Matt Cutts Interview Tueday 4PM PST

[Halfdeck]

For guys that come to the SEO Chat thingie, you might want to listen to Danni Sullivan and Matt Cutts talk live on Webmasterradio, Tuesday 4 PM PST 5/16 (I guess that means 8 PM EST). You can also download a podcast later (that way you won't miss GG's radio show). I don't expect to hear anything groundbreaking, but you never know (they'll probably talk about the SEO contest that just ended today, nofollow, google trends and other newsie stuff, no algorithm-related / technie talk).

They also have an irc room up; you can login to that and maybe ask Matt or whoever else shows up a questions or two before he heads off to vacation.

[Preacher]

Thanks for the heads up halfdeck.

[Halfdeck]

It's starting now (7PM EST, sorry, not 8). They haven't hooked up Matt or Danny yet (supposedly talking from Googleplex).

[Bill]

Let us know if he says anything interesting.

I went to the link Cutts gave in his blog, but for some reason when I clicked on the link it activated my dvd player not my media player - maybe it's in some odd format or something...

http://www.webmasterradio.fm/episode....php?showId=16

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/im-on-webmasterradiofm/

Unfortunately I have to cancel the SE Chat tomorrow night, or I'd be asking you to spill what you know tomorrow. ;-}

[Halfdeck]

http://www.webmasterradio.fm/episodes/

Click on WMV/RM/or whatever else.

Matt Cutts is saying they're not running out of space and that Google is not crawling some pages due to either low PR or too many reciprocal links.

IRC: irc.ynot.com / #webmasterradio

EDIT:

Here's the big news of the day:

The sites that fit “no pages in Bigdaddy” criteria were sites where our algorithms had very low trust in the inlinks or the outlinks of that site. Examples that might cause that include excessive reciprocal links, linking to spammy neighborhoods on the web, or link buying/selling. The Bigdaddy update is independent of our supplemental results, so when Bigdaddy didn’t select pages from a site, that would expose more supplemental results for a site.

Another one (Matt talking about crawling priority):

typically the depth of the directory doesn’t make any difference for us; PageRank is a much larger factor.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/

[RawAlex]

Matt Cutts is taking a vacation, and I for one think he needs it. His comments regarding space are diametrically opposed to the points made by other higher ups in public statements, which I think were attached directly or indirectly to SEC filings by Google. Weirdness.

I also feel that there is much misleading information being put out there about supplemental listings and Big Daddy. For a while Matt was saying "give it time" and now it is a question of spam? Me thinks that just like the truly bogus PR update the last time around (I had domains that didn't have PR for 4 years suddenly pop to PR4) tells me that Google has maybe gone down the road of, umm, disinformation.

I will certainly have to listen more to the clips, but I am thinking that this is magician's flashpaper.

Alex

[Halfdeck]

It's a good time to start a blog.

[Linkster]

Unfortunately - there is nothing new in anything that was said - its all the same thing Google has always done - the recip links, spam and bought links checking has been going on for over 3 years and the misleading PR in the toolbar for at least 2 years - but then nobody ever believes it and keep doing what theyve been doing and I just keep getting richer

[Halfdeck]

Originally Posted by Linkster

Unfortunately - there is nothing new in anything that was said - its all the same thing Google has always done - the recip links, spam and bought links checking has been going on for over 3 years

Linkster, "all the same thing"? Matt isn't just reinterating Google's quality guidelines: "Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank."

Assuming Matt's got his facts straight and his head screwed on the right way, Google's crawl priority and indexing behavior is not the same post Big Daddy:

Some folks that were doing a lot of reciprocal links might see less crawling.

it’s by design in Bigdaddy that we crawl somewhat more than we index in Bigdaddy

CrankyDave, your site seems like an example of one of those sites that might have been crawled more before because of link exchanges. I picked five at random and they were all just traded links. Google is less likely to give those links as much weight now.

In other words, Google is singing the same tune as it always has, but is now handling things a bit differently.

[Linkster]

What I was referring to is that although they havent publicly said it until now (and used BigDaddy to "guise" it through) this has been Googles actual practice all along - like I said - it sounds good in the news when everyone is looking at Google to come out with spam prevention - but nothing in the back end has happened other than a different amount of code accomplishing the same thing it did before

[Halfdeck]

Originally Posted by Linkster

nothing in the back end has happened other than a different amount of code accomplishing the same thing it did before

So you're one of those geeks that keeps messing with the co-citation filters on Google's back end? *hide* Seriously Linkster, unless you have moles buried deep in the plex, your claim that "nothing in the back end has happened..." just doesn't fly. Even if you are right on the money, you haven't backed up anything you said. If you think owning a high traffic site automatically makes you an expert on Google, then according to Alexa, I'd have to go with Matt Cutts.

[Linkster]

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

according to Alexa

That, my friend, just explained everything to do with your opinions

[DangerDave]

Originally Posted by Halfdeck

If you think owning a high traffic site automatically makes you an expert on Google, then according to Alexa, I'd have to go with Matt Cutts.

That's the funniest thing I have read in ages.... Sad but funnnnnny!


DD
(fuk I hate people that make me post!)

[RawAlex]

DD, you wouldn't think that perhaps Matt Cutts might know exactly how to build a site to get good SE results, hmm?

Alex

[Bill]

So far I can't say I've seen any big changes in the basic google results with bigdaddy. Most of what I have seen looks like "More of the same". More of a devalueing of the bottom two thirds of the web, more of an aristocracy of links ("trustrank", I suppose). A greater tendency to suppress results into supplemental.

No big change in the 'back end' is coming to mind.

[Halfdeck]

Originally Posted by Linkster

That, my friend, just explained everything to do with your opinions

Linkster, I don't give a rat's ass how your site or mine is ranked in Alexa. That wasn't my point. In case it doesn't show, I highly respect your opinions. But without proof, your claim doesn't carry any weight with me. And why should you care, if you're right and you keep raking in the dough?

You claimed "nothing in the back end has happened other than a different amount of code accomplishing the same thing it did before" - care to back it up?

[Halfdeck]

Originally Posted by Bill

So far I can't say I've seen any big changes in the basic google results with bigdaddy. Most of what I have seen looks like "More of the same". More of a devalueing of the bottom two thirds of the web, more of an aristocracy of links ("trustrank", I suppose). A greater tendency to suppress results into supplemental.

No big change in the 'back end' is coming to mind.

A greater tendency to suppress results into supplemental.

Bill, according to Matt Cutts, Google is not suppressing more results into the supplemental index. Google is indexing less pages from sites with low numbers of incoming/outbound trusted links, and that is causing supplementals to show through in the results. In other words, the numbers of supplemental pages hasn't grown; instead, the number of indexed pages from some borderline sites has dropped.

No big change in the 'back end' is coming to mind.

As far as I know, Google hasn't implemented any big changes in their algorithm. What's changed is that now, according to Cutts, Google is "better at judging link quality" (i.e. identifying reciprocal links, linktrades, bought links). Pre Big Daddy, if your brand new 20,000 page (original, quality, exclusive, non-spammy...) site had a decent PR, Google will deep crawl / index it eventually. Post Big Daddy, depending on the types of links going in and out of your site (i.e. 100% hardlink trades), your site may never get indexed.

Anyway, that's the hype.

[RawAlex]

Originally Posted by Bill

So far I can't say I've seen any big changes in the basic google results with bigdaddy. Most of what I have seen looks like "More of the same". More of a devalueing of the bottom two thirds of the web, more of an aristocracy of links ("trustrank", I suppose). A greater tendency to suppress results into supplemental.

Bill, what I find the most scary in this is that it appears to be Google regressing to the past, putting way too much emphasis on older and established sites with significant "natural" deep linking, and giving little space or time for new sites with new ideas or concepts.

It is the reason why an insider page at PBS for a special on porn that aired February 7, 2002 continuously ranks in the top 20, even though the page has not been updates and is losing relevance in reality every day.

it goes back to my basic issue with Google: They appear to be way more interested in developing new products not related to search, and they don't appear to give a damn about making the SERPs any better than they have been for the last couple of years.

Alex

[DJilla]

Let me throw this out there for comment... but has anybody ever thought that G might have a diffrent set of rules altogether for different types of sites once identified. In other words handles things one way for mainstream and another for adult? Wouldn't this be feasible, possible? Likely to occur in the future? WDUT

[RawAlex]

DJ, my opinion is that Google has pretty much set limits for certain segments, especially sites that are identified as porn. There are limits on potential PR, and I suspect they are much more agressive with certain techqnieus to detect junk sites.

This is one of the reason why using expired non-adult domains to pump porn keywords was such as success at some points, because those non-adult flagged sites appeared to have much more power and potential to pass PR and good SERPs around than any porn site. My feeling is that the evilPBS page stays high in the rankings for porn because of some linkbacks from high profile sites not tagged as adult sites.

Google does some seriously sneaky shit.

Alex

[DJilla]

Yeah! Without any real evidence or even many posts I've ever found on the matter, my experiences in the manstream vs adult its been my subjective feeling that a different set of something was going on. Heck every other major corp lies throught its teeth why not G, that "not doing evil thing notwithstanding".

[Halfdeck]

We've been refreshing our supplemental results ... and this refresh has involved some serious changes under the hood. Unfortunately, with change of this scale, there sometimes are bugs. In this case, we found a few bugs that affected the site: operator...

- Vanessa Fox, 5/19

Oopsie.