Friday, July 18, 2008 at 8:36 AM
During a recent visit to the Mountain View Googleplex, I had the chance to interview Matt Cutts for our German Webmaster Blog. While enjoying the California sunshine we chatted about how to rank in Google, resources for webmasters and Matt's first encounter with spam. As these topics are not only interesting for a German audience, I want to share them with you as well. So watch the video and find out how difficult it can be for the head of webspam engineering to surf the Internet. :)If you speak German you might want to check out the German translation of the interview.
20 comments:
Nice Video Matt. It's really interesting how you bring up the points about User expectation increasing as we go along. I am really interested to see what kinds of data you guys can pull from Friend Connect once it goes fully live and how those metrics might affect SEO.
hello i am administrator of www.axclip.com please help me for this:
i have onlt 15 to 45 vists in 1day from google i hava registered in google and have sitemap in google
whaT I DO? PLEASE HELP ME ANSD SEND YOUR ANSWER ME TO INFO@AXCLIP.COM
I love the comment about small webmasters vs. the larger ones. When at Classmates.com as their SEO Manager I struggled with the red tape in getting projects out the door (took me several months just to get the redirect they had from www.classmates.com to register.classmates.com fixed to resolve to www.classmates.com)
Now being a Sr. Director of Marketing at Smartsheet.com - I think it helps not only that they are smaller, but that I am higher up on the totem pole in that it takes me just days to get projects out the door :o)
Jenn
After seeing Catfish's post I Googled "Friend Connect" and signed up. I was so impressed by the form posting data right to the Google doc spreadsheet I created my own SEO Survey that posts to a Google doc spreadsheet for all to see...
Pretty cool stuff!
You can add to the spreadsheet via the survey at seomarketinggoddess.blogspot.com
Google - you never cease to amaze me!
Jenn
An excellent interview with Matt Cutts, seems like a very informative nice person. We have experienced our first hack on a clients website this week, and Google Webmaster Tools made it straight forward to identify malicious content and have the issue resolved very quickly. Keep up the good work.
Thank you Matt. It's really great work.
What a nice guy Matt Cutts is...lol
I see that I should be hanging around in here a LOT more.
Re Spam, If only you would do something about it. I have made 3 spam reports regarding a site using hidden text. Spam reports submitted, Apr 4th, June 18th and today. It appears the only reason you ignore them is because they have a large spend on Adwords PPC
Great video! I find that when I write posts at my blogger blog, mnanchors.blogspot.com, only certain pages get hits. The main one being pat sajak's salary, the rest seem to be lost. Although I am targeting a specific niche, I would like more visibility.
HapiBlogging to you my friend! Have a nice day!
That was a very informative, and good interview Matt. I appreciated the content about how to improve, and what is expected in the future.
Genius of Despair said...
My Blog is locked for spam blogging -- LET US GO! Blogger we didn't do anything... HOW COULD YOU SHUT US DOWN WITHOUT WARNING for spam blogging...IT IS TWO DAYS AND WE HAVE NEVER MISSED A BLOG BEFORE. We didn't spam blog. You are shutting us down for no cause.
THERE IS NO WHERE TO GO TO GET ANY PEOPLE I HAVE BEEN IN CIRCLES ON YOUR HELP LINE and your group list.
YOU GAVE US LETTERS TO TYPE WHICH I COULDN'T EVEN DISCIPHER...How could you do this without warning us first so we could tell our readers we would be gone for awhile.
LET OUR BLOG GO...WE NEED TO POST WE HAVE A LOCAL ELECTION COMING.
http://eyeonmiami.blogspot.com/
thanks matt
hello , its a nice post
I dont think that Google is that clever with detecting SPAM in their SERP. I've wrote few times about flagrant violation of Google rules and link building strategies.
I could show you all and example: check our this search query(use it with quotes) "free templates website and how to build your own website" you could see 3 websites that are not even connected with website templates ahnd. But an interesting thing that 2d and 3d website's have NOSCRIPT tag where you could see some optimized content and links to http://www.flashmint.com/ and other websites that belongs to FLASHMINT owners. If you will study this case closely (since Google don't show all backlinks index) you would be able to find some sites that has such a script with this link: http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0geu6AYyZpIfqQAEJhXNyoA?p=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.flashmint.com+%22no+7h13ghf88jo%22&y=Search&fr=&ei=UTF-8
And Google dont want to solve this spammy websites problem.
Effect of penalties on rankings.
I am a Webmaster running http://www.globalbidstore.com and I have first hand knowledge on what Google Rules mean.
My advice to all Webmasters is to take the rules seriously because if you don’t, then you will suffer the consequences. I have been through that and I am still suffering from the penalty that was assessed on my site. Unfortunately, I can’t pinpoint exactly what my crime was, but I will give four rules that I may have overlooked. My site used to move between pages 8 and 12 of Google and then in early July 2008, I disappeared from the first 1000 pages using specific keyword searches.
1. Buying Traffic
2. Bulk Uploads/page generation
3. Content Issues – Duplicates
4. Links – Bad Links.
My first confession is that I am guilty of that I bought traffic. The last traffic that I bought was in the month of June 2008.
I used to upload a consistent amount of items on my site – about 300-500 per week. But on the July 4th weekend, I uploaded about 1,100 items in three days. Within 5 days of doing so, I disappeared from the top 15 pages using keyword search. I am still confused about this because the site is an auction site and in an auction, you can literally have 100,000 items in a day, 10,000 the next… I mean its not fixed, if there are several users on the site. So the consistency rule will not apply. I guess Google found out that the 1000 items per week were from one IP address. But then again I get confused as to whether it is wrong for me to upload any number of items from one IP address. I don’t do that any more. If fact, when I login to the site and start uploading items for sale, I literally freeze when I reach 100 items. The reason is that I don’t want to prolong the penalty.
Content issues. I was happy to login to Webmaster central yesterday and tried to figure out some of the content issues my site might have and I found some. I realized I had over 30 different title variations within my site that affected the site. So I immediately logged in to my admin area and deleted all titles and descriptions from my categories SEO feature. You see, in my admin area, I have this feature that allows me to give different titles to different categories to help with the search engines. Before then, I did not know that duplication could be interpreted otherwise. I took the title out immediately.
Lastly, Links. I think every Webmaster knows about bad links and many will avoid these links like the plaque. I am not exactly sure whether the penalty on my site relates any links to my site, but yesterday, I took out all affiliate links from my site. You know, the links from Commission Junction, Share a Sale, etc. The only link I have on my site now is a YouTube Link. I don’t want to take any more chances.
So my advice to Webmasters, please take the rules seriously. If you depend on your site as a source of income, don’t blow it. I can attest to that. I used to get some income from my site before the penalty. I used the income to pay up some debts that I incurred setting up the business and also for advertisements. I even used adwords. That source dried up. I now rely solely on my regular job. Just this month, I was forced to sacrifice $220 for other bills so that I can pay for the server. I don’t know what I will do next month if the penalty is still there. I am just appealing to Google to lift the penalty. This is a tough economic time for everyone. I am not even sure my regular job will be there next month. Just keep watching the news. 27,000 jobs lost this week alone. If I lost the regular job but my site was bringing in money, then I would be safe. That would in turn save the taxpayer money in the form of unemployment income to me.
Please, please. Lift the penalty. I submitted a reconsideration request through the Webmaster tools on 09/12/2008 but they said it will take several weeks for anything to happen. I will never buy traffic, I will watch out on bulk uploads, but I would like matt to clarify whether the bulk upload rule is true. I will stay clear of bad neighborhoods and I will always keep checking on my content to ensure it meets guidelines.
Theophilus Tures.
www.globalbidstore.com
This is a continuation of my comments dated 10/25/2008.
I just reached the end of the rope.
I submitted a request on 09/12/2008 for reconsideration but its now five months down the line and I can't find my site using the keywords "online auction" or "Online auctions". My site is an online auction. Which leaves me wondering whether there is a hand from the established auction websites trying to suppress up-coming auction sites.
I might draw some retaliation from this small note... but what have I got to loose now. One of my creditors has already taken me to court.
At this juncture, I have just concluded that whatever mistake I may have made will never be forgiven. I have strived to stay within the rules since I asked for reconsideration but I am not seeing any forgiveness.
I have just resigned myself to the fact that Global Bid Store - http://www.globalbidstore.com/ will never appear on the first 1,000 pages of google using the above keywords. Maybe some people like me are just doomed never to get a break in life... no matter how hard they try. Or may be I am just paranoid and I suspect someone is suppressing my site.
The only problem is that google does not contact webmasters to tell them what mistakes they may have made and what corrective actions they should take.
So... I don't know what to do next.
Theo Tures.
http://www.globalbidstore.com/
Hi everyone,
Since some time has passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Help Forum.
Thanks and take care,
The Webmaster Central Team
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