear What Matt Cutts and Carol Bartz Have to Say

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Google Talks About the Links-for-Money Spectrum

Chris Crum — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:57:30 +0000

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

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Google Talks About the Links-for-Money Spectrum

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Matt Cutts Opens Up About Google Penalties

Doug Caverly — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:04:45 +0000

Not long ago, another installment of the wacky car race known as the LeMons was held. Rule-breakers are penalized by being forced to do things like paint Bob Ross landscapes on their hoods and participate in conga lines. Google’s punishment system isn’t quite as obvious, though, so Matt Cutts discussed the matter at SMX Advanced. Coverage of SMX Advanced continues at WebProNews Videos . Stay with WebProNews for more updates and videos from the event this week. Cutts started by giving a rather witty answer to the question of “how can you tell if your site is in the penalty box?” He replied, “One really good way is if it disappears completely from Google. That’s what we call a leading indicator.” After some laughter subsided, Cutts then shared additional details. He said, “We make the penalties public where we think it can give the most help. So if you’re a small mom and pop, and you didn’t even realize (this happens a lot) – I hired a webmaster, and he put some hidden text on the page in 2003, and it was like 3 sentences, and they didn’t know – that’s the sort of thing where you want to tell them [through official channels]. “But if you see a sustained drop in ranks, or if it drops completely out, that’s the sort of thing where . . . there’s lots of forums on the web, including the Google Webmaster Forum, where you can go and ask for some help.” Cutts noted that Google’s employees will often respond with some “very, very blatant hints” about what’s gone wrong on such forums. And here’s one more important detail: unlike the LeMons judges, Google isn’t trying to toy with anyone. Cutts said that the only reason all of this isn’t conducted out in the open is because scammers and black hats would use the info to their advantage.

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Matt Cutts Opens Up About Google Penalties

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Google Referral Change Linked to Faster Search Results Experiment

Chris Crum — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 13:53:17 +0000

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=http2F2Fmypage.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.

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Google Referral Change Linked to Faster Search Results Experiment

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