Are you paying close attention to Google’s algorithm updates these days? Are you looking forward to the updates, or are you afraid of what they will bring? Let us know in the comments.

Cutts is careful to note that any of this information is subject to change, and should be taken with a grain of salt, but this pretty much the kind of stuff they have planned at the moment.

Penguin

We already knew the Penguin update was on the way, and he touches on that.

“We’re relatively close to deploying the next generation of Penguin,” says Cutts. “Internally we call it ‘Penguin 2.0,’ and again, Penguin is a webspam change that’s dedicated to try to find black hat webspam, and try to target and address that. So this one is a little more comprehensive than Penguin 1.0, and we expect it to go a little bit deeper in have a little bit more of an impact than the original version of Penguin.”

Before the video came out, Cutts was already talking about this update on Twitter, saying that it would be “larger” and roll out in the “next few weeks”.

Updates To Panda

Google recently changed its updating strategy for Panda. Webmasters use to anxiously await coming Panda updates, but Google has turned it into a rolling update, meaning that it will continue to update often and regularly, to the point where anticipating any one big update is not really possible any longer. On top of that, Google stopped announcing them, as it just doesn’t make sense for them to do so anymore.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t Panda news, as Cutts has proven. It turns out that the Panda that has haunted so many webmasters over the last couple years may start easing up a little bit, and become (dare I say?) a bit friendlier.

Cutts says, “We’ve also been looking at Panda, and seeing if we can find some additional signals (and we think we’ve got some) to help refine things for the sites that are kind of in the border zone – in the gray area a little bit. And so if we can soften the effect a little bit for those sites that we believe have some additional signals of quality, then that will help sites that have previously been affected (to some degree) by Panda.”

Sites And Their Authority

If you’re an authority on any topic, and you write about it a lot, this should be good news (in a perfect world, at least).

“We have also been working on a lot of ways to help regular webmasters,” says Cutts. “We’re doing a better job of detecting when someone is more of an authority on a specific space. You know, it could be medical. It could be travel. Whatever. And try to make sure that those rank a little more highly if you’re some sort of authority or a site, according to the algorithms, we think might be a little more appropriate for users.”

Advertorials

Also on the Google menu is a bigger crackdown on advertorials.

“We’ve also been looking at advertorials,” says Cutts .”That is sort of native advertising – and those sorts of things that violate our quality guidelines. So, again, if someone pays for coverage, or pays for an ad or something like that, those ads should not flow PageRank. We’ve seen a few sites in the U.S. and around the world that take money and do link to websites, and pass PageRank, so we’ll be looking at some efforts to be a little bit stronger on our enforcement as advertorials that violate our quality guidelines.”

“There’s nothing wrong inherently with advertorials or native advertising, but they should not flow PageRank, and there should be clear and conspicuous disclosure, so that users realize that something is paid – not organic or editorial,” he adds.

Queries With High Spam Rates

Google will also be working harder on certain types of queries that tend to draw a lot of spam.

Cutts says, “We get a lot of great feedback from outside of Google, so, for example, there were some people complaining about searches like ‘payday loans’ on Google.co.uk. So we have two different changes that try to tackle those kinds of queries in a couple different ways. We can’t get into too much detail about exactly how they work, but I’m kind of excited that we’re going from having just general queries be a little more clean to going to some of these areas that have traditionally been a little more spammy, including for example, some more pornographic queries, and some of these changes might have a little bit more of an impact on those kinds of areas that are a little more contested by various spammers and that sort of thing.”

Denying Value To Link Spam

Google will continue to be vigilant when it comes to all types of link spam, and has some new tricks up its sleeve, apparently.

Cutts says, “We’re also looking at some ways to go upstream to deny the value to link spammers – some people who spam links in various ways. We’ve got some nice ideas on ways that that becomes less effective, and so we expect that that will roll out over the next few months as well.”

“In fact, we’re working on a completely different system that does more sophisticated link analysis,” he adds. “We’re still in the early days for that, but it’s pretty exciting. We’ve got some data now that we’re ready to start munching, and see how good it looks. We’ll see whether that bears fruit or not.”

Hopefully this won’t lead to a whole lot of new “fear of linking” from webmasters, as we’ve seen since Penguin first rolled out, but that’s probably wishful thinking.

Hacked Sites

Google intends to get better on the hacked sites front.

“We also continue to work on hacked sites in a couple different ways,” says Cutts. “Number one: trying to detect them better. We hope in the next few months to roll out a next-generation site detection that is even more comprehensive, and also trying to communicate better to webmasters, because sometimes they see confusion between hacked sites and sites that serve up malware, and ideally, you’d have a one-stop shop where once someone realizes that they’ve been hacked, they can go to Webmaster Tools, and have some single spot where they could go and have a lot more info to sort of point them in the right way to hopefully clean up those hacked sites.”

Clusters Of Results From The Same Site

There have been complaints about domain clustering in Google’s results, and Google showing too many results from the same domain on some queries.

Cutts says, “We’ve also heard a lot of feedback from people about – if I go down three pages deep, I’ll see a cluster of several results all from one domain, and we’ve actually made things better in terms of – you would be less likely to see that on the first page, but more likely to see that on the following pages. And we’re looking a change, which might deploy, which would basically say that once you’ve seen a cluster of results from one site, then you’d be less likely to see more results from that site as you go deeper into the next pages of Google search results.”

“We’re going to keep trying to figure out how we can give more information to webmasters…we’re also going to be looking for ways that we can provide more concrete details, [and] more example URLs that webmasters can use to figure out where to go to diagnose their site.”

So Google has a lot of stuff in the works that SEOs and webmasters are going to want to keep a close eye on. It’s going to be interesting to see the impact it all has. Given that Google makes algorithm changes every day, this has to be far from everything they have in the works, but I guess the video makes up for the lack of “Search Quality HIghlights” from Google in recent months. Still wondering if those are ever coming back. They were, after all, released to keep Google more transparent.

What do you think of the changes Matt Cutts talked about. Looking forward to any of them? Dreading any? Let us know in the comments.

Speaking at the SMX conference, Cutts said that the next Panda update will take place this Friday, March 15th or by Monday, March 18th at the latest.

The last Panda update rolled out on January 22nd, and Google said that it affected 1.2% of queries. Even if a Panda update launches this Friday, it will have been the longest time between updates in recent memory. Google previously released a Panda update a few days before Christmas, and two back in November.

Although the Panda refresh is coming sooner, a Penguin update is also on the horizon – and Cutts said that it’ll be a big one. Cutts said that it will be one of the most talked-about updates of the year.

They are “working on the next generation of Penguin,” said Cutts.

More algorithm changes were discussed at SXSW last week. There, Cutts announced a possible crackdown on bad online merchants.

“We have a potential launch later this year, maybe a little bit sooner, looking at the quality of merchants and whether we can do a better job on that, because we don’t want low quality experience merchants to be ranking in the search results,” he said.

Check here for more on the future of Panda and Penguin in 2013

The video was a response to the user-submitted question:

Europe is small compared with USA, so will Google get a webspam team for smaller markets?

“It turns out we actually do have a webspam team based in Europe (in Dublin, in fact), and they’re able to handle webspam and tackle spam reports in a wide variety of languages, so on the order o well over a dozen – dozens of languages, because there’s a lot of smart people there,” says Cutts. “So we actually have people on the ground in a lot of different offices around the world, and we also have engineers in Zurich. We have an engineer in Hong Kong, but there’s a lot of people who have native experience…people who think about spam in Russia, but also a lot of people in Dublin, who have done a fantastic job dealing with, you know, if an algorithm misses something, they’re there to find the spam. They know the lay of the land. They know who the big players are, and they’re really quite expert.”

“But if there’s some kind of really unique link spam going on in Poland, for example, there’s a person there, and those people are on top of that situation,” he adds. “So, I think it’s important that Google not be just a U.S.-centric or an English-centric company. We want to be international. We want to deal with all different languages, and it is the case that we might not have webpam full-time on every single language, but you would be pretty shocked at the number of languages that the webspam team collectively is able to fight spam in.”

Webspam is always a big issue for Google, but it’s been a particularly big issue in the search industry this year, thanks to Google’s launch of the Penguin update, designed to algorithmically tackle sites violating Google’s quality guidelines.

In another video from Google this week, Cutts said that about 90% of the messages Google sends out to webmasters are about black hat webspam.

More recent Webmaster Help videos from Matt Cutts here.

Spinfographics. Get ready, because they about to flood the Internet.

You never heard of “spinfographics” before? It means, well, if you know what a splog is, you will probably understand exactly what a spinfographic is. If, not we had best go back to the beginning.

In the beginning there was Google.

Google created the Internet, and saw that it was good.

Then Google created websites, and saw that it was good.

Then Google ranked websites, and saw that it was good.

And Google told webmasters to make their websites for users, not for higher rankings. But webmasters were tempted, and they took of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, that they might be like Google and know the ranking algorithm.

And nothing was the same again. Every time webmasters took another bite of the fruit, webmasterkind would spoil it. The pattern was always the same…

1. Knowledge: A few people discover that they can rank better by adding more terms in the
keywords meta tag.

2. Temptation: Everybody decides to stuff their keyword meta tag so they can rank for everything.

3. A big mess!: Suddenly rankings are scalable, everybody can do it and replicate with ease. Too much quantity, too little quality.

4. Banishment: Google removes keywords meta data from its algorithm.

Sometime later…

1. Knowledge: People learn that directory links can be useful for ranking well.

2. Temptation: Some people realize that if they can create tons of directories, they can get lots of webmaster traffic.
Other people discover that if they can auto-submit sites, they can make money for building tons of links.

3. A big mess!: Suddenly link-building is scalable, everybody can do it and replicate with ease. Too much quantity, too little quality.

4. Banishment: Google devalues directory links in its algorithm.

Then…

1. Knowledge: People learn that article directory links can be useful for ranking well.

2. Temptation: Some people realize that if they can create tons of article directories, they can get lots of webmaster traffic. Other people discover that if they can auto-submit articles, they can make money for building tons of links. Quickly. Cheaply.

3. A big mess!: Suddenly article submissions are scalable, everybody can do it and replicate with ease. Too much quantity, too little quality.

4. Banishment: Google devalues links from duplicate content in its algorithm.

Then, of course…

1. Knowledge: People figure out that if they spin each article into various versions, they can use the same basic content without creating duplicate content.

2. Temptation: Some people realize if they can automate the spinning process, they can create lots of articles easily from the same content. Quickly. Cheaply.

3. A big mess!: Suddenly article spinning is scalable, everybody can do it and replicate with ease. Too much quantity, too little quality. In fact, so little quality that it starts turning the Internet into a waste bin.

4. Banishment: Google devalues spun content in its algorithm and penalizes heavy users.

We are getting closer. And then…

1. Knowledge: People figure out that keyword rich links in blog content are the best links for ranking well.

2. Temptation: Some people realize how much money they can make by offering tons of in-content blog links for very little work by creating blogs just to sell links.

3. A big mess!: Suddenly in-content blog link-building is scalable, and splogs (spam blogs) are popping up like weeds. Too much quantity, too little quality. Yes, the Internet really is looking more and more like a waste bin.

4. Banishment: Google de-indexes whole networks of splogs and penalizes heavy users. Can you say “Penguin”?

And next…

1. Knowledge: Some people figure out that they can get lots of good links by sharing Infographics.

2. Temptation: Infographics galleries start popping up and some people realize there is a market to be made selling “cheap, easy, DIY Infographics”.

3. A big mess!: Suddenly Infographics creation and distribution becomes ______________ . Too much quantity, too little quality. (Fill in the blank. Hint, it rhymes with “shwalable”). Yes, we transition from Infographics to spinfographics.

4. Banishment: Google _________________________ (Fill in the blanks). What do you think Google will do to spinfographers – to webmasters who mass produce and mass distribute Infographics?

Listen carefully, and you can already hear the moaning and groaning on future webmaster forums, as people complain with surprise that their sites have been penalized or lost rankings because they were mass distributing Infographics to artificially boost their rankings.

“But Google says, ‘The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community.’”

OK, sure. But the pattern is always the same. Huge swarms of webmasters looking for shortcuts, trying to mass produce quality, totally oblivious to the oxymoron of their business model. And they spoil it for the rest of us. Already people are advertising services to create “easy” infographics “in minutes” for a very “cheap” price.

Does this mean the days of Infographics are numbered? I don’t think so. There always has been a place for graphical displays of data. Newspapers have been doing it for decades, and it will continue on the Internet.

However, I am certain that any popular link-bait strategy using Infographics today will be outdated a year or two from now. Smart webmasters will go back to the table and reconsider how to use Infographics to boost their promotions.

Done right, I am confident that these will always be useful for search engine rankings. Just as blog links.
And content spinning. And article links. And directory links. And…well, maybe not meta tags.

Just as in all these previous techniques, webmasters will have to make sure that it is perfectly clear to the search engines that they are not mass-producing, mass-linking or using a scalable or automated method to create or distribute content.

And there is a single strategy that applies to all of these. Don’t do it for the search engines; do it for reaching out to new markets. Don’t ignore the search engines; keep one eye on them with everything you do. But if the main goal of any action is aimed at reaching new markets, you will end up creating and distributing the kind of content that Google wants you to. Or at least that Google is now saying that it wants you to – but that is another scary topic for another discussion.

For now, the key thing is to avoid Spinfographics, because with the Penguin update, Google has shown that it is ready to do more than just devalue scalable links – they are willing to penalize sites involved.

White hat search marketers read and follow Google Guidelines. What should they tell clients whose competitors use black hat techniques (such as using doorway pages) and whom continue to rank as a result of those techniques?

Do you you think Google does a good job catching webspam? Let us know in the comments.

“So first and foremost, I would say do a spam report, because if you’re violating Google’s guidelines in terms of cloaking or sneaky JavaScript redirects, buying links, doorway pages, keyword stuffing, all those kinds of things, we do want to know about it,” he says. “So you can do a spam report. That’s private. You can also stop by Google’s Webmaster forum, and that’s more public, but you can do a spam report there. You can sort of say, hey, I saw this content. It seems like it’s ranking higher than it should be ranking. Here’s a real business, and it’s being outranked by this spammer…those kinds of things.”

He notes that are both Google employees and “super users” who keep an eye on the forum, and can alert Google about issues.

“The other thing that I would say is if you look at the history of which businesses have done well over time, you’ll find the sorts of sites and the sorts of businesses that are built to stand the test of time,” says Cutts. “If someone is using a technique that is a gimmick or something that’s like the SEO fad of the day, that’s a little less likely to really work well a few years from now. So a lot of the times, you’ll see people just chasing after, ‘OK, I’m going to use guest books’, or iI’m going to use link wheels’ or whatever. And then they find, ‘Oh, that stopped working as well.’ And sometimes it’s because of broad algorithmic changes like Panda. Sometimes it’s because of specific web spam targeted algorithms.”

I’m sure you’ve heard of Penguin.

He references the JC Penney and Overstock.com incidents, in which Google took manual action. For some reason, he didn’t bring up the Google Chrome incident.

This is actually a pretty timely video from Cutts, as another big paid linking controversy was uncovered by Josh Davis (which Cutts acknowledged on Twitter). Google ended up de-indexing the SEO firm involved in that.

“So my short answer is go ahead and do a spam report,” Cutts continues. “You can also report it in the forums. But it’s definitely the case that if you’re taking those higher risks, that can come back and bite you. And that can have a material impact.”

He’s not joking about that. Overstock blamed Google for “an ugly year” when its revenue plummeted. Even Google’s own Chrome penalty led to some questions about the browser’s market share.

Cutts notes that Google is also happy to get feedback at conferences, on Twitter, online, blogs, forums, “if you’re seeing sites that are prospering and are using black hat techniques.”

“Now, it’s possible that they have some low-quality links, and there are some links that people aren’t aware of that we see that are actually high quality,” Cutts notes. “But we’re happy to get spam reports. We’re happy to dig into them. And then we’ll try to find either new algorithms to try to rank the things more appropriately in the future. Or we’re certainly willing to take manual action on spam if it’s egregious or if it violates our guidelines. We have a manual web spam team that is willing to respond to those spam reports.”

According to Cutts, you can even submit spam reports using Google Docs. Here’s a conversation he had on Twitter recently:

After Google launched the Penguin update, Cutts tweeted the following about post-Penguin spam reports:

Shortly thereafter, he tweeted:

I’m sure plenty more reports have rolled into Google since then, but it does seem like they process them fairly quickly.

Do you think Google has done a good job at cleaning up webspam? Share your thoughts.

We were hoping to get a some in depth discussion about Google’s recent Penguin update, but apparently that wasn’t a major point of conversation. Daniel Waisberg liveblogged the discussion at Search Engine Land, and Penguin only came up briefly. Here’s the relevant snippet of the liveblog:

Danny talks about Penguin and asks how it is going from Google standpoint, are search results better? Amit says that in the end of the day, users will stay with the search engine that provides the most relevant results. Google’s objective was to reward high quality sites and that was a success with Penguin. One of the beauties of running a search engine is that the search engines that can measure best what the users feel is the one that will succeed more.

From Google’s perspective they use any signal that is available for them, more than 200 of them. They have to make sure they are accurate and good. They will use any signal, whether it is organic or not.

Google’s Matt Cutts also recently said that Google has considered Penguin a success, though plenty out there disagree.

If you want Google’s advice on Penguin recovery, check out these videos Matt Cutts says to watch, these tips he endorsed on Twitter, and of course Google’s quality guidelines.

Google has said on multiple occasions that it thinks the Penguin update has been a success. Do you agree? Let us know in the comments.

PageRank And The Web

WWW, as you may know, stands for World Wide Web. It’s a web because it it’s connected by links. Sites all over the web link to one another, creating a path for users to click from page to the next. Often those pages are to different sites. This is the way it has worked for years. Just think what it would be like if sites couldn’t freely link to one another. The web would be broken, and users would suffer.

When Google launched with its PageRank algorithm, it was a revolution in search. It seemed to be a better way of doing search. It gave a rhyme and reason to the ranking of search results. Today, Google uses over 200 signals to rank its search results, which are becoming more personalized than ever before. PageRank still matters, but it’s far from the only thing that matters.

Yet, it is PageRank that has given links on the web so much power to influence the visibility of web content. Now that just about everyone is on the web, everyone is fighting to have their content seen. Once upon a time, you would have thought: the more links the better. More links can only lead to more chances people will see your content. Now, somewhat ironically, people are finding that that the links they have out there are making their content less visible. In some cases, they’re making it practically non-existent in Google, or at least so buried, it might as well be non-existent.

Freak Out Time?

Google’s Penguin update has been a major wake up call to webmasters about certain kinds of linking practices. The update was designed to target sites violating Google’s quality guidelines. Among those guidelines are: “Don’t participate in link schemes” and “Avoid hidden text or hidden links.”

Some of Google’s guidelines are obvious – avoid obviously unethical practices. But in the link schemes department, things can get a little blurry. Just ask WPMU.org, which got hit by Penguin over a few questionable links (interestingly enough, after seemingly benefiting from Google’s Panda update, designed to reward higher quality sites).

A lot of webmasters have taken to the forums and blogs to complain about the Penguin update, but Google has, on more than on occasion, deemed the update a success. We’ll also be seeing it come back around every so often, much like its Panda predecessor.

Even before Penguin, Google was sending out tons of messages to webmasters alerting them of questionable links. All of this has gotten webmasters in to a frenzy to clean-up their link profiles, and reduce the number of links Google considers to be of poor quality, in hopes that their content can find its way back into Google search visibility.

Legal Action Over Links?

Some webmasters have even gone so far as to threaten legal action over sites that are linking to them. We referenced this in another article after Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable mentioned that this was happening. Now, Greg Finn at Search Engine Land has pointed to a specific example where PSKL got a DMCA take down notice from LifeShield, after writing a positive review.

Now, to be clear, this DMCA takedown notice is not in reference to any content theft or content use. It’s about links. It threatens legal action. It says:

I request you to remove from following website (pskl.us)
all links to www.lifeshield.com website as soon as possible.
In order to find the links please do the following:
1) If this is an online website directory, use directory’s search system to find “LifeShield” links.
2) If there are hidden links in the source code of website, open website’s main page and view its source code. Search for “lifeshield.com” in the source code and you will see hidden links.

It also says:

LifeShield, Inc will be perusing legal action if the webmaster does not remove the referenced link within 48 hours.

Jeremy at PSKL actually shares the entire conversation around the matter, which did include an apology, indicating that PSKL shouldn’t have been on the list of sites that received a notice. Jeremy, however, took issue that there was a list of sites getting such notices. Throughout the conversation, it is revealed that LifeShield had a site “cloak lifeshield and generate over 700K back links” without LifeShield’s knowledge, and that “Google stepped in and slapped” them with a penalty, which led to layoffs at the company.

Jeremy responded with, “So you’re saying that somebody went out and bought 700K back links for you, knowing that it would get you penalized by Google? So does that mean you had (Company name) send out 700K DMCA notices? Talk about throwing good money after bad. Report the linkspam to the spam team at Google, then spend that money on an SEO expert rather than on trying to bully people with intimidation.”

The response was actually longer than that, and included the metaphor of putting out a house fire with manure, but that was the main gist.

I suggest reading Jeremy’s entire post. It’s pretty interesting.

Is This Where The Web Should Go?

He does make another important point in this: A party creating large quantities of backlinks to a site in order to generate SEO (or, in this case, destroy SEO) is unethical. It is not illegal.

While many may not have a problem with such practices becoming illegal, it’s the idea that the law could intervene with linking in any form that could lead to greater problems. Just consider all fo the gray area there already is in fair use law. There will always be different interpretations, and that can get dangerous.

For the record (granted, I’m no lawyer), I wouldn’t expect any legal action, such as that threatened in LifeShield’s DMCA notice to hold much water in a court of law. Finn also points to two cases (Ford Motor Company v. 2600 Enterprises) and (Ticketmaster Corp. v. Tickets.com, Inc.), where the legality of linking prevailed.

But even if things like this have to go to court, it’s going to be a major inconvenience, and legal fees will have to be paid. If sites practicing legitimate, ethical linking habits get caught up in this, where will that leave the web?

Is this what linking on the World Wide Web will become? Will you have to worry about getting sued because you linked to a site, and that site may or may not find your site to be a strong enough site to desire a link from? Could you get sued because your page didn’t have a high enough PageRank, and not enough link juice to help the site you’re linking to in its search engine visibility?

LifeShield seems to be targeting some very specific webspam, but sending out notices to a whole list of sites. It’s likely that LifeShield isn’t the only company panicing and resorting to such action. It’s unfortunate, for the company if some negative SEO (it’s unclear if this was from a competitor) was able to have such an impact on its business, as Jeremy suggests, this may not be the best way of trying to resolve the issue.

Let’s Give Google Some Credit.

You can point to Google’s guidelines and its algorithm updates, which clearly do cause some to think this way, but just the same, Google can’t be held entirely to blame for this kind of mentality either. The company has said in the past that people shouldn’t obsess with PageRank, and that it uses over 200 signals to rank content. PageRank is not the only thing that matters. In fact, the company puts out huge lists of signal changes every month.

It shows the power over society that Google really holds though. It shows how much businesses rely on Google search that they will go so far as to threaten sites that are simply linking to them with legal action.

Should such legal action ever lead to a victory in court, that could mean very bad news for the Web as we know it, and people could be afraid to link. I would imagine that would spawn more issues of sites not getting the credit (and possible referral traffic) they deserve.

Do you think Google’s guidelines and penalties can have an influence on the law? Now that would be power, and made even more ironic still, by the fact that Google is constantly under scrutiny of its own.

Share your thoughts in the comments.

Image: Batman Returns (Warner Bros.)

Update: Here’s another interesting search engine project on Kickstarter.

Visual Purple’s Megan Rutherford reached out to us to tell us a little about the project. First, check out the video:

“We’ve been building bleeding-edge technology and advanced training simulations for years,” she says. “Recently, we developed and launched a professional data discovery tool for analysts and researchers. The tool is GisterPRO, and does some very powerful things such as read unstructured data – things computers don’t normally like to read.”

“We agonized over finding a way to bring this technology to the rest of us,” she adds. “Then, we stumbled upon Kickstarter.”

“Like most people, Google is our go-to search engine,” the Kickstarter page says. “From our extensive study of the mathematics of language, we found a great way to combine smart web bots and intelligent reading technology. Our technology reads every Google result, strips out the spam, and bubbles up only the best results along with the strongest concepts in a kinetic, Gooey Graph.”

It strips out the spam and bubbles up the best results? Maybe Google should be checking this out as a possible acquisition target, given all the complaints that have been going around regarding the Penguin update.

“Instead of marketing tags, these concepts are discovered entities that empower you to interact with and explore Google results like never before. Gooey makes search fun and rewarding for kids of all ages,” the page continues. “All you have to do is type your search terms into the search bar (just like you would any Google search). We issue your search to Google but our smart bots literally check every result returned – verifying each link and reading each document for you.”

“On the right side of the Graphic User Interface (GUI for short) is Gooey Graph – an alive, real-time network diagram of discovered concepts,” the page explains. “Just play with Gooey Graph by deleting or stacking concepts to quickly sort results and find what you need.”

Rutherford says Gooey Search is designed to bring “professional-grade data discovery technology to the rest of us”.

“The sub-rosa story is that Gooey brings complete privacy, anonymity and automatic entity extraction to Google searches while neutralizing ‘Filter Bubble’ biasing of search results,” she says.

More on the Filter Bubble here.

The Kickstarter page includes the following image used to illustrate how the user can maniplate the “Gooey Graph”:

What do you think?

Gooey will only be funded if it gets $125,000 in pledges by Friday, June 8. So far, it’s attracted 44 backers at $2,380.

In light of all the link warnings Google has been sending out, and the Penguin update, a lot of webmasters are freaking out about their link profiles, and want to eliminate any questionable links that might be sending Google signals that could lead to lower rankings.

A user submitted the following question to Cutts:

Site A links to Site B because Site B has content that would be useful to Site A’s end users, and Google indexes the appropriate page. After the page is indexed, Site B’s content changes and becomes spammy. Does Site A incur a penalty in this case?

“OK, so let’s make it concrete,” says Cutts. “Suppose I link to a great site. I love it, and so I link to it. I think it’s good for my users. Google finds that page. Everybody’s happy. Users are happy. Life is good. Except now, that site that I linked to went away. It didn’t pay its domain registration or whatever, and now becomes maybe an expired domain porn site, and it’s doing some really nasty stuff. Am I going to be penalized for that? In general, no.”

“It’s not the sort of thing where just having a few stale links that happen to link to spam are going to get you into problems,” he continues. “But if a vast majority of your site just happens to link to a whole bunch of really spammy porn or off-topic stuff, then that can start to affect your site’s reputation. We look at the overall nature of the web, and certain amount of links are always going stale, going 404, pointing to information that can change or that can become spammy.”

“And so it’s not the case that just because you have one link that happens to go to bad content because the content has changed since you made that link, that you’re going to run into an issue,” he concludes. “At the same time, we are able to suss out in a lot of ways when people are trying to link to abusive or manipulative or deceptive or malicious sites. So in the general case, I wouldn’t worry about it at all. If you are trying to hide a whole bunch of spammy links, then that might be the sort of thing that you need to worry about, but just a particular site that happened to go bad, and you don’t know about every single site, and you don’t re-check every single link on your site, that’s not the sort of thing that I would worry about.”

Of course, a lot more people are worried about negative SEO practices, and inbound links, rather than the sites they’re linking to themselves.

More Penguin coverage here.

Don’t forget that nofollow was introduced with blog comments in mind. Google put out a post in early 2005 called “Preventing Comment Spam,” in which it said:

If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

SEO consultant Carson Ward recently wrote a great article at SEOmoz about types of link spam to avoid. One of those was comment spam.

“If I were an engineer on a team designed to combat web spam, the very first thing I would do would be to add a classifier to blog comments,” he wrote. “I would then devalue every last one. Only then would I create exceptions where blog comments would count for anything.”

“Let’s pretend that Google counts every link equally, regardless of where it is on the page. How much do you think 1/1809th of the link juice on a low-authority page is worth to you?” he wrote, referring to a screen cap of a spam comment on a page with 1808 other comments. “Maybe I’m missing something here, because I can’t imagine spam commenting being worth anything at any price. Let’s just hope you didn’t build anchor text into those comments.”

It may seem like common sense to many, but it’s amazing how frequently comment spam occurs, even today, even on blogs that implement nofollow on comment links.

For the Bloggers

Matt Cutts put out a pretty popular blog post in 2009 about PageRank sculpting. Here’s what he had to say about blog comments in that:

Q: If I run a blog and add the nofollow attribute to links left by my commenters, doesn’t that mean less PageRank flows within my site?

A: I wouldn’t recommend closing comments in an attempt to “hoard” your PageRank. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites.

Some bloggers aren’t opposed to turning off comments though. We had a couple of interesting conversations with bloggers Jeremy Schoemaker and Michael Gray last year, following the Panda update. Panda was all about the quality of content on a page, and obviously blog comments can carry varying degrees of quality.

Schoemaker told us that he called a Google engineer friend and asked about this. Schoemaker said he was told that if anything, it’s “diluting the quality score of my page” by possibly diluting overall keyword density. Another factor could be comments that go through, but are clearly spam. These send signals that the page is not being well maintained.

Gray, who turned off his blog comments years ago, told us last year, “While I’m not living in the SEO world of 1999, things like keyword focus and density do play a role,” he adds. “If you’re doing your job as an SEO in 95% of the cases the keyword you are trying to rank for should be the most used word/phrase on your page. If you’ve gone to all the trouble to do that why would you now let and knucklehead with a keyboard and internet connection come by and screw that up with comments?”

Google says in its help center, “If you can’t or don’t want to vouch for the content of pages you link to from your site — for example, untrusted user comments or guestbook entries — you should nofollow those links. This can discourage spammers from targeting your site, and will help keep your site from inadvertently passing PageRank to bad neighborhoods on the web.”

“In particular, comment spammers may decide not to target a specific content management system or blog service if they can see that untrusted links in that service are nofollowed,” it says. “If you want to recognize and reward trustworthy contributors, you could decide to automatically or manually remove the nofollow attribute on links posted by members or users who have consistently made high-quality contributions over time.”

As far as I can tell, nofllow hasn’t done much to detract spammers, but at least it does keep you from passing PageRank to bad neighborhoods.