Internet Marketing
Marketing With Out The Fluff

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).

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 .

If you’re responsible for a handful of blogs or sites, and have been wearing holes in a thesaurus to avoid using the same phrase twice, rest easy.  At SMX Advanced, Matt Cutts said some things about duplicate content that should comfort the average blogger or small business owner. Coverage of SMX Advanced continues at WebProNews Videos .  Stay with WebProNews for more updates and videos from the event this week.   Cutts was asked whether a network of co-branded job sites would be penalized for duplicate listings.  He answered, "Within one site, I wouldn’t worry as much about a duplicate content penalty.  We’ll just try to pick the best page." Also, even when scores of sites are involved, the odds are good that there’s no need to worry.  Cutts continued, "If you have the same content on 200 different sites . . . is it typical that we give a duplicate content penalty for that?  No.  Definitely not." For the sake of not giving an incomplete picture, though, we should note (as Cutts did) that Google remains focused on users having a positive experience, and it might be best in the 200-site situation to make PageRank flow to one original domain. Not bad, right?  So again, as long as you’re not doing anything too unusual, don’t worry about leaving your thesaurus or Word’s trusty Shift-F7 combo alone for a while.

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.

On Google’s Webmaster Central YouTube Channel , Matt Cutts frequently answers questions from users in short clips. In one in particular, he answers the following user question: Recently, Google has been more proactive in providing results that feature "corrected" spellings. In what way will smart guesses be employed in search results in the future? Can we expect more synonyms in search results, for example? "If you look at random queries, something like 10% of them might be misspelled," Matt explains. When Google realized that so many queries were misspelled, that’s when they decided to write what Matt refers to as one of the world’s best spell checkers. But even if you have huge click thru on "did you mean," there are always some people who didn’t realize it was there, he says. Google recently introduced a change where they spell correct what they think is the right answer for one or two results, then they’ll show the normal answers underneath. This greatly helps out users who just don’t know how to spell the query correctly. Matt notes that it even helps web spam out, because users who enter typos and misspellings don’t see that kind of spam so much because they realize they didn’t spell it right. Matt says there are lots of ways to tell Google that you are entering exactly what you mean. He says power users can always – put a + before a word to say "this is the exact word I meant to search for." – put the query in double quotes – put double quotes even on a single word "We try to be smart," Matt says. "If someone types something that looks like it’s a misspelling, but it’s not, we’ll try to figure that out over time. It’s not a case where we roll something out and never make any more changes for several years." He says Google tries to go with what works for the majority of peoople, and then tries to improve upon it and correct mistakes when it rolls out the next iteration of its algorithm. Let’s not forget that Google recently made some changes to its SERPs that include other suggestions as well. Intent-based search is one direction that Google is moving in with regards to relevancy.