Google's Matt Cutts on Canonical Again
17/6/2009 | external link
Matt Cutts is getting in the habit of posting helpful videos along with accompanying slideshows. He has continued this tradition today with one of each on the recently announced Canonical Link element introduced jointly among Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft (Cutts notes that Ask has gotten on board as well).
The video is 20 minutes long, but interesting nonetheless, and is something webmasters should pay attention to. It comes with captions too, and the slides are quite useful.
As Matt mentions, WebProNews conducted an interview with him just as the canonical tag was announced. You can view that here:
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I should point out that WebProNews has a YouTube channel that features videos related to Google's Webmaster Central.
Google's Matt Cutts Talks State of the Index
17/6/2009 | external link
You may recall a little over a month ago Matt Cutts from Google's Search Quality Team talked about Google getting more transparent this year and making his talks from conferences available online so that everyone can easily see what he has to say.
He started then with a video based on his "Preventing Virtual Blight" presentation from the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco from November. He also provided his presentation slides.
Now Cutts has posted a video and slideshow based on his "State of the Index" talk from PubCon Las Vegas a while back. Here are both:
As I said when he posted the first video, a lot of people are going to be appreciative that Cutts is posting his presentations. Quite honestly, most speakers at industry conferences would be wise to follow suit and include their own presentations on their respective sites/blogs.
If the content was good enough for a presentation in front of a live audience, chances are there is enough valuable information in it that it can benefit visitors to your site/blog. And considering the increasing popularity of online video (not to mention the ranking implications) it's a win-win situation.
Canonical Tag Announced: Google's Matt Cutts Interviewed
17/6/2009 | external link
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Eric Schmidt once famously (or infamously, depending on how you look at it) called the Internet a cesspool. Now Google along with search rivals Yahoo and Microsoft are working together to clean up that cesspool to some extent.
Much of this "cesspool" comes from duplicate content, and a tag has now been revealed jointly from the three search engine giants that can give your pages the URL format that they all prefer. This is called the Canonical Tag and looks like this:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish” />
As Google explains (see here for example, and FAQ), you can simply add this tag to specify your preferred version of a URL inside the <head> section of the duplicate content URLs:
http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&category=gummy-candy
http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish&trackingid=1234&sessionid=5678
and the search engines will understand that the duplicates all refer to the canonical URL: http://www.example.com/product.php?item=swedish-fish. Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well.
If you have unanswered questions about the canonical tag, now is the time to ask. Google will be happy to answer them. Yahoo and Microsoft have additional posts about the tag.
Google's Cutts Apologizes For Paid Post Snafu
17/6/2009 | external link
Jaws dropped last week upon the news Google penalized its own Japanese site in Google search results after discovering Google Japan participated in a pay-per-post blogging scheme. WebProNews Video caught up with Google’s anti-spam-team captain, Matt Cutts, who offers his apologies.
“Certainly there were a lot of angry, upset, disappointed people within Google,” Cutts said about the situation, which led to Google Japan dropping from a PageRank 9 to a PageRank 5, the first time Google has ever had to penalize itself for violating its own terms of service.
“Speaking for me personally, I was mortified. I was just very, very upset about it. To the extent I can personally apologize, I do apologize for the fact that this happened.”
More WebProNews Videos
Google Japan hired a Japanese company called Cyberbuzz, who paid bloggers as much as $100 to write about a new search widget. This was a clear violation of Google’s rules, which Google has aggressively and publicly enforced over the past couple of years, much to many directory operators’ chagrins.
“We’re contacting all these bloggers and asking them remove the paid posts,” said Cutts. “We do think that paid posts and those sorts of things are bad because they lead to people writing about things they wouldn’t write about normally. And they can affect search engines in a negative way.”
Cutts pointed a finger directly at the marketing at Google Japan, which issued its own apology last week and, judging from the language, was unaware of Google’s stance against paid posts.
Cutts reiterated Google’s stance on paid links and said the company’s position hadn’t changed. “We thought our position [was] clear, we [didn’t] need to reiterate, and I think part of the message is that maybe we do need to every so often just repeat [why we think paid posts are bad.]”
“This is something where we should have done better,” he said.
Google Won't Remove Pages About You
17/6/2009 | external link
If you've been involved with the web for any significant amount of time, there is a good chance there may be pages up somewhere that you're not thrilled about, but are out of your power to remove. Whether it is a page you made in high school or somebody else talking smack about you, you're concerned about your online reputation (as you should be) and would like to see the page removed from Google's index altogether.
Unfortunately, Google cannot be held responsible for this because as they say on the official help page for "How do I remove content from Google Search Results?" they do not own the Internet. The company says, "In order for information within Google search results to change, the information must first change on the website where it appears."
Google's Matt Cutts posted about this on his own blog after receiving countless emails from people making such requests. He was kind enough to share his response to these emails, which usually goes something like this:
Unfortunately there’s not much I can do. The page you pointed out is not spam, and pretty much the only removals (at least in the U.S., which is what I know about) that we do for legal reasons are if a court orders us. We typically say that if person A doesn’t like a webpage B, only removing page B out of Google’s search results doesn’t do any good because webpage B is still there (e.g. it can be found by going to it directly or through other search engines). In that sense, the presence of that page in Google’s index is just reflecting the fact that the page exists on the wider web.
The best actions for you from our perspective can be one of a couple options. Either contact whoever put up webpage B and convince them to modify or to take the page down. Or if the page is doing something against the law, get a court to agree with you and force webpage B to be removed or changed. We really don’t want to be taking sides in a he-said/she-said dispute, so that’s why we typically say “Get the page fixed, changed, or removed on the web and then Google will update our index with those changes the next time that we crawl that page.” Our policies outside the U.S. might be different; I’m not as familiar with how legal stuff works outside the U.S.
This is pretty much the same thing you get from the official page. "If you can't get the webmaster to do anything, we're really sorry, but our hands are tied without action from the webmaster," is the position stated there. Though Google uses the opportunity to suggest reporting social security or credit card information in results, adult content in results when SafeSearch is on, defamatory content in results, and inappropriate images in video results. So if the content you're trying to get removed falls into any of these categories, there might still be hope for you.
Once people understand that Google can't take responsibility for listings they don't like, they seem (for the most part) to accept the explanation. It's the understanding in the first place that is often lacking. Hopefully Matt's comments will set the record straight.
Ultimately this leaves you no choice but to amp up your reputation management efforts. Go to the root of the problem. Make nice with people if you have to. It won't always work, but just like with the rest of life, sometimes you have to live with past mistakes and acceptance that someone might not like you.
>>> Should Google remove pages upon request?
... Discuss what Google should or should not be doing with other WebProNews readers below...
Bloggers Battle Over Sponsored Conversations
17/6/2009 | external link
A Forrester report released yesterday kicked off once again the debate over paying bloggers to write about products and companies. Blogging purists, new media marketing experts, and Google’s Matt Cutts have all weighed in, indicating this is hardly a debate that will soon be put to rest.
Sean Corcoran
Forrester’s report is eight pages and $750 worth of “Why You Should Pay Bloggers To Talk About Your Brand,” filed under a less ominous sounding phrase “sponsored conversations.” Sean Corcoran sums up his expensive treatise this way:
Kmart gave some bloggers a free shopping spree in exchange for a blog post about the experience — a practice we call sponsored conversation. With appropriate protections for disclosure and authenticity, this practice will take its place alongside public relations and advertising activities in the blogosphere. Marketers should take advantage of sponsored conversation as an entrée into the online conversation.
Chris Brogan
The Kmart example recalls a controversial post from new media marketing guru Chris Brogan, who accepted a $500 shopping spree in exchange for blogging about his experience. Brogan disclosed the sponsorship at the top of the resulting post. Charges were flung immediately about how his participation damaged his overall blogger credibility and authenticity. After a long rebuttal where he is an admitted PayPerPost convert and former stone-thrower himself, Brogan gave critics permission to read someone else.
“I’m here to share insights and give you actionable strategy,” wrote Brogan. “I’m going to explore even more ways that bloggers and media makers can make money in 2009.”
Marshall Kirkpatrick
ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick posted a respectful disagreement with the Forrester report, saying that, “paying bloggers to write about your company is a dangerous and unsavory path for new media and advertisers to go down.” And later, “Blogging is a beautiful thing. The prospect of this young media being overrun with ‘pay for play’ pseudo-shilling is not an attractive one to us.”
Kirkpatrick splits a few hairs in his post, especially regarding whether it is acceptable to allow event sponsors to pay for travel to an event, which ReadWriteWeb has accepted in the past. Such a declaration in rebuttal to the concept of sponsored content is an interesting tack, and makes one wonder how wide the gray area really is.
Jeremiah Owyang
Forrester senior analyst Jeremiah Owyang defends his company’s report, reiterating the importance of transparency and blogger authenticity. “Blogger authenticity means that the blogger should have complete freedom to write in their own voice – even if the content they write about the brand is negative.”
Of course, that stubborn devotion to authenticity could mean the blogger doesn’t get another shot at sponsored conversation money, which sets up a mean Catch 22, one that has existed in media since there has been media.
Brogan returns slamming “the righteous web” and inherent hypocrisy involved in compensated blogging, via AdWords or otherwise. Meanwhile Google’s Matt Cutts draws the line in the search index sand. You might remember Google penalized itself for sponsored conversations recently, and Cutts tears down Forrester’s Kmart example:
"Google found multiple bloggers that violated our quality guidelines and we took corresponding action. Those blogs are not trusted in Google’s algorithms any more."
Cutts once again calls for sponsorship disclosure and paid links that do not pass PageRank.
The resurgence of this conversation is interesting especially because of its odd timing.
Paul Harvey 1918-2009
Paul Harvey died over the weekend, a radio icon said to be older than commercial radio itself. Harvey’s news commentary was always interspersed with sponsored updates so well delivered it was difficult to distinguish where the news stopped and the commercial began—something we generally considered charming, the rest of the story right after Harvey tried to sell you something for your aching joints.
This tension between advertisers and content producers has always existed. Some producers handle it well, others don’t. Some content consumers handle it well, and others don’t. It’s hard to imagine a real justification for changing a model of content delivery that has existed and thrived for at least a century—newspapers currently notwithstanding. Media and advertising depend on one another.
There are abuses on all sides. Advertisers try to exert control over content; consumers try to exert control over advertisers so that they’ll exert control over content; governments try to exert control over content; now search engines try to exert control over content.
There is so much interest in controlling content, the only moral approach to it is to let content producers control their own content at their own risk. Certainly competing content producers will be more than happy to point out their rivals aren’t on the up and up, and if producers are found to be inauthentic or labeled as a marketing channel for a specific brands, consumers can turn the dial, load another webpage, flip the channel in response if they wish. The purists will form their righteous, purism clubs and search engines will go about their usual tasks of sorting it all out.
But are sponsored conversations, paid posts, ad columns, breaks before the rest of the story all wrong? Good luck making that argument stick, and good luck funding good content.
Google On Limiting Links
17/6/2009 | external link
As you may or may not be aware, Google recommends keeping the number of links on any given page to under 100. This recommendation can be found among Google's webmaster guidelines under the Design and Content Guidelines section.
Google's Matt Cutts took the opportunity to explain the reasoning behind this suggestion. He says that originally Google would only index 100kb of a page, and pages with larger amounts of links ran a higher risk of not being indexed entirely.
Google will now however index more than 100kb, but the recommendation remains, and the reason is user experience. The general thinking as Cutts presents it is that users don't like pages with a lot of links.
He says that in some cases it makes sense to have over a hundred links. Don't worry, Google does not automatically consider that spam. Still, he notes that such pages can be spammy, "especially if the links are hidden or keyword-stuffed."
Sidenote: While on the topic of linking, there is another interesting story about linking practices being threatened in this exclusive discussion between legal experts:
More WebProNews Videos
"If you end up with hundreds of links on a page, Google might choose not to follow or to index all those links," explains Cutts." At any rate, you’re dividing the PageRank of that page between hundreds of links, so each link is only going to pass along a minuscule amount of PageRank anyway. Users often dislike link-heavy pages too, so before you go overboard putting a ton of links on a page, ask yourself what the purpose of the page is and whether it works well for the user experience."
To me, it's going to come down to personal judgment. Use links where they make sense and you'll probably be fine on the user experience level. Linking for linking's sake is probably where might start turning people off.
Google Launching Friend Connect API
17/6/2009 | external link
At PubCon Matt Cutts just announced the launch of the Google Friend Connect API. It let's you copy javascript and make your blog more social.
Editor's note: How do you think the launch of the Google Friend Connect API will affect data portability? Share your thoughts. WebProNews anchor Abby Jonnson spoke with Cutts at the conference:
More WebProNews Videos
The key point to acknowledge here is that Google is encouraging people to create more plug-ins for it, and it will be available through WordPress, Drupal, and phpbb plugins making it accessible to a whole lot of the web.
Google Friend Connect will be easily usable with not only blogs, but forums and content management systems. It's completely open and built on open social.
Out of this, publishers can get:
- more user participation
- More comments and higher -quality comments, less spam
- More interactions: questions, answers, votes
- flexibility - widgets, etc.
This is an important step for data portability. We have not seen Google Friend Connect truly take off yet like it could, and this might get it pushed in that direction.
Cutts says it's not perfect yet, and it's not live yet, but it will be in an hour or two. More on this as we find out...
Update:
Google has posted to the official Social Web Blog now with more.
Product Manager Mussie Shore writes:
Whether you're a site owner or developer, the new Friend Connect APIs offer something for anyone who is interested in helping the web become more social:
Site owners - Integrate Friend Connect more deeply into your site. JavaScript APIs allow you to integrate a social community directly within the markup of your page, and our REST APIs allow you integrate existing login systems and your existing data with new social data and activities. These are your visitors and this is your site, so you should be able to add social features the way you want.
Plugin developers - Make plugins to integrate with popular content management systems, bulletin boards, or any open framework. To get you started, we have created open source plugin samples for WordPress, Drupal, and phpBB.
Gadget developers - Make OpenSocial applications with greater control over how data flows across servers with signed requests. Use server-side authentication mechanisms so that a site with Friend Connect can act as an OpenSocial container.
Update 2: WebProNews reporter Abby Johnson spoke to Matt Cutts about the API launch who basically just said it provides deeper integration. The plugins are new and developed by his team. Once users sign in they don't have to sign into each site and are able to copy that info in other places.
A few other tidbits coming from the Q&A with Matt Cutts:
- Twitter followers will not help your page rank
- Does CTR or other behavioral metrics on SERPS affect ranking? It would be really spammy and noisy.
- Cutts says he can't promise Google would never use its wiki results...
Abby Johnson conributed to this report.
>>> What are your thoughts on this breaking news/? Comment here.
Let us know what you think about the Google Friend Connect API.
Create Trust, Reduce Spam with Google Friend Connect API
17/6/2009 | external link
Yesterday, at PubCon South, Matt Cutts talked about Google Launching the Google Friend Connect API. Shortly after WebProNews broke this story, Cutts sat down with our own Abby Johnson for an exclusive interview in which he discussed the API launch in a litle more detail. You can see that interview here (Share Your Thoughts on the video):
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Cutts says the API can awaken the social stuff going on on your site. Before, Google Friend Connect wasn't directly integrated with your site, but now, with the API, Google is strongly encouraging developers to write new plug-ins based upon it. The API allows them to do with javascript or serverside stuff.
Users will be able to come to your site and sign in with:
- a google account
- a yahoo account
- open ID
- AIM
Then they can leave comments for example, without having to fill out a bunch of personal information, and they can participate in a forum, etc. He says you can do all kinds of social stuff with it. "The sky is the limit as far as what plug-ins you want to write," he exclaims.
So far, Matt's team has written Wordpress, Drupal, and phpbb plug-ins. He hints at other possibilities like plugins for vbulletin, and sites that can vote things up and down like digg. The plug-ins are open source, you can download them right now, and they're completely free.
He acknowledges that there will be some rough edges, but since its open source, people are free to download plug-ins and make them better. People are probably already improving upon the initial three plug-ins mentioned above.
Google is really encouraging people to take the API and run with it. Cutts says it's really easy to deal with and can be applied to all kinds of content management systems.
Cutts says that by adding these social elements to your site you won't get nearly as much spam. "If you can get a little more trust...a little more identity on the web, that's gonna be good for the web," says Cutts.
Google's Matt Cutts Answers Link: Operator Questions
17/6/2009 | external link
Google's Matt Cutts has posted a video in which he responds to user questions regarding Google's [link:] search operator. He answers the following two questions:
- How accurate is Google's backlink-check (link:...)? Are all nofollow backlinks filtered out or why does Yahoo/MSN show quite more backlink results?
- If you have inbound links from reputable sites, but those sites don't show up in a link:webname.com search, does this mean you aren't getting any "credit" in Google's eyes for having inbound links?
The video comes from Google Webmaster Central's YouTube channel, which is full of useful videos for webmasters. The channel has videos not only from Cutts, but from other knowledgeable Googlers as well. Cutts himself has been posting informative videos on his own in an effort to bring his presentations from various conferences to the audience at home.
Matt Cutts Provides Another Chrome Market Share Update
17/6/2009 | external link
Although it's possible to quibble over percentage points, Google Chrome appears to be moving in a positive direction. Matt Cutts gathered together statistics from several sources, and all of them indicate that Google's seven-month-old browser is gaining market share.
Let's start with the most optimistic estimate. According to Google Analytics, 7.04 percent of the visitors to Cutts's own blog (during the last 30 days) used Chrome. That equates to about one out of every 14 people, which is pretty impressive.
Next, there's the data that Clicky Web Analytics had to share. Cutts wrote, "Clicky says that in the last 60 days, Chrome has gone from 2.099% to 2.479%."
Cutts also stated, "StatCounter says that Chrome topped 2% recently," and noted that "more people using Firefox and Chrome over the weekends." This might mean Chrome's gaining genuine play-with-it-at-home fans even if it isn't present in the average workplace.
Finally, Cutts wrote, "Net Applications says that Chrome went from 1.15% to 1.23% in the last ~30 days." Which lands us fairly well on the opposite side of the usage scale, with just one out of every 81 or so people using Chrome.
Still, Google's no doubt happy to see all these numbers heading up.
Matt Cutts on Google Spelling Corrections
17/6/2009 | external link
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.
Matt Cutts on Social Media Links in Google
17/6/2009 | external link
Google's Matt Cutts has really been taking the bull by the horns when it comes to reaching out to the community. He's posted another answer to a user question (yesterday we looked at his response to one about Google's spell corrections) via YouTube video.
This time the question strikes a pretty timely and relevant topic that WebProNews has discussed a few times in recent memory. That is the relationship between social media and SEO/link building. The question Matt tackles is:
Has Google Changed the relevancy it awards to social media sites in the last six months?
Matt implies that Google doesn't look at it like social network links are different from any other links. "We tend to think about links, and whether they're useful," he says. No surprise there. Why should a link get any more or less weight just because it's social?
Matt does say that he was in a meeting where they were talking about a change that does "slightly different weihgting" for how they do some types of links and anchors and that could have an effect on social media sites, but that was not the intent of the change.
So when it comes to the question at hand, he basically says yes, they've probably changed the way social sites are weighted, but not for the reason that they are social media sites. "It hasn't been....'oh let's change how we think about social media sites,'" he says.
It's all about the user experience, and that shouldn't come as a shock. Matt says Google's open to doing what they need to do in this area. More on the relationship between social media and SEO.
Matt Cutts Answers Canonicalization Tag Question
17/6/2009 | external link
Google's Matt Cutts continues to post helpful videos at Google's Webmaster Central YouTube channel, in which he answers user questions. The latest question he tackles comes from a guy in Chicago who asks:
Does the new canonicalization tag make it safe to add tracking arguments to some of my internal links without fear that Google will split the quality signals between the two addresses?
Matt says, "I believe you can do this," but he recommends trying it out on one directory or a small set of URLs at first to make sure it's completely safe. If you can do something with cookies or your analytics package, Matt says that would be better because as he explains, "Suppose someone copies and pastes a URL...they might copy and paste it differently...and maybe that URL goes away or the tracking code changes...so if you can make the URLs unified. That's still better, but I believe this sort of thing can still work totally fine with the new canonicalization tag."
Basically, Matt just wants you to be cautious and make sure it works for you to avoid any issues.
If the Canonicalization tag is something you're not familiar with, it's something that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announced jointly a while back in an effort to reduce duplicate content. Matt discussed it with WebProNews upon its launch:
More WebProNews Videos
Matt has also elaborated on the tag in a longer video and slideshow:
Matt is frequently posting informative videos to YouTube, which can generally be found here. He is also posting longer ones with presentations from conferences on his blog. These are both good resources for webmasters to bookmark.
Google Referral Change Linked to Faster Search Results Experiment
17/6/2009 | external link
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.
Matt Cutts on Google Announcement Timing
17/6/2009 | external link
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?
Matt Cutts on Overlooked Items from Searchology
17/6/2009 | external link
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's Matt Cutts Has Some Words with Bing
17/6/2009 | external link
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.
Cutts Explains How Blogs Can Rank Higher In Google
17/6/2009 | external link
If you want your blog to do better in Google’s search results, Matt Cutts recommends WordPress. According to a presentation Google’s Webspam captain gave at WordCamp San Francisco, Word Press takes care of about 80-90 percent of SEO mechanics.
The presentation, which spans 50 pages, is available at Cutts’ blog in Google Docs or PowerPoint. Other than how WordPress helps automatically, Cutts gave tips about how to get a blog to rank better in Google. The two biggest ones are be relevant and be reputable.
Being Relevant
Some of this is voodoo and some of this technical, obviously. The big questions are necessary, equivalent to who am I? Why am I here? Cutts recommends asking yourself: “What do I love?” “What am I really good at doing?” What do I have to say?”
Once you’ve answered those questions and commit to exploring them via bloggery, there are some technical things for gaining relevance, like keyword relevance. Choose words users are likely to type, and include them naturally in blog posts. For example, a blogger can use name variations referring to the same device: usb drive, thumb drive, flash drive, pen drive.” Cutts recommends ALT attributes.
Also consider URL structure. WordPress default URL structure uses question marks and numbers, instead of day and name, month name, etc.. Cutts says these types of URLs improve aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility. For URL paths with keywords in them, Cutts says dashes (hyphens) are preferred over underscores to separate words, but no spaces between words is a bad idea (example.com/my-keywords).
Don’t overdo keywords in the text. Make sure they flow naturally. Otherwise, Google could bust you for keyword stuffing.
Being Reputable
Cutts recommends the following to boost a blogger’s reputation:
Be interesting
Update often
Find your niche
Provide a useful service
Do original research or reporting
Give great information
Live blog
Make lists
Create controversy
Meet people on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed
Other Useful Information
Google crawls in decreasing order of PageRank, which means if a site has a low PageRank, it will be crawled last, behind sites with higher ranking.
Cutts’ simplified definition of PageRank is “the number and importance of links pointing to a site.”
Cutts also recommends plug-ins he uses for his blog, which include Akismet (a comment spam catcher), Cookies for Comments (another comment spam catcher), Enforce www. Preference (301 redirects to no-www or yes-www preference for link building), Feedburner Feedsmith (for tracking subscribers), and WP Super Cache (for fast caching).
How to Avoid Google Penalties with AJAX and display:none
17/6/2009 | external link
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.
Google Talks About the Links-for-Money Spectrum
17/6/2009 | external link
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
Duplicate Content Not An Everyday Problem
17/6/2009 | external link
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.
Google 'Evaporating' Excess PageRank
17/6/2009 | external link
PageRank sculpting is a pretty advanced SEO tactic, and it has been widely used by SEO pros since Google’s Matt Cutts described its use on YouTube, giving the strategy the official green light. At SMX Advanced in Seattle, the same harbinger of Google insider information offered a stunning revelation: Google changed the way it handled link structures intended for sculpting.
Coverage of SMX Advanced continues at WebProNews Videos. Stay with WebProNews for more updates and videos from the event this week.
An Explanation of PageRank Sculpting (If you know already, skip to next heading.)
PageRank sculpting works for sites that already have a high PageRank and, as a result, have a lot of “juice” to pass around. Webmasters looking to have more control over which pages appear in Google’s search results would thus harness the trust (juice) Google gave their site to boost certain pages they consider important while blocking other unimportant or less useful pages.
For example, a webmaster may find that a sign-in page or contact page appears in the search results but a page more useful to the end user digging around the Net doesn’t, perhaps because the Googlebot hasn't been able to locate it. The webmaster could help “sculpt” different pages’ rankings by adding a nofollow tag on links pointing to unimportant pages while linking to preferred pages.
In this sense, PageRank was seen as a finite amount of energy to divvy up among a certain number of pages. If you have 10 liters of PageRank juice to distribute, you could deprive one page of receiving any juice and evenly divide the rest among pages needing a boost. With six links, one is nofollowed, the rest normal, giving the Googlebot directions on where to crawl while passing on two liters of juice per page.
Google cleared this practice in 2007 by using it with YouTube. The video site links to random videos from the homepage, and as such, when the Googlebot came by, it would pass on the tremendous amount of juice YouTube carried to those random videos. Google used PageRank sculpting to keep it fair and prevent favoritism of certain videos in the search results.
That Was Then, This Is Now
Matt Cutts
Using the 10 liters of juice model, if a webmaster had ten links, blocks five, then five got two liters and five got none. If the webmaster unblocked five, then the juice was evenly redistributed. It also worked in reverse. If a webmaster had distributed the juice among the ten but decided to dam up five, then the juice would evenly redistribute two liters to the preferred five pages.
But, according to Matt Cutts, in a Q&A moderated by Danny Sullivan at SMX Advanced, that’s all changed. Now, if the webmaster dams up five, that half still receives nothing, but the remaining half remains at one liter each instead of being boosted up to two liters.
Now, instead of having a certain amount juice to distribute as a webmaster likes, Google allows only that select pages be deprived of juice. And where does that all that excess PageRank juice go? “You can almost think of it as just evaporating,” said Cutts, and one imagines the number of stomachs turning over at that moment.
It’s important to note that Cutts said Google would not penalize a site for PageRank sculpting, but Cutts did suggest the practice wasn’t a great use of a webmaster’s time unless using nofollow for sign-in pages, RSS subscribe links, et cetera.
Highlights From the Cutts Q&A Regarding PageRank Sculpting
Cutts on penalties
It's not gonna get you a penalty. You're not gonna get in trouble or anything. We're not gonna say "oh all of these internal links are nofollowed" or anything like that. However, it's not as effective, so it's definitely a better use of your time to go and make new content.
Cutts on sculpting
If you're using nofollow to change how PageRank flows around within your site, it's almost like a band-aid. It's better to make your site the way you want PageRank to flow from the beginning, and then it's good for users, and it's good for search engines.
So how you choose to link within your site is your own business, and I would tell people you can try to sculpt PageRank, but it's not gonna be as useful. So I would urge people to make new content or think about how to link within your site. Put your best products right up on your root page, and things like that. And that's gonna be a much better way to "sculpt" PageRank than using nofollow.
Cutts on site architecture
What we've been saying from the beginning is don't spend as much of your time on the PR sculpting aspect of it. Spend your time making good site architecture so that PageRank just flows wherever you want. That's why we've been saying use it sparingly. Don’t use it for links you can't vouch for. Don’t use it for user-generated content that you don't necessarily trust. And this is all up on the HTML documentation page made for rel="nofollow”.
Cutts on nofollow use:
If you are a power user and there's a specific page you don't want like a sign up page or a login page, that's a fine way to use nofollow.
For example if you look at mattcutts.com, the only thing I have nofollow on (I believe) is my subscribe link and that's because it goes to an RSS feed, which is really not all that useful for the main web index. So for me personally, I tend not to use nofollow on my own internal links
Chris Crum provided some notes for this article.
How Google Handles Google Bowling
17/6/2009 | external link
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.
Matt Cutts Opens Up About Google Penalties
17/6/2009 | external link
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.
Was Microsoft's Bingathon a Success?
17/6/2009 | external link
Last night Hulu ran the live telethon style infomercial for Bing called the "Bingathon".
So how did it perform?
Well, it appears nothing "official" has been released yet. So let's see what some Twitter users (a co-host, industry professionals and everyday users) are saying about the Bingathon.
Did any of you watch the Bingathon? If so, what did you think about it? Tell us.
Olivia Munn, co-host of the live event with Jason Sudeikis, tweeted the following...
This shouldn't come as any shock that Microsoft is claiming an early victory. Think about it, what is the real measurement for success here? What other live telethon launch of a search engine is there for comparison?
Some of the search industries biggest names threw in their two cents about the Bingathon via Twitter...
So we've heard what a co-host had to say as well as people in the industry, but what does the everyday user have to say about the Bingathon?
Some Tweeters loathed the event...
...while some Twitterers were just happy for the 24 hour commercial free Hulu, provided by Bing.
Scanning through my #Bingathon search on Twitter I did notice that the overall feeling of the Bingathon wasn't very positive. With that said I was able to find a few Tweets of people who seemed to enjoy the event...
It's really hard to say for sure if the Bingathon was a success, but it did manage to get people talking... even though the talk wasn't 100% positive. So was this one of those "any press is good press" moments?
Does Google Recognize the Name of Your Business?
17/6/2009 | external link
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.
Do You Think Google Favors Big Brands?
17/6/2009 | external link
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.
Google's No-Follow Changes Explained
17/6/2009 | external link
Last Tuesday, we discussed the idea of Google potentially making some changes to PageRank and it’s relationship to no-follow - particularly in the context of PageRank sculpting.
As a quick refresher, PageRank sculpting is the practice whereby you add no-follow attributes to less important links in order to emphasize links you deem more important. We used an analogy of a bucket withe holes in it. The holes represented your outbound links. Your website’s PageRank (link juice) flowed thru the holes. The fewer holes you had, higher the percentage of your link juice went thru the remaining holes (links). That's PageRank Sculpting in a nutshell. Dividing your link authority by a smaller number of links in order to maximize the authority you pass on.
At the end of our article, we mentioned that no official word on how Google was going to change the dynamic between no-follow and PageRank, but as of last night, we now know a little more. Matt Cutts made a post on his blog about the way Google has decided to deal with the issue. The biggest surprise in the post was actually Matt’s claim that this change went into effect “over a year ago” but nobody noticed.
Beyond that, Matt’s explanation of PR Sculpting fit pretty nicely into our analogy. Matt said “nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page”. Which basically means, if you plugged some of the holes in your bucket, the remaining holes received a higher percentage of your link authority. This statement is also significant because it pretty much (by definition) says unequivocally that Pagerank sculpting ‘worked’ conceptually at least. But that’s ‘worked’ with an emphasis on the past tense.
The change Google implemented ‘over a year ago’ according to Cutts. Made Google count the outbound links regardless of the no-follow attribute. To paraphrase Matt in his post, if you have 10 PageRank points on a page with 10 outbound links and you put no-follow on 5 of the links, each of your 5 remaining links would pass just 1 point of PageRank now. Prior to the change, each of your 5 links without no-follow would pass 2 points apiece. Now, your PR passing ability is spread out or divided by all of your links - regardless of their no-follow status.
Matt does a pretty good job of anticipating several questions that will doubtlessly arise from his post. I’ll Highlight a couple of the more important points below, but would also urge you to go check out the real thing (like you haven’t already...)
Whenever you are linking within your site, don’t use no-follow?
Q: Since PR is divided amongst outbound links, no-follow or not, should I turn off comments on my blog? ?“A: I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.”?
So, there you go. The debate that arose during SMX Advanced as to whether or not Google was changing how they handled no-follow in terms of PR sculpting has now been answered. The big surprise in all of this is that they apparently changed it all a while back, but at the end of the day it was pretty much the change we were anticipating anyway. Namely, no-follow links do not pass PR, no-follow links do not pass anchor text value, but no-follow links DO count toward your total of outbound links.
The obvious question this creates I suppose then is: why, then, should we no-follow anything?
Hear What Matt Cutts and Carol Bartz Have to Say
17/6/2009 | external link
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).
