Episode 34: Matt Cutts keynote at SMX Advanced Seattle 2014

welcome to om report by andrei alpa your interview focus podcast on topics from online marketing to internet startups welcome to the matt cutts ama so uh for folks who haven't seen it last year we tried making a video that said what to expect from google seo in this coming summer a few people might have seen it and one of the things that i talked about was uh what came to be known as a payday loan update yes uh that handles really

really spammy queries so i just wanted to let people know that um the second part of the next iteration of that algorithm will be launching pretty soon normally we don't talk about future dates but but you just launched it no that it's uh it's a it's another aspect to it is going to be launching um probably later this week maybe as soon as tomorrow so we'll see whether that um when you say another aspect what do you mean an aspect of it

uh like the payday loan you know just call it what you want call it give it whatever number you want but the next uh uh part of the algorithm will launch probably tomorrow if all the binaries go out to the data centers correctly but how is that different from the thing you rolled out two weeks ago uh they tackle different things so you know you can look at spammy queries or you can look at spammy sites

and so there's different aspects oh what were you doing before spammy sites spammy sites so you found the spammiest of the spammiest payday was sort of like yeah alert alert yeah yeah and now we're looking more at the spammy queries what sort of queries should we look at to see who's going to be saddest the most from this well the queries that are likely to be the spammiest right you know like payday loans casinos debt consolidation

you know those sorts of things you know in theory it could affect uh sites that are doing counterfeit kind of things although that wasn't a specific intent so we'll see we'll see how people uh like it when it rolls out speaking of better notifications with webmasters and better uh process there we've been having a lot of engineers working on reconsideration requests and trying to figure out how to do that better it certainly takes a lot of time

to handle linking reconsideration requests and all that sort of thing some of the experiments we tried one in particular was we had kind of an appeals process where uh if you submitted reconsideration request and it was denied and you submitted a reconsideration request again then we might select you for higher touch processing which means we would actually correspond with you and give you examples and sort of talk you through what was going wrong on the reconsideration request process

i feel like it's somebody coming in for landing on an aircraft carrier okay pull back on the stick you're too low goose yeah no um so so we uh so that process worked well but we you know we were only doing that for some sites and so what we're starting to do is we're building into our templates for the reconsideration requests and open text area such that if there's a webspam analyst and they're looking at a reconsideration request

and they want to just drop a note to the site it's like no not here here look here these are the spammy links or or you know here's what you're getting wrong or or here's what you're mistaken about and i think we're going to use that that functionality today there's a very large site that did a reconsideration request which what side is that uh i probably shouldn't go into which side it is all right you you've heard it we won't tell

anybody yeah no one tweet right um yeah the wi-fi will will stay up wi-fi is totally off so you're that's true the cone of silence here uh so so that site will be getting a rejection of the reconsideration request but we're going to take advantage of that functionality to say look here are some examples of sort of the duplicate content or the examples of overlap that you guys should so you would but you were already sending out examples well we were

sending out categories and then for links we would sometimes send out examples of links but now any time we we reject a reconsideration request the webspam analyst has an option to fill in more information there now a lot of times it's cut and dry black and white there's not much need to do that update filter adjustment or whatever you guys want to call it may have impacted your rankings yeah no that's a that's fair feedback uh

what happened on that update is uh the payday stuff mostly went out over the weekend and uh the the panda stuff was scheduled to go out on like tuesday or wednesday and we had an interesting indexing situation where sometimes the documents uh pile up a little bit because you realize you have to reindex them for one reason or another normally we do like to spread those out in time so that people can have a clear idea of what

right at what time uh in this particular case it didn't work out that way they wouldn't need to be spread out if you could just you know go into your dashboard and say yeah you you've been you you've been impacted by payment well so usually when we show things in webmaster tools what we want is to show notifications that are actionable so someone can like very clearly do something about them whereas with panda it's here's the blog post you know it's a

longer term thing it's not like a manual action it's a little bit harder and the other thing is there's over 500 different algorithms now it's fair feedback that maybe we should think about whether to include that for panda or penguin if you haven't paid attention to webmaster tools for a little while you might want to circle back around to it uh we have done fetch and render as googlebot which is indicative of the fact that we

can actually execute javascript and ajax and all that sort of stuff now so you can see a thumbnail of what googlebot actually looks like to google you know for your site so for my site for example i had blocked the css and it looked like a pretty text heavy page you couldn't see the design at all and it really does help if you unblock your javascript in your css so you guys really are trying to make

fetch happen yes we are trying to make fetch happen and if you don't unblock your javascript in css then you might miss out because we are getting better and better at page understanding and if we aren't able to understand your page then you might not get all the full credit that you deserve oh my god you mean stuff i have hidden in my javascript if you can't read it no no if the page look like for example it

would be helpful to determine the main content of the page and if we can't do that as easily because you have everything blocked and we can't crawl the whole site then then we might not be able to give you that the prominence that it deserves but that's just a tiny little bit of the stuff that's coming with webmaster tools over the course of the next few months i would expect more and better help with robots.txt testing

i'm really excited about the idea that you could do easier online testing and and that will be a lot more interactive we've already done better documentation for site moves and i think that we are going to continue to explore how we can make site moves work better for site owners which i think will be helpful and especially with nominet you know the uk registry is opening up not yes well you know we always have to deal

with duplicate content that's like our cross to bear but uh but i think we're going to introduce some new tools to help with that okay uh i would also expect things like better reports about href lang so that people can see it turns out a lot of people get that sort of stuff wrong when you're trying to mark up this is the german version of my site this is the french version and show this for these languages a lot of

people get that syntax incorrect and so if you uh if you show some better reports that'll help and then over time as we do more app indexing i think if we could show error reporting that would be really really helpful so keep your eyes on webmaster tools i know everybody in this audience probably uses it but let other people know you know it makes sense to circlebar why can't they just disavow the links and i can stay out of

the whole thing it's a fair question but uh if they could just disavow the links and you would stay out of the whole thing then somebody could spam get caught immediately just do a disavow they could keep a list of all the spam links they were building them and then just do a disavow overnight and hope to get out of the the penalty box immediately and that's really not fair to the other people who are trying to compete on a

level playing field so i take the point that you know maybe the pendulum has swung too far on the link walk of shame in terms of uh the amount of work that they have to do ends up creating some work or stress for real publishers you know the meta filters of the world or you or i've been known to get a link removal request which is hilarious i love it yeah um i did take it down by

the way because they were very nice and polite you know um while you're at it i just noticed that you seem to write a lot about google do you know anybody over there that could maybe just get me out of the penalty yeah right so um but it is tricky because we do want to make sure that all the people who have been trying to do things the right way the honest way the white hat way

aren't put at a disadvantage by the people who are just gonna spam and jam turn and burn do a black hat thing and then immediately try to disavow it when they get caught so that's the tension there and we're open to feedback on how to make that better for everybody while still hard for the people who've been trying to cheat um remember when you said we were gonna get um like all of our keyword data for a whole

year in webmaster tools nearly a year ago i think i remember that you have an announcement on there i don't folks are still working on that all right but i i saw a tweet earlier today that was like set a calendar reminder every 90 days you know to download the links yeah it's not ideal i know but i don't know you still can get the data i'm not even going there i'm not even here all right

i already went there hey um or just you know give us the data forever because you guys have all the machines you can drive you can drive a car automatically to the moon you can store our data forever storing all our other data it's just a few few keyword terms not like you got rid of them all right i will pass but okay let's just let sergey know earlier this year you declared that guest blogging for lynx was dead

um and then this week i got some major brand being reported as uh blogging for links so did they not get the memo is that i mean you will be shocked to learn some companies take a while to get the memo about spammy behavior but it sometimes it takes a while for people to get the message all right so see we take action we're willing to take action i mean there's been a large number of companies

in a large number of blog networks that we've taken action on so at this point it would be easier google told us what links were okay rather than what's not to call them or dear google should we just no follow everything type of thing so is is link building just dead at this point is that are you basically saying people should not even try to proactively gain links no link building is not dead i i think

there's a very interesting bubble around this room link building's not dead yes you're telegraphing it so uh i i think the people in this room have a very different view of the web than like a lot of average regular people so a lot of people in this room are like ah links are so hard to come by and they're all no followed and the fact is uh like a very small percentage of links on the web are actually no followed

and and so if you look at the overall mass that's that's not the way that the actual web works um so i think that there's a lot of mileage left in links and i've said that before and i still continue to believe that well i'm not saying that there's not mileage in links i'm talking about the obtaining of links well there was an interesting so dwayne forrester from bing did an interesting post which uh some found controversial or what's

that being yes yeah it's a it's a perfectly fine search engine being a perfectly fine search engine yeah it's completely adequate um so so dwayne wrote an interesting post that some people found controversial but i thought it was interesting which basically said if you know the source of where your links are coming from you're on the wrong path now that's going a little bit far like it's it's taking it a little bit to the extreme but uh but it's also the case that if

you do enough excellent interesting useful funny compelling stuff usually your reputation or your links however you want to think of it takes care of itself because you know somebody wrote to me on twitter today and they're like what's your link building strategy mat and i was like i post useful things and that's that's my link building strategy and and there's a lot of different variants of that you know there's all kinds of ways to add value

to the web you can be the person who does good analysis you can do the person who writes interesting research the person who takes data and slices it and dices it and visualizes it in a way that no one's ever seen before you can have a perspective that no one else is able to really replace you know think about the walt mossbergs of the world you know and you can't become walt mossberg overnight but you can build up to it you can build

up to it in smaller niches and then build up your topic area more and more and more until people know that you're the person to go to for reviews of this product or this area and over and over again and i think this is true for pretty much everybody in the audience it's easier to be real than to fake being real the the era of shortcuts that would guarantee number one rankings is is quickly coming to an end and at this

point it's easier to just have those authentic conversations and do the work and get to be known the honest way because that's what stands the test of time and i and i think the content like at buzzfeed the look at these pictures of how dinosaurs had sex that is linkable quality uh you did a video saying about assessing a page without links could you really work because you kind of basically said it's really hard that you really need things a lot to do

no no he did it no in the old days search engines didn't have links and they worked pretty well you'd get you know 20 porn in alta vista but yeah 80 of the time it worked every time um would it work now um could you go completely off links cold turkey it would be well the context for that video was can you how do you score without links are there other things to look at and there's a lot of other

things if you were trying to do the full-fledged operation so assessing the quality and the topicality and the reputation without links entirely that would be that would be tricky that would be hard um what's going on with authoring you've been using it for in-depth articles we have anything else let's try come on i can't i can't get into the secret sauce that much what's this so do you say yes or no what's the secret sauce it's how secret is that yes now if you

were deemed an authoritative author that might help you rank a little bit better oh my god the world come to an end they made it run for shelter i've said before i think the long term trend is that we will use that data more but uh as far as the specific instances i probably can't get into you can't say if it's being used in regular web search because eric's all like authoring's coming well i i think look if danny sullivan

posts on a random forum yeah i would be interested in that right it doesn't matter that it's a random forum random forum because it's danny sullivan and his his opinion is inherently interesting to me because of my background in context okay man okay matt thank you very much for that yeah so so i am a big fan of the idea behind off the rank now as far as what the timeline looks like how the logistics work

all that sort of stuff that's that's a difficult problem and we have to figure out how to solve it what's going on with negative seo how where are you of it and are you doing anything to stop it uh we're very aware uh we does that mean you admit it's a possible thing that happens and it's we've never thinking and killing small businesses we're very aware because people are worried about it and we design our algorithms such

that we try to make sure that it's not a realistic attack to do so for example uh the first half of the uh payday loan algorithm stuff that rolled out uh just a few weeks ago incorporates a lot of protections against negative seo uh so we've talked about hummingbird and one of the ideas behind hummingbird was that we wanted to help deal with natural language conversation a lot better so for example i'll try doing some natural language searches which probably

won't work because i think the net is mostly dead but okay google now where is the space needle and then we have to see whether i'm racing it space needle is at 400 broad street seattle i want to see pictures pictures of space needle who built it the space needle was designed by edward carlson victor steinbrook and other architects how tall is it the space needle is 605 feet tall show me some restaurants near there here are the listings for restaurants

within 0.8 miles how about italian here are the listings for italian restaurants within 0.9 miles navigate to the first one navigating to the pink door so now that's live right now that's regular google search um what is white hat link building should i trust companies who advertise that as a service well link building as a service often tends to be high risk um and let me just say every pitch every tool that you've heard today at this

conference can be beaten with creativity if you come up with something compelling that's what's the real hook that's going to make a big difference so um link building is a service i was talking to somebody yesterday and he said he was actually trying to build authentic organic links with tracking where he didn't care about whether he didn't want him to flow pagerank he just wanted like real links and after like three weeks he was unable to find a single vendor who was able to

like provide that that was not in a spammy sort of way which is sort of discouraging um but it is certainly possible to do white hat link building usually it's called being excellent right there there are a lot of like take search engine land right you broke off from your old site you started fresh and yet now you have a very you know search engine land is known as one of the most authoritative places to go on

the web you didn't cheat you didn't take shortcuts you went right up the middle and you you earned it with sweat and that's that's the best way to do white hat link building in my experience sweat plus creativity helps a lot om report and andre ipa would like to thank you for your attention you can get more episodes on www.omreport.com you