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Matt Cutts
@mattcutts

In addition to http://t.co/ptV8oDZOwC it’s safe to assume webspam will continue to tackle link networks that violate our guidelines as well.

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11 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto

Follow @mattcutts

Matt Cutts
@mattcutts

In fact, we took action on several thousand linksellers in a paid-link-that-passes-PageRank network earlier today.

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10 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto

Let the good times roll.

Webmasters continue to anxiously await an upcoming, bigger version of the Penguin update, and Cutts also indicated that Panda would be easing up a bit.

As part of Cutts’ big video, he said Google would continue to be vigilant when it comes to all types of link spam. Already, the webspam team is making good on its word.

Matt Cutts says the internal team at Google is referring to it as Penguin 2.0, despite what other numbers are making the rounds out there.

Get ready, because it’s coming:

In case you don’t get the nose-biting reference, enjoy this scene from Tim Burton’s Batman Returns featuring Danny DeVito as The Penguin.

Hat tip to Danny Sullivan

Does this make results pages better? Would you be in favor of Google implementing this as a new design? Let us know in the comments.

Note: We’ve updated this article after people have had time to react to the test.

Google tests different things with its search interface all the time. Sometimes we cover the tests, and sometimes we don’t. Frankly there are just too many to keep track of. Matt Cutts has said that Google runs 20,000 search experiments a year.

This one is kind of interesting though, as it completely removes URLs from search results pages (apparently unless there is authorship involved). Tecno-Net tipped Search Engine Roundtable with a couple screen caps.

Here’s what it looks like on desktop:

And on mobile:

SER’s Schwartz posted about it on Search Engine Land here. It’s clear that this would not be a popular change if implemented. Here are a few sample comments from that article:

John Mitchell: “Hmm.. not sure if I like this as a user, I tend to look at the URLs in the results as there are some sites that I don’ trust even if Google does and places their pages in the results. In the examples above I’d probably be looking for the relevant page on the Microsoft site and there is no clue as to which result(s) that is.”

Liam Fisher: “Sounds like a huge way of opening the door to dodgy sites impersonating legitimate ones.”

Nick Boylan: “I wouldn’t like this at all. I glance at the URLs all the time, to determine the legit-ness of the source. Particularly if I’m looking for legal information or otherwise, or government services, etc.”

We’ve also gotten a few comments opposing the change:

Michele: “Worst Idea Ever!!! When I search for something, I have my own opinion about various sources – if google removes that information, I have to click through to determine that I don’t want to go there. Another case where I HATE it when technology thinks it’s smarter than I am.”

Vincent J. Eagan III: “Horrible idea! You need to see the URL so you know what kind of page it might be – otherwise it will be easy for scammers to set up pages.”

As Schwatz points out, the test is all being discussed a lot in the forums.

In Google’s own forum, one user writes, “I really hope that this isn’t a forerunner of a real change to the search results page – we’ve had too many of these recently, from the removal of the instant preview to the messing around with green arrows to see more information. Google needs to realise that people get used to and trust a particular format and anything different (like the Google+ merged results for example) only confuses people and makes them trust the results less.”

These are all valid points, and it’s hard to imagine Google implementing any change knowing that it could help spammers. It also makes the page less informative, which seems like a step in the wrong direction. Clearly most people who have seen the change aren’t wild about it.

Still, Google has made plenty of changes in the past with varying degrees of popularity. Recent changes to Google Image search seem to be quite unpopular with webmasters, for example.

What do you think? Should Google get rid of URLs on results pages? Share your thoughts.

Do you think it’s more important for marketers to optimize for different search engines around the world than it used to be? Share your thoughts in the comments.

A recent report from BrightEdge indicates that the majority of search marketers think that it is becoming more important for sites to rank in global search engines. According to the firm’s survey, six out of ten believe it will become either “more” or “much more” important this year, compared to last year. 36% said “more,” while 27% said “much more.”

“SEO marketers at global companies aspire to reach customers worldwide, and drive leads, revenue and traf!c through global SEO initiatives,” says BrightEdge in the report. “Looking beyond a single country also helps them demonstrate a greater ROI on marketing investments. Not only does this boost marketing ROI but also maintains global brand consistency while accommodating local nuances. A global concerted approach to SEO marketing addresses these needs.”

Respondents were specifically asked about Chinese search giant Baidu, with 31% saying it would be much more important to rank in Baidu in 2013, and 10% saying “much more important”.

“With roughly 540 million internet users, 900 million mobile users and 388 million mobile internet users, China is the world’s largest internet market,” says BrightEdge. “Baidu, China’s dominant search engine, is one of the most valuable gateways to this large internet user base.”

You can download the report in its entirety here. It deals with numerous topics, far beyond the topic of global SEO.

Another recent report (via MarketingCharts) from Covario found that Baidu generated three times more global paid search clicks than Yahoo/Bing in Q1.

“I no longer believe it makes sense for any company to roll out an international SEO programme to multiple countries without also having a PPC campaign in place,” writes WebCertain CEO Andy Atkins-Krüger in a post for Search Engine Land about multinational SEO. “In some cases, we would recommend leading with PPC and landing pages first, rather than full blown (and relatively expensive) international SEO.”

He adds, “There are a number of reasons why we recommend this, but one is that user satisfaction on your site can be measured much more quickly with PPC than with SEO. Behavior really matters — so if you can study it first and quickly with PPC, your SEO efforts later will work out to be much more successful. I do worry that the association of search engine warnings with SEO being ‘bad’ are beginning to stick with people who are newer to the industry, and therefore, SEO is having a health warning attached.”

Dave Davies has a great article on international SEO considerations at Search Engine Watch, in which he concludes, “While expanding one’s market is generally a good thing, what people often forget is that you still have to maintain what you have, so make sure you have the resources. Many wars have been lost simply by trying to fight them on too many fronts.”

“If you have just enough resources to dedicate to a successful SEO strategy in your own country, it doesn’t make sense to expand in that you’ll be drawing resources away from the strategy that’s keeping the lights on,” he adds. “You need to make sure it’s the right decision for your business and if it is, make sure that you’re picking the right strategies to maximize your odds of success in the shortest period of time.”

In your international optimization efforts, you may also want to keep in mind some recent changes Google has made to its indexing systems. They’re now treating some country-code TLDs differently in terms of geography vs. generic. The list will change over time, but right now, these are the ccTLDs Google is considering generic: .ad, .as, .bz, .cc, .cd, .co, .dj, .fm, .gg, .io, .la, .me, .ms, .nu, .sc, .sr, .su, .tv, .tk and .ws.

Are you increasing your focus on international SEO, or are you simply focusing on your own region? Let us know in the comments.

Cutts says, “There a sort of persistent misconception that people often have, which is that just because a patent issues…that has somebody’s name on it, or someone who works at search quality, or someone who works at Google, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we are using that patent at that moment.”

He continues, “Sometimes you’ll see speculation, ‘Oh, Google had a patent where they mentioned using the length of time that the domain was registered.’ That doesn’t mean that we’re necessarily doing that. It just means that, you know, that mechanism is patented.”

Cutts recalls, “Somebody else at Google had gotten a patent on the idea (or the mechanism, not just the idea, the actual implementation) by which you could look at how people had changed their webpage after an update, and basically say, ‘Oh, these are people who are responding to Google, or they are dynamically SEOing their stuff,’ and so there were a lot of publishers who were like, ‘Ugh, I’m just gonna throw up my hands. Why bother at all if Google’s just gonna keep an eye?’ and you know, ‘If we change, and Google’s just using that and monitoring that, and changing their ranking in response,’ and it’s the sort of thing where just because that patent comes out, doesn’t mean that Google’s currently using that technology.”

“So, patents are a lot of interesting ideas,” he adds. “You can see a lot of stuff mentioned in them, but don’t take it as an automatic golden truth that we’re doing any particular thing that is mentioned in a patent.”

It is true that patents provide a lot of insight into the kinds of ideas that Google is thinking about, and often we can only really speculate about certain things that it is actually implementing.

The list, which may still change more over time, of generic country code TLDs is as follows: .ad, .as, .bz, .cc, .cd, .co, .dj, .fm, .gg, .io, .la, .me, .ms, .nu, .sc, .sr, .su, .tv, .tk and .ws.

Google’s Pierre Far shared the news in a Google+ post (via Search Engine Roundtable).

Pierre Far1 day ago

Expanded list of ccTLDs treated as Generic ccTLDs

Over the past few months, we've been updating our indexing systems to treat certain country country-code TLDs as generic TLDs; that is, even though the top-level domain has a country code, we would treat it, by default, as not targeting a specific country. Now that all the pieces are in place, we also updated our Help Center article listing the TLDs we treat as gTLDs:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1347922

The latest addition includes the quite-popular (and personal favorite ) .io.

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Geotargetable domains – Webmaster Tools Help
Generic top-level domains (gTLDs) don’t target specific countries. If your site has a generic top-level domain, such as .com, .org, or any of the domains listed below, and targets users in a particula… 20    0 Powered by socialditto

Google’s Matt Cutts recently did a Webmaster Help video discussing location and ccTLDs. If you’re reading this article, you might find it helpful. You can get the gist of it in text if you click the link, in case you don’t feel like sitting through the two-and-a-half-minute video.

Has Google ever worried you about your own linking practices? Let us know in the comments.

This past week, Google Google’s Matt Cutts addressed the following question in a Webmaster Help video:

Suppose I have a site that covers fishing overall (A) & I make another fishing site that solely focuses on lure fishing (B). Does linking to A from B violate guidelines? I’ll make sure both have high quality content & disclose that they’re both owned by me.

“Just linking from A to B is not a violation of our quality guidelines,” says Cutts. “If you only have two sites, they’re thematically related, a person on A would be interested in B…then it makes perfect sense to link those two sites. The problem gets into [when] you don’t have two sites, but you have fifty sites, or eighty sites, or a hundred and fifty sites, and then suddenly linking all of those sites starts to look a lot more like a link network and something that’s really artificial, as opposed to something that’s organic.”

“So if you really do have just a small number of sites – you can count them on one hand – and they’re all very related to each other, it can make perfect sense to link those together,” he continues. “It’s when you start to get a lot more sites – you know, you don’t need 222 sites about car insurance. It looks a little weird if you have howdoigetmycarinsurance.net and wheresthecheapcarinsurance.com…I’m making these domain names up, so I’m not saying these particular site owners are bad – maybe they’re great. Who knows? But if you have 222 different copies of that, usually you’re not putting as much work into each individual site, and so as a result, you’ll end up with shallow or superficial sites, lower quality content, you’re more likely to see doorways…that sort of thing.”

It says something about Google’s power over webmasters (at least those that depend on it too much) that people have to check with Google to see if Google is okay with them putting a link on their own website to another of their own websites.

And this isn’t the first question Cutts has addressed regarding people linking to their own content in recent days. In another video, the user asked about internal links leading to lower rankings because of the Penguin update. The exact question was:

Do internal website links with exact match keyword anchor text hurt a website? These links help our users navigate our website properly. Are too many internal links with the same anchor text likely to result in a ranking downgrade because of Penguin?

So here, the person knows that the links are used to help users, but they’re still concerned how Google will view them. In other words, regardless of whether or not it’s actually good for people who visit the site, they need to make sure it’s going to be okay with Google, because presumably the users will never find it in the first place if they can’t find it in a Google search. Here’s Matt’s response to that:

“My answer is typically not,” says Cutts. “Typically, internal website links will not cause you any sort of trouble. Now, the reason why I say ‘typically not’ rather than a hard ‘no’ is just because as soon as I say a hard ‘no’ there will be someone who has like five thousand links – all with the exact same anchor text on one page. But if you have a normal site, you know…a catalog site or whatever…. you’ve got breadcrumbs…you’ve got a normal template there…that’s just the way that people find their way around the site, and navigate, you should be totally fine.”

“You might end up, because of breadcrumbs or the internal structured navigation, with a bunch of links that all say the same thing, that point to one page, but as long as that’s all within the same domain, just on-site links, you know, that’s the sort of thing where, because of the nature of you having a template, and you have many pages, it’s kind of expected that you’ll have a lot of links that all have that same anchor text that point to a given page,” he says.

So basically, this isn’t an issue you should have to worry about, but if you abuse it, it could become an issue. The problem is that clearly well-intentioned people are still worried about whether their practices will be considered abuse by Google, even if they think they’re just doing what’s right for the user.

After the Penguin update, we saw a lot of overreaction in link removal requests by those who were afraid links from other sites were hurting them. In the process, because of their fear of Google, some requested the removal of links they would have otherwise found valuable. Google has since offered the Link Disavow tool, but Google even suggests that most people don’t use it.

It will be interesting to see how people continue to approach links moving forward. This week marked the one-year anniversary of the Penguin update, and a big update to that is expected in the near future.

Are people worrying about Google too much when it comes to links? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Have you seen less traffic from Google Image Search since the redesign? Let us know in the comments.

Webmasters complaining about changes made by Google is nothing new. Every time Google releases a major algorithm update like Penguin or Panda, the outcry is everywhere. But, like it or not, that’s Google trying to better its algorithm, and ultimately improve its search results. You could also argue that any traffic one site loses, another gains. Somebody wins.

The Image Search story is a bit different, however. This is not an algorithmic change designed to point users to higher quality images or more relevant image results. It’s a cosmetic change, and while some users may find the experience to be an upgrade, it’s clear that many webmasters have not welcomed the redesign.

We got over seventy comments about the changes on a previous article we published. Not many were positive. In fact, most were from webmasters talking about the traffic they lost almost instantly. Here are a few examples:

“55% dropped for websites with images…”

“Google image traffic has dropped by 50-70% on my site…”

We could go on. See for yourself.

That was back in January. It doesn’t appear that things have gotten much better.

Define Media Group published some findings from a recent study on Monday (hat tip to Search Engine Land). According to the firm, you might as well spend your time in other areas of search engine optimization and online marketing, and not worry so much about optimizing for image search anymore.

“We analyzed the image search traffic of 87 domains and found a 63% decrease in image search referrals after Google’s new image search UI was released,” explains Shahzad Abbas. “Publishers that had previously benefitted the most from their image optimization efforts suffered the greatest losses after the image search update, experiencing declines nearing 80%.”

“In the eleven weeks after Google’s new image search was released, there has been no recovery – which means for image search, the significantly reduced traffic levels we’re seeing is the new normal,” he adds. “In the aftermath of the new image search experience, image SEO has been severely compromised, and we have no choice but to recommend deprioritizing image SEO when weighed against other search traffic initiatives.”

Of course, there’s always the chance that your images could turn up in universal search results on Google’s web results pages, but even then, personalized “Search Plus Your World” results tend to get the emphasis when applicable.

It’s all made even more interesting due to the fact that Google pitched the changes as good for webmasters, indicating that they would actually drive more traffic to sites.

“The domain name is now clickable, and we also added a new button to visit the page the image is hosted on,” wrote associate product manager Hongyi Li in the announcement. “This means that there are now four clickable targets to the source page instead of just two. In our tests, we’ve seen a net increase in the average click-through rate to the hosting website.”

“The source page will no longer load up in an iframe in the background of the image detail view,” Li added. “This speeds up the experience for users, reduces the load on the source website’s servers, and improves the accuracy of webmaster metrics such as pageviews. As usual, image search query data is available in Top Search Queries in Webmaster Tools.”

It’s possible that some sites are seeing more traffic from the Image Search changes, and just aren’t being as vocal, but there has been an overwhelming amount of complaints since the redesign, and this new study is not doing anything to defend Google’s case.

Of course, Google is all about placing users first (even over webmasters), and they’ll continue to do what they think is best for them. From a user experience perspective, the changes aren’t bad. But that’s little consolation for those who now have to find other ways to get their content in front of an audience.

Do you see Google’s recent Image Search changes as a positive or a negative? Let us know in the comments.

Google has penalized Mozilla.org, the nonprofit site of the organization that provides the Firefox browser. This doesn’t appear to be an accident like what recently happened with Digg. This was a real manual web spam penalty.

Mozilla Web Production Manager Christopher More posted about it in Google’s Webmaster Help forum (hat tip to Barry Schwartz), where he shared the message he got from Google:

Google has detected user-generated spam on your site. Typically, this kind of spam is found on forum pages, guestbook pages, or in user profiles. As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to your site.

“I am unable to find any spam on http://www.mozilla.org,” said More. “I have tried a site:www.mozilla.org [spam terms] and nothing is showing up on the domain. I did find a spammy page on a old version of the website, but that is 301 redirected to an archive website.”

Google Webmaster Trends analyst John Mueller responded:

To some extent, we will manually remove any particularly egregious spam from our search results that we find, so some of those pages may not be directly visible in Google’s web-search anymore. Looking at the whole domain, I see some pages similar to those that Pelagic (thanks!) mentioned: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:mozilla.org+cheap+payday+seo (you’ll usually also find them with pharmaceutical brand-names among other terms).

In addition to the add-ons, there are a few blogs hosted on mozilla.org that appear to have little or no moderation on the comments, for example http://blog.mozilla.org/respindola/about/ looks particularly bad. For these kinds of sites, it may make sense to allow the community to help with comment moderation (eg. allow them to flag or vote-down spam), and to use the rel=nofollow link microformat to let search engines know that you don’t endorse the links in those unmoderated comments.

For more tips on handling UGC (and I realize you all probably have a lot of experience in this already) are at http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81749

Also keep in mind that we work to be as granular as possible with our manual actions. Personally, I think it’s good to react to a message like that by looking into ways of catching and resolving the cases that get through your existing UGC infrastructure, but in this particular case, this message does not mean that your site on a whole is critically negatively affected in our search results.

Let this be a lesson to all webmasters and bloggers. Keep your comments cleaned up.

Mozilla still appears to be showing up in key search results like for “mozilla” and for “web browser”. It’s not as bad as when Google had to penalize its own Chrome browser for paid links.

A newspaper company wants to add an archive with 200,000 pages. Should they add it all at once or in steps?

Cutts says, “I think we can handle it either way, so we should be able to process it, but if we see a lot of pages or a lot of things ranking on a site all of a sudden, then we might take a look at it from the manual web spam team. So if it doesn’t make any difference whatsoever to you in terms of the timing of the roll-out, I might stage it a little bit, and do it in steps. That way, it’s not as if you’ve suddenly dropped five million pages on the web, and it’s relatively rare to be able to drop hundreds of thousands of pages on the web, and have them be really high quality.”

“An archive of a newspaper is a great example of that,” he adds. “But, if it’s all the same to you, and it doesn’t make that much of a difference, I might tend to do it more in stages, and do more of a gradual roll-out. You could still roll them out in large blocks, but you know, just break that up a little bit.”

So it doesn’t sound like you’re going to have any major problems if you do it all at once (provided you’re not actually spamming Google with low quality content), but you might be raising a red flag with the web spam team, so it’s probably better to err on the side of caution, as Cutts suggests.