Internet Marketing » Traffic

Matt Cutts Talks Keyword Density

Chris Crum — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 02:12:42 +0000

Google has put out a new Webmaster Help video, featuring (as usual) head of web spam Matt Cutts. This time, Cutts is answering his own question, rather than a user-submitted question. The question is: What is the ideal keyword density: …

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Matt Cutts Talks Keyword Density

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A Panda Meaner Than Google’s, Page Speed & The Beardo

Chris Crum — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 01:33:14 +0000

There’s a lot of Google going on in today’s edition of the daily video round-up. That includes a Panda reference, Matt Cutts talking about Page Speed, the Galaxy Nexus and even Eric Schmidt’s wife. But if I’m being honest, Michael …

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A Panda Meaner Than Google’s, Page Speed & The Beardo

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Google Panda Update: Cutts Confirms Another Tweak

Chris Crum — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 00:54:26 +0000

As previously reported, Google’s Matt Cutts tweeted out on October 5 to “expect some Panda-related flux in the next few weeks, but will have less impact than previous updates (~2%).” SearchMetrics has since shared numbers for sites it found to …

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Google Panda Update: Cutts Confirms Another Tweak

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Google Algorithm Testing – Search Giant Calls for Help Detecting Scrapers

Chris Crum — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 23:19:43 +0000

Google announced that it is testing algorithmic changes for scraper sites – blog scrapers in particular. The company is calling on users to help them. “We are asking for examples, and may use data you submit to test and improve …

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Google Algorithm Testing – Search Giant Calls for Help Detecting Scrapers

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Google: Not Having Robots.txt is “A Little Bit Risky”

Chris Crum — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 02:37:43 +0000

Robots.txt as you may know, lets Googlebot know whether you want it to crawl your site or not. Google’s Matt Cutts spoke about a few options for these files in the latest Webmaster Help video, in response to a user-submitted …

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Google: Not Having Robots.txt is “A Little Bit Risky”

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Google Gives an Update on How it Thinks About DMOZ

Chris Crum — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 03:40:46 +0000

Google posted a new Webmaster Help video featuring Matt Cutts. This time around, he discusses the Open Directory Project, otherwise known as DMOZ. The video is Matt’s response to a user-submitted question, which said: “What role does being in DMOZ …

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Help Google Crawl Your Site More Effectively, But Use Caution

Chris Crum — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 23:09:25 +0000

Google has introduced some changes to Webmaster Tools – in particular, handling of URLs with parameters. “URL Parameters helps you control which URLs on your site should be crawled by Googlebot, depending on the parameters that appear in these URLs,” …

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Help Google Crawl Your Site More Effectively, But Use Caution

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Google’s Matt Cutts on Why Amazon Often Ranks Well

Chris Crum — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 01:16:48 +0000

If you search for products a lot, using Google, there’s a fairly good chance you’ve seen Amazon at or near the top of the results pages quite a few times. Someone sent a question about this to Google, and Matt Cutts used a Webmaster Help video to discuss the subject. The question was phrased as: “Search for a physical product usually ranks Amazon #1, even though it may not provide the best user experience. What is being done to prevent large corporations from dominating search engine results?” Matt’s responded by saying, “I think in general, not to call anybody out, but I think Amazon does have a relatively good user experience in general. I wouldn’t necessarily agree that Amazon always ranks number one for every physical product.” “So typically when I do a search for a book, Amazon is up there, but if there is an official homepage for a book, it often ranks very well, and sometimes number one as well,” he continued. “The interesting thing is not every book has a home page. This is something that still surprises me. You’ll have a very savvy author. They’ll have a webpage, but they may not have a landing page or a page dedicated to that specific book. Sometimes it’s just a lack of savviness.” He brought up one book that he had recently looked at, noting that no other content about it was on the web, other than Amazon, GoodReads, and Google eBooks. “The best answer is, make sure there is an actual page for your product,” said Cutts. “In general, Google does try to figure out what are the official home pages whether it be for governments, universities, or states or whatever, and we try to make sure we return those when possible.” “We are mindful of whenever users do a search, and then they complain to us, if they complain that they’re not finding an official homepage for a product, then that’s something that we do take into consideration,” he said. “In general, we do look at the number of links. We look at the content of the page, and if one particular website is able to get a lot of links, because a lot of people thank it’s a great site, then in general, usually it should rank relatively well, and I think that by itself isn’t necessarily a problem.” Looking at this a little bit myself, I did find that a search for my wife’s book, “The Fireman’s Daughter” did return an Amazon result within the first few results (a band with the same name is ranking above it), while the landing page for the book from the actual publisher is buried 5 pages in. There are pros and cons to Amazon outranking this page. She makes more in royalties if the book is purchased directly through the publisher, but on the other hand, the Amazon brand also lends a bit of trust from the user’s perspective, as not as many people will be familiar with the publisher itself (this may be a different story with some more well-known publishers). The question is not just about books though. Looking at it from the perspective of the average online store, the consumer trust factor likely plays a big role in Amazon’s rankings. Remember Google’s list of questions you could use to assess the quality of your site? It included something like “Would you feel comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?”

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Google’s Matt Cutts on Why Amazon Often Ranks Well

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New Google Panda Update Approved, On the Way

Chris Crum — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 20:49:36 +0000

Google’s Matt Cutts spoke in a Q&A session with Danny Sullivan at SMX Advanced this week, and discussed the Panda update, among other things. A lot of sites have been critical of Google for returning results that are scraped versions of their orignal content. Cutts is quoted as saying in a liveblog of the session, “A guy on my team [is] working on that issue. A change has been approved that should help with that issue. We’re continuing to iterate on Panda. The algorithm change originated in search quality, not the web spam team.” He says there’s another change coming soon, and that he still doesn’t know when Panda will be launched fully internationally (in other languages). He also says they haven’t made any manual exceptions with Panda. You may recall that the Mac blog Cult of Mac was hit by the original Panda update, and then after exchanging some dialogue with Google the site ended up getting some new traffic. Matt says, however, “We haven’t made any manual exceptions. Cult of Mac might have been confused because they started getting all this new traffic from blogging about it, but we haven’t made any manual exceptions.” Yesterday we looked at some poll results from Search Engine Roundtable that found 4% of sites were saying they had fully recovered from the Panda update . Some other sites have been finding partial recovery. Image credit: Search Engine Roundtable On the prospect of sites having recovered from the update, Matt is quoted as saying, “The general rule is to push stuff out and then find additional signals to help differentiate on the spectrum. We haven’t done any pushes that would directly pull things back. We have recomputed data that might have impacted some sites. There’s one change that might affect sites and pull things back.” You may also recall Google’s list of questions that webmasters could use to assess the quality of their content. Cutts talked briefly about those questions, saying, “It could help as we recompute data.” He also said that what is being called “Panda 2.2″ has been approved but has not yet been rolled out. “If we think you’re relatively high quality, Panda will have a smaller impact. If you’re expert enough and no one else has the good content, even if you’ve been hit by Panda that page can still rank.” That says a lot about original content.

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New Google Panda Update Approved, On the Way

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The Latest On Panda Straight From Google

Chris Crum — Fri, 27 May 2011 02:58:55 +0000

Google’s Matt Cutts engaged in a live chat with webmasters on YouTube, and had some things to say about the Panda update. Barry Schwartz posted the above video , capturing a Panda-related segment of the chat, in which Cutts discusses the update. “It came from the search quality team,” he says. “It didn’t come from the web spam team, so web spam engineers have been collaborating with search quality folks on it since the initial launch, but it originated from the search quality team, and it’s just an algorithmic change that TENDS to rank lower quality sites lower, which allows higher quality sites to rank higher, so it’s not a penalty, and I talked about how algorithms are re-computed, so there’s been no manual exceptions.” “I don’t expect us to have any manual exceptions to Panda,” he says. “This is something where the signal is computed, and then when the signal is re-computed, if the sites are slightly different, then that can change the sites that are affected, and we’re going to keep iterating.” “So we’ve had Panda version 1 in February and Panda version 2 in April I believe, and…possibly March…and that started to use blocking of sites along with some other signals,” he continues. “And then we’ve had smaller amounts of iterations…” Referring to before the update came about, he says, “We had heard a lot of complaints. We’ve been working on it even before we’d heard a lot of the complaints to try and make sure that lower quality sites were not ranking as highly in Google search results.” He then mentions the list of questions Google released a few weeks ago for content providers to ask themselves about their own content quality. The list, he says, “Helps to step into the Google mindset and how we think about these sorts of things.” In the talk, Cutts mentioned that the update will still roll out internationally in other languages in time, “maybe in the next couple months”. So far, it’s been launched globally, but only in the English language.

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The Latest On Panda Straight From Google

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