Website owners, spam watchers, and SEO optimization experts have all been chomping at the bit regarding seeing this software do its job in getting the spam off the search engine and allowing legitimate sites to see their day in the higher rankings.  After the announcement that the software was up and running, aficionados watched intently to see the results.  So far they’re not satisfied even from the responses of Google’s SEO expert Matt Cutts who enlightens the public on everything Google and SEO related issues.

It was on June 12, 2014 that Cutts made the announcement that the software was up and running but so far the satisfaction level just isn’t there for the public.  Lots of speculation is emerging from experts in SEO and those on the sidelines.  The Payday Loan software was touted as a something like a dream come true.  Something the hard working website owner or webmaster could count on to give them a fighting chance against the black hat spammers who often thwart the search engines and dominate the top rankings.  They populate Google with low end quality content written by hack writers from third world countries.  The average and above average website owner and webmaster doesn’t have a chance nowadays.

That being said, it’s going to take serious vigilance to see where this SEO algorithm is going and whether the spammers can compromise it.  It’s like as soon as Google gets ahead these people are right on their tail and they’ve got to start all over again.

The Payday Loan 3.0 algorithm follows the Panda 4 software that Google initiated recently to do somewhat of the same thing.  One might think that with this one two punch that Google would be well down the road to beating back the spammers but so far no flags or fireworks of celebration have been seen.  It may be that due to the sheer volume, perhaps billions and billions of spammy websites are too much for the algorithms to handle in a speedy manner and may well take weeks or months to show results to a satisfactory degree.  If that’s the case then it could be a double edged sword for Google in that by the time the software takes hold and shows results, the spammers and black hatters will have back engineered things and Google will be back where they started.

It’s all about the math here.  With billions of people on the web and millions of spammers and those who would undermine things for greed, it may call upon Google to really pour on the heat and find a way to combat it all.  It may take something drastic that will upend the SEO world but something has to be done before someone else comes up with a search engine that can’t be compromised and Google will go the way of Yahoo.

Picture credit: Wikipedia

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One user asked how he can guest blog without it appearing as though he paid for links. Cutts explains that there are typically surefire signs when a user has paid for links and that will send up a red flag. Those who pay for links will usually have an off-topic or irrelevant blog post that has nothing to do with the area the host blog covers. Keyword-rich anchor text is another red flag that typically tips off the webspam team that there are links for pay in play, not organic guest posting. Paid links obviously negatively impact search engine optimization efforts.

There is a wide spectrum of quality to consider as well. Some guest blogs are of much lower quality lately, which makes the webspam team have to look closely to determine whether or not content is legitimate. For the most part, guest blogging is a real way to get links back to your site. It is generally best reserved for cases where you are a real expert in an area and can provide a unique insight on the subject.

The second question Cutts’ addressed has to do with whether or not webmasters should focus on more than just ranking in search engines when building a search engine optimization plan for their sites. He reiterates that Google has always been in a state of flux. They have always made updates and changes to their algorithms to ensure only the best results are presented to users, much to the chagrin of some SEOs. Still, their efforts haven’t changed that much over the years and he encourages webmasters to focus on creating high quality sites, free of black hat techniques, to yield the best possible outcomes.

He says that it’s a good idea to invest time in more than just search engine optimization. Whether that’s through print advertising, a brick and mortar store, or a social media campaign, Cutts says having a well rounded and well diversified plan is your best bet for accruing the highest number of visitors and customers possible.

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The first question Matt Cutts addressed this week has to do with PageRank. The user was wondering why their site’s PageRank hasn’t increased despite the fact that they make regular content updates and have their SEO content written by proven editors who know what they’re doing. Cutts begins his answer by explaining that the PageRank toolbar indicator is only periodically updated. So, it is possible that a site’s PageRank has increased but the indicator just hasn’t updated yet. As a side note, the PageRank toolbar is likely to fade away as a way to track this anyway since the latest version of Internet Explorer has trouble showing it and Google Chrome doesn’t support toolbars in the first place.

Cutts also advises this user to check on their backlinks. After all, it is the number of links directed toward a site (from high quality sites, of course) that determine PageRank. Having great content with perfect SEO on your site can help it rank higher in search results but it won’t necessarily boost PageRank.

The second question we’re looking at this week has to do with internal nofollow links and whether or not you should include the rel=nofollow tag on links that point to a login page, let’s say. Cutts explains that, for the most part, you want make internal links on your site dofollow. You want PageRank to flow from one page to the next. You want GoogleBot to be able to find these internal pages within your site. This helps to improve your site’s visibility and can improve the rank of individual pages on your site in the search results.

Cutts then addresses the user’s specific question regarding whether or not you should add nofollow to links to login pages or other relatively useless pages like “Terms and Conditions” pages and things like that. He says you can add nofollow to links to these pages but there’s really no reason to. They don’t hurt anything and only add to the amount of unique content associated with your site that GoogleBot sees. The more unique content, the better it is for your overall SEO efforts!

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The second question had to do with sites that have a script that automatically generates pages based on user search queries. These pages that don’t offer any original content and often just say that the site you’ve clicked to has no search results for that subject matter surrounded by ads. The question was about what Google does in response to these sites. Cutts answered that sites with pages like these offer no value to Google search results and are actually in violation of the Webmaster Guidelines. These are very bad for SEO. He asks that anyone who comes across a site like this to report it as spam and that webmasters be careful to block pages with no results on them from being indexed.

The third and final question about SEO we’re talking about this week has to do with the impact of Panda on websites and how webmasters will know whether or not they’ve been affected by it. So, Panda rolled out a few years ago and Google made incremental updates to it every month or so. After a time, Google found that each update was small and that it was affecting a small enough number of sites that they could integrate it into the regular indexing process.

The way to avoid being affected by Panda in general is to create high quality content and not focus on keyword stuffing or any other short-term tactics. In all reality, SEO has a lot more to do with structuring your site and content in the proper way, then allowing that content to stand on its own two feet. You have to be consistent to build your visitor count and that means committing yourself to a strategy that places quality on a pedestal above everything else.

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Cutts explains that the main problem they have is scale. With 250 million domain names, there’s no way they can provide individual responses to everyone who has a question or problem with each of them. That being said, that doesn’t mean they aren’t doing anything to help webmasters get a hold on their SEO efforts.

Their first and primary goal is to return the highest quality web results possible. By default, the concerns of webmasters are secondary. However, they have responded individually to over 400,000 requests in an effort to answer specific SEO questions and to help webmasters better optimize their sites.

While they can’t respond to each and every question from every person who has a website out there, they have tried to create scalable ways to answers common (and not-so-common) questions about building websites, SEO, and everything in between. One way they do this is to make videos on YouTube answering such questions. This way, they only have to answer things once (not a million times in individual emails). These videos get several thousand views, which they are taking as a good sign in terms of getting the word out.

Even so, Google continues to search for new ways to accommodate webmasters’ need for information in a realistic way they can actually handle. In terms of reconsideration requests, they handle them typically in two ways: a notification that the issue is resolved or a notification that there is still work to be done to fix it. In some cases, they respond letting the webmaster know that they’ve fixed one problem but there are other issues that still need to be addressed. It’s not a perfect system by a long shot, but it’s as good as they can make it for now.

Anyone trying to improve the SEO for their website should keep up to date with the videos Google uploads with Matt Cutts answering questions. It’s a good place to start familiarizing yourself with Google Webmaster Tools and to get the help you need.

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Today we’re going to discuss the latest video from chief Google engineer, Matt Cutts, who offers up regular tips and tricks to webmasters. The topic for today is penalty link examples.

When you manage a website, it’s important to have an understanding of your linking strategy. This means you need to know what sites link to yours. It should be a priority to make sure you have links from high-quality websites with a high PageRank. This is very important for SEO. If you use Webmaster Tools, as you should be, you won’t necessarily see any comments about your incoming links. This will simply be reflected in where your site ranks in the search engine results.

However, if the Google Webspam team has taken a specific action against a link to your site, there will be a notice or message in Webmaster Tools. In some cases, there will be example links of the incoming links that netted a penalty. Sometimes, however, there won’t be any examples and this can leave site managers stumped.

Even if you do receive example links, they won’t always be comprehensive. That is, you might have more offending links than the ones listed. The ones listed are examples to help you get back on track with your SEO and to identify the type of links that are getting you into trouble. Cutts says they just can’t list out every single offending link, because sometimes there are millions of them and they just don’t have the capacity to send out notifications that cover everything.

Still, Google is planning on including more details in Webmaster Tools messages in the future and hope to include at least a couple of example links to help webmasters identify and solve link building problems. This should be extremely helpful and you will no longer have to sit and wonder what the problem is.

SEO can be tricky to implement and even more difficult to maintain, especially when it comes to managing inbound links. You may be punished for links you had no hand in creating, which is why keeping tabs on everything through Webmaster Tools is so essential for your success with optimization.

You can’t leave your SEO plan to chance. And Cutts assures people in his latest video that changes will be rolling out that offer up more detailed messages to webmasters. Though you shouldn’t expect every last detail, you can expect more details in the near future.

PS. Obviously Matt advertizing the San Dimas High School while wearing the San Dimas HS Football t-shirt  on this video.

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First up, a user wanted to know how Google treats hidden content that is only revealed when a visitor clicks a button to reveal it. Is it spammy?

Cutts points out that this kind of content is actually very common on the web. How often have you visited a store site and viewed a product where “more information” or “specifications” were hidden unless you clicked a button? That information drops down when you click it so the page isn’t cluttered and looks tidy. This is normal and shouldn’t affect SEO in any sort of negative way. Cutts says so long as the content is obviously useful and designed to be there for your visitors, you have nothing to worry about. Google can tell that this is important information.

He does give one caveat though: if you have a tiny button that a user can’t see or can barely see, that reveals many pages worth of content, then that might be grounds for penalization from Google. Doing something like that could be bad for SEO and result in a reduced ranking in the search results. Basically, don’t do it!

The second question we’re going to talk about today came from a user wanting to know how important the freshness of content is. That is, will a blog that’s updated regularly always rank more favorably than a business site that isn’t updated as often? Cutts’ answer relates to QDF or a query that deserves freshness. Basically, if someone searches for the term “earthquake” it’s likely that they want to know about an event that just happened. In that case, sites with the newest content will rank higher. However, if someone is searching for evergreen content, the freshness of the pages won’t matter much in the search results. In terms of SEO, freshness matters sometimes, but not all of the time. So, yes, updating your site often is a good idea, but it won’t necessarily mean a boost in the rankings if your site covers subject matter that is considered to be “evergreen.”

Hopefully these questions and answers will bring you that much closer toward becoming a webmaster expert!

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When building a website and using SEO to optimize it, many webmasters run into a problem: bad links. When a site has a lot of links from less than legitimate sites pointing to it, this can dramatically reduce that site’s rank. While this is done to weed out sites using nefarious backlinking strategies, it’s not always as unpleasant as that. In fact, many legitimate businesses are punished. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t currently provide examples of the kinds of links they consider “bad” when sending out notices to sites in Webmaster Tools.

Where people run into a lot of SEO trouble is when they submit a reconsideration request to Google asking for clarification about what links in particular are the problem. This will often just result in another denial. You see, the reconsideration request system is only capable of giving out “Yes,” “No,” and “Processed” replies. Asking for clarification isn’t going to help you.

Instead, Google engineer, Matt Cutts, recommends visiting the Webmaster Tools forum to ask your questions there. You’ll get helpful feedback from experienced webmasters who may have a better idea of what the problem is. Plus, the Tools themselves offer up some examples of “bad links” anyone interested in SEO should be aware of.

Cutts completely acknowledges that there’s a lack of transparency right now and this is definitely not good for legitimate businesses. However, the reason the system is the way it is at the moment is due to the high number of spammers. Obviously, they can’t respond to each individual who’s trying to game the system with lazy and illegitimate tactics.

Still, Cutts says that Google is working on creating new tools and features that increase transparency and expand how businesses can get a handle on what specific links are causing the problem and what they can do to fix it. Removing links isn’t always easy, but it’s often necessary to boost a site’s ranking and prevent any false claims of spamming.

In the meantime, webmasters will just have to play it smart and make good assumptions about the types of links that are causing the biggest problems for them. Until the tools become more robust, this is all we have to rely on to expand SEO and improve linking strategies and overall site rankings. Now is the time to make the best of what we have to move forward with search engine optimization.

This article has been posted on behalf of Affordable SEO Florida consulting company offering local SEO, internet marketing, mobile website development to small businesses in Tampa Bay area. Visit Affordable SEO Florida Google place for more information on SEO optimization or call 727-938-8891 to schedule a consultation.

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First up, a user wanted to know if their site was down for a day, if it would have a negative impact on their search engine rankings and SEO. Cutts explained that if the site is only down for a short period of time, it shouldn’t make that much of a difference. Getting a Googlebot notification in Webmaster Tools that your site is down isn’t the end of the world and can be remedied so long as the site’s server goes back up fairly quickly. If your site is down a couple of weeks, however, you could run into some problems. Google obviously wants to maintain the integrity of their search results, so they don’t want to lead people to a site that’s down, even if you have every intention of putting it back up.

In short, resolving site downtime issues as quickly as possible is your best bet for maintaining your site’s rank.

The second SEO question had to do with voice search. The user wanted to know if query syntax has changed much in the light of voice search gaining more prominence. Cutts explained that the query syntax for voice searches is much more natural. People are less likely to use keywords and search operators. They speak as you and I would normally speak and often ask questions in their search queries.

He noted that Google is going to try to get better at accommodating for voice search in the future. For instance, when you use the word “and” now in search, your results get narrower because Google knows you’re looking for something specific. But if you use more words in voice search, you’re likely to get more and more results. Google will be working on making it so their search algorithms boil down search queries to get the gist of what you’re talking about. In short, query syntax has definitely changed over the years, not just for voice search, and will continue to do so. You can search by images now, even. Cutts doesn’t anticipate the evolution of search to slow down anytime soon, which means all of us SEO professionals have to continually stay on top of our game!

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You see, where you attribute your sources actually doesn’t matter. At all. When building up the SEO for your site and while you’re trying to stay within the Google Webmaster Guidelines, you might think that where you put source links in articles matters for building your site’s rank and encourage PageRank flow. However, this is not the case. In fact, Cutts was only able to offer up tips in terms of what he found to be preferable as a reader.

With that in mind, Cutts prefers that people place links to the original source for an article (the article that the writer got their information from) near the top of the post. So, the first paragraph would be great. It’s not enough to just say, “According to a popular tech blog…” or even, “According to Wired…” You need to put an actual link in there that directs people to the source material. Otherwise, you are technically attributing your source but your not participating in PageRank flow and you’re not being very considerate to your readers who want to know where to find out additional information. Now that is important for SEO.

You can certainly place the link to the source at the bottom of the article, so long as it’s clearly defined, perhaps like this: “Source: Website” with website being the link. If it’s a really long article though, the odds that someone will make it to the bottom is slim and that can make it like you’re not really giving any credit at all.

Basically, Cutts advises webmasters and bloggers to be courteous to those they obtain information from. This means always citing your sources, of course, but it also means being considerate in where you place this attribution. Make it easy for your readers to find so they can pursue additional information if they want it easily. Being responsible on the web is about more than just SEO.

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