SEO Werkt!

A video from Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, today answers some of the questions about what webmasters and SEOs should expect in the near future in regards to SEO. The question Matt asked and answered was, “What should we expect in the next few months in terms of SEO for…



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Google’s head of search spam, has decided to publish a bunch of blog posts that were sitting in draft mode on his personal blog. He said his blog needs to cough up a hairball – hence the animated GIF used here. But we can learn a few things when Matt Cutts coughs up hairballs. A [...]



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Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a YouTube video talking about a recent SEO misconception that he would like the SEO and webmaster world to “put to rest.” Matt said, just because Google has a search quality or ranking patent it does not mean that the patent was or…



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In a recently published Webmaster video, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, listed off the top five SEO mistakes webmasters make. Matt said these are not the most devastating mistakes, but rather, the most common mistakes. (1) Not having a website or having a website that is not…



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What to do if Google sends you a penalty notice and you can’t figure out exactly what it’s for? Turn to Google’s help forums, the company says. If you’re still confused after that, you can file a reconsideration requests where you might be given more details. The issue of…



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In a recent Matt Cutts video, where the head of Google’s search spam team answered the question “Does linking my two sites together violate the quality guidelines?” The short answer is no but, there is always a but, if you link hundreds of unrelated sites together, then it would…



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Google announced they are having an opt in field trial of including Gmail emails, contacts and flights in the right hand side bar of the Google search results.

So if you search in Google for something and Google thinks a relevant email or contact or flight is relevant to your search, Google will show a section in the top right of matching emails. Note, the emails are now shown by default.

(1) You need to opt in to the field trial (not available for Google Apps users).

(2) You need to click on view emails or results to expand the actual emails

(3) You have to have matching emails for the search

There is a tremendous panic around Google showing personal emails in your Google search results. Which is a bit crazy because you need to opt into it to see it. But I can see how people would be concerned.

Google is searching the open web and your personal email in the same query.

A HackerNews user complained saying:

I may be outside of the normal use case here, and absolutely I am giving my opinion so judge it as one voice in 255 million (or whatever gmail’s user count is now), but this isn’t ever faster for me. I always have a gmail tab open.

As to remembering the source of a piece information, I made no claim to be perfect at this. What I will claim is that for the 95% of the time that I DO know the source of a piece of information I will be annoyed by results that are not from my intended search space.

Obviously Google has a pretty good track record at returning relevant results, but I can still hope for an off/on switch.

In which, Google’s Matt Cutts responded:

At the event, they demonstrated that the same one-click toggle to disable personalized results will also disable the results from Gmail. It’s not in our enlightened self-interest to push information that’s unhelpful or jarring, because then you’re less likely to search on Google in the future.

Here are some screen shots of contacts and flights showing up:

To sign up, you need to go to the field trial and as Googler Jessica notes in a Google Web Search Help thread:

As the post mentions, this is a trial and you need to sign up here (g.co/searchtrial) to use it. Because there is so much Gmail content, this is a technical challenge thatâs difficult to scale, so this field trial has a limited number of users that can be admitted and will cap at one million users. This forum subcategory is a place for you to discuss this new feature and share your feedback. Please note that when the field trial is over, this subcategory will be deleted, but all of the posts will still be available in the overall Web Search forum.

Forum discussion at HackerNews, WebmasterWorld and Google Web Search Help.

Honestly, a fairly slow week despite some significant SEO events. SEOmoz introduced MozCast, a weather report to track Google changes. There are some SEOs claiming Google pushed out a Penguin refresh but I think it is because SEOs are very eager for a new Penguin refresh. Google Webmaster Tools added a structured data dashboard and it is pretty cool. Matt Cutts of Google explained in more detail what those new link notifications are about – so you get it now? SEOmoz received one of those link notification after getting into a fight with negative SEOs. We get into the debate on exact match domains versus branded domain names. Bing now allows you to tag your Facebook friends in Bing. Majestic SEO launched a competitive keyword tool based on links. Google updated their toolbar PageRank values this week. Google loves their Olympics search results. I also published the monthly Google SEO webmaster report this morning. That was this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Make sure to subscribe to our video feed or subscribe directly on iTunes to be notified of these updates and download the video in the background. Here is the YouTube version of the feed:

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Search Topics of Discussion:

• SEOmoz Tries To Automate Google Update Notifications With MozCast
• UK SEOs Say Possible Google Penguin Refresh
• SEOs Eagerly Waiting A Penguin Refresh
• Structured Data Dashboard On Google Webmaster Tools
• Google’s Cutts Explains Untrusted Link Notifications
• Did Negative SEO Beat SEOmoz?
• Google SEO: Exact Match Domain Or Not?
• Annoy Your Friends On Facebook With Bing Facebook Tagging
• A Keyword Competitive Tool Based On Links & Anchors
• Google PageRank Update: August 2012
• Google Touts Their Olympics Results
• August 2012 Google Webmaster Report

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On July 20th, Google sent out a batch of new link notifications that scared the webmaster community. Google then informed us we can relax about those notifications because they are ignored links that don’t specifically hurt your site.

Still, there was a lot of confusion. So over the weekend, Google’s Matt Cutts posted a detailed blog post on what these notifications means. He wrote:

In less severe cases, we sometimes target specific spammy or artificial links created as part of a link scheme and distrust only those links, rather than taking action on a siteâs overall ranking. The new messages make it clear that we are taking “targeted action on the unnatural links instead of your site as a whole.” The new messages also lack the yellow exclamation mark that other messages have, which tries to convey that we’re addressing a situation that is not as severe as the previous “we are losing trust in your entire site” messages.

Cutts Says Do Not Ignore The Links

Matt Cutts said do not ignore the links despite what we thought Google told us to do on that Friday.

These new messages are worth your attention. Fundamentally, it means we’re distrusting some links to your site. We often take this action when we see a site that is mostly good but might be might have some spammy or artificial links pointing to it (widgetbait, paid links, blog spam, guestbook spam, excessive article directory submissions, excessive link exchanges, other types of linkspam, etc.). So while the site’s overall rankings might not drop directly, likewise the site might not be able to rank for some phrases. I wouldn’t classify these messages as purely advisory or something to be ignored, or only for innocent sites.

On the other hand, I don’t want site owners to panic. We do use this message some of the time for innocent sites where people are pointing hacked anchor text to their site to try to make them rank for queries like [buy viagra].

Anyway, Matt goes into more details on the Google Webmaster Blog.

A WebmasterWorld thread has Tedster saying he would still focus his time and resources on other things and not go after removing links in this link unharmful notifications.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Matt Cutts explains that Google Webmaster Help has created 375 videos to answer questions users have asked and they have decided to do some more tutorial/informational videos. So, in this video Matt answers his own question “Is there a limit to how many 301 (Permanent) redirects I can do on a site?” in an effort [...]