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Matt Cutts - Q&A
By Find2k | November 10, 2008
Q & A with Matt Cutts from the recent Google Webmaster open forum
Qustion-1: “Recently Aaron Wall said in a post that if a bad neighbor website links to us then that will decrease our Trustrank. If that is true, then one can pay the bad neighbor websites to link to its competitor to bring it down. Is it true?”
Question from - Sandeep Bali, Mumbai, India
Matt Cutts: We try very hard to make it hard for one competitor to hurt another competitor. (We don’t claim that it’s impossible, because for example someone could steal your domain, either by identity theft or by hacking into a domain, and then do bad things on the domain.) But we try hard to keep one competitor from hurting another competitor in our ranking.
Just as a side note, there are a couple definitions of TrustRank:
- It was a paper that was written by researchers at Yahoo.
- In 2005, Google applied for a trademark for the term “TrustRank” for an anti-phishing filter.
I’m not great at trademark searching, but it looks like Google abandoned the TrustRank trademark earlier in 2008 and now someone in New Zealand appears to have filed for TrustRank as a trademark. But we don’t use the term “TrustRank” at Google to refer to anything.
Qusetion-2:“Will Google ever learn to detect paid and other junk links (per your guidelines) without you making webmasters use nofollow? Thank you for your work, Matt.”
Matt Cutts: We definitely have worked to improve our paid-link and junk link detection algorithms. In our most recent PageRank update (9/27/2008) for example, there are some differences in PageRank because we’ve improved how we treat links, for example.
The “nofollow” attribute on links is a granular way that site owners can provide more information to search engines about their links, but search engines absolutely continues to innovate on how we weigh links as well. Thanks for the question!
Question-3:“How about adding a link “Report this as spam” under each listing on Google serps (like Sphinn)? The link redirect to the form of reporting spam. Google human editors might take care of filtering the spam reports first, if WebSpam team is busy”
Question by - Harith, Denmark
Matt Cutts: Personally, I love the idea of a “Report as spam” link on our search results.
At the same time, our search results pages are shown hundreds of millions of times each day, so a feature needs to be useful to a pretty large fraction of people. I’m not sure how many people would use a “Report this as spam” button.
I do like the idea of a Greasemonkey script or Firefox extension to add a “Report spam” link to the search results. Clicking on the link could send the user to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en and rewrite the DOM on the page to automatically fill in most parts of the form. Anyone who is savvy enough to install a plug-in/script is probably the right demographic to report spam anyway. Anyone want to write that extension or Greasemonkey script?
Question-4: “Have you considered appointing a European Matt Cutts like deputy who would be accessible for meetings, conferences, workshops etc? You can’t be everywhere at once, and it’d be great to be able to meet and talk shop with some Google folk”
Question by - Nass, London, UK
Matt Cutts: I think people give me too much credit, when in actuality there are a ton of people that do communication. Just in Europe, there are great people like John Mueller, Pedro Dias, Alvar Lopez, Juliane Stiller, Kaspar Szymanski, and Luisella Mazza. I feel for all the people I can’t mention, because these are just a tiny slice of the many people that answer questions on the web, attend conferences, do interviews, tape videos, and post on the official webmaster blog (including in German and Spanish as dedicated blogs, and several other country-level blogs).
If you are still skeptical, just check out http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/one-year-of-monitored-european.html to see some of the folks in Europe who are listening and participating online. Many of these people have journeyed to search conferences to listen or to speak as well.
Question-5: “What is the purpose of Google moderator?”
Question by - Carloslorenzo, Barcelona, Spain
Matt Cutts: Initially we used Dory (an internal version of Google moderator) for company meetings. Instead of whatever random question would be asked by the first person to walk up to a microphone, now anyone at any Google office could submit a question and the interesting questions could percolate up because several people would vote for them.
I think that Google moderator can be great for meetings to prioritize questions. It’s a 20% project, but it still can be pretty handy.
Question-6:“When are you going to actually read the spam reports?
Your website, asks webmasters to be responsible and report spam, i’ve done that since Google launched the form. Some i’ve done once a week. hidden text, duplicate pages, duplicate websites? thnx”
Question by - paisley, dallas
Matt Cutts: paisley, we absolutely do read spam reports and act on a lot of them. Sometimes (e.g. for hidden text), we might remove a site and then reinclude the site if they take the hidden text off their page. There are other actions that we take that might not be immediately visible either. But we definitely do read a lot of spam reports and love to get spam leads from the reports and take action on them.
If you can, it’s much better to use the spam report form at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en because that form is authenticated with a Google Account instead of being an unauthenticated web form. The spam reports to our authenticated form do receive a higher priority in our system.
Question-7: “If a site links out to other sites, does it help him to become more relevant in a niche? Do you use a term equivalent to “topical niche” at all, when it comes to ranking?”
Matt Cutts: We don’t use the exact phrase “topical niche,” but certainly we are aware of different niches and industries around the web. Different industries (and even different languages) have different linking patterns. I would recommend linking out to other sites that are useful to your visitors. If a visitor doesn’t feel trapped and thinks that a site is providing good, impartial advice or an overview of an topic, that visitor is more likely to link to your site and tell friends about your site.
Question-8: “Does Googlebot have preference the following url structures?
long-haired-dogs.html
longhaireddogs.html
long_haired_dogs.html”
Question by - JasonBartholme, Loves Park, IL
Matt Cutts: I would recommend
long-haired-dogs.html
long_haired_dogs.html
longhaireddogs.html
In that order. If your site is already live on the web, it’s probably not worth going back to change from one method to another, but if you’re just starting a new site, I’d probably choose the urls in that order of preference. I can only speak for Google; you’ll need to run your own tests to see what works best with Microsoft, Yahoo, and Ask.
Question-9: “In GWT can you introduce an ‘accept or deny’ option for IBL’s so webmasters can elect ones they want. This will allow webmasters to break any association between e.g. “nasty validmirs porno” and “aunty bettys tea and biscuit” sites.”
Question by - jeff hall, plymouth uk
Matt Cutts: We’ve talked about offering this feature in Google’s free webmaster tools. We already try very hard to keep a website from being able to harm a competitor’s ranking. The advantage of letting webmasters disavow some in-bound links is that the webmaster knows they’ve told Google “this link has nothing to do with me–please don’t count it.” The disadvantage is that if a site has a large number of links, looking through all those backlinks would be a considerable amount of work. Right now we don’t have a feature like this planned, but if we do release something like that, we’ll be sure to mention it to people on our webmaster blog.
And there were many more.. the experience of going through that was real fun.. hope you have find some of your answers here
Topics: Google, Search Marketing |