Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

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Well, this question is definitely going to stir up strong emotions.
As google increasingly becomes the dominant force in searching obviously each flaw shows up.
I have a list but more than anything i would like more transparency.
1. When pagerank has been updated, can you hint as to how this will affect us. You don’t necessarily need to give us the update made but to know how it will benefit us would be good.
2. When i search i am normally looking for current information, can the results be ordered by date and relevance?
3. I would love Google to have less dependency on the number of links and more consideration for the site itself, the content, internal linking, well optimised and accessible for everyone.
4. I HATE the excessive use of the nofollow tag, I completely understand why it was created but I do not think that it has done the job it was created for.
I would like to see webmasters having more control of who they link to and not just nofollow everything. I especially think this is ridiculous when you see certain sites that each internal link is a nofollow link.
I am all for sculpting your pagerank but if this continues then the whole internet will be nofollow, where will that leave us?
I am not just complaining, i would like to see a number of different tags created, each with a different weight. Webmasters are central to this in controlling who they link to and what comments they publish.
a. comments tag - you know this is a comment but they are participating on the blog, it has been published so must be relevant to the topic.
b. a recommended link tag (research or source article), again weighted for relevancy.
c. advertiser tag, a paid advert on the site is meant for the users of the site and not really the link juice, tagging it as such omits any doubts over its presence.
d. internal link tag, we want google to see this information as part of the site.

I will be interested to see if Google does consider content to be the most important factor in 2009.

Thanks and good luck

Emma

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Link exchange in the footer… it’s very easy

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Build a better product search. If someone wants to buy a product, he or she will go to amazon to do the search instead of google. I need there is a lot improvement google can do to make its product oriented search as credible as its regular search that people will do holiday shopping through it.

it could be another revenue steam for google too which I think will dwarf what google is making now.

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I tend to review some obscure video game titles as well as the major ones on my site, and annoyingly despite my site often being one of the few places on the whole web with a review of a particular game, it’s the sites with “game pages” that wind up top of the SERPs. These are holding pages for particular titles with keywords like “reviews” littered about them, despite the fact that they haven’t reviewed that game yet and often never do. We all know which sites do this so I won’t mention any names.

And yes, kudos to them for creating such an SEO friendly website, very clever, but not helpful for the end user looking for an actual review of Game X.

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Hey Matt,

Posted my wish here

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Arbitrage…

I hate this so much, I hate to sound negative about Google but I think they allow it only because it brings in so much money.

Doing a search for something such as BRANDNAME bathroom, you come up with a PPC link to a list of page search results which is Overture listings for “Bathroom” - as far as the user journey goes this is disgusting, taking me back 3 steps in my searching …

I know that the click in Google cost them 10p and then the next click I could have made in the Overture listings would have earnt them 50p, so I do understand the business model for them, problem is that it effectively devalues ALL listings. I will happily provide a list of companies who actively engage in this!

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Raj, I was thinking that after I submitted it. As far as I know, there is no option to remove a whole domain from search results and never be bugged from them again. It would be a good addition anjd I would use to remove;

ExpertsExchange.com and Answers.com to name 2 from many.

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Regarding my mention on bakers cyst synonyms:

I forgot to mention that earlier I tried the option with the tilde sign, ~bakers cyst, but still didn’t have satisfactory results.

It has got many synonyms like: Posterior herniation of the knee joint, popliteal cyst, synovial cyst, peritendinitis serosa, myxoid cyst, ganglion, gastrocnemius-semimembranosus bursa, semimembranosus bursa etc.

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Deal with the out of control attorney spam in Google Local. I see attorneys creating fake businesses, fake addresses and phone numbers and multiple domain farms to dominate the 1-10 packs.

The Maps Group never responds to my spam reports. If I could only have 10 minutes on the phone with Maps Jen, you could instantly know who these people are and how they are doing it!

Google Maps destroys the natural language based businesses by letting spammy, adword looking sites to take over with its easily manipulated algo.

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@Dave (Original)

Personalizing my search: You may be talking about removing/voting/hiding the sites after the search has been done, but I want an option even before that, a query parameter to exclude some sites that I do not want to see in my search results right on my first query itself. With the current available personalization, you can vote/hide a site for one particular search but for another search that site may prop up again in my results.

Neither Google search preferences nor Advanced Search have options for this! May be I’m ignorant! Can you help Dave (Original)?

Original?????!!!!!

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Glad I’m not the only one that thinks aboutus.org is useless.

experts exchange ticks me off too. If you go to the page from google, you have to scroll dozens of times to get to the content.

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1. Stop those websites/blog from appearing in the SERP which have not been updated since a long time.
Eg: Say a blog with its last entry in 2006 appears on top in SERP for a particular keyword. This limits the chances of those who have new blogs (after completion of sandbox) with regular updates. Maybe Google gives a lot of priority to the domain age or existence period, but whats the use of showing a blog in SERP when it has not have updated since the last 2 years. I feel that in such a case, a reader is deprived of the updated and fresh information.

2. Please reconsider Wikipedia listings. I am tired of seeing Wikipedia appear for almost every keyword that I enter. Even if it is an authority site mainly giving information, but as a user, it is not necessary that I would always look for information. I might consider purchasing a product and want only those websites that are selling products.

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http://www.1degree.com/process.asp

Take a look at this system. I have reported it to the webspam team and yet…nothing. Clocked content, clocked links, etc….

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1. remove pay-for-the-answer links from search results (e.g. experts exchange)

I second that and would add that site where you MUST sign-up/in to see what googlebot saw should be removed too.

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1. remove pay-for-the-answer links from search results (e.g. experts exchange)

2. aboutus.com useless.

3. notification when I log into any of my google services if there’s a problem with one of the websites in my webmasters tools.

4. The ability to declare which sections of a web page should be indexed.

5. Easier to report problems, such as obvious spam sites.

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6) Personalizing my search: I will be much pleased if I have an option to exclude some sites appearing in my search results for some information that I’m searching for. Eg., Wikipedia, answers.com.

Google has allowed this for a few Month now. Just log onto to your Google account.

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My suggestions as a blogger what I would expect from Google:

1) I get a lot of link buying offers though I have placed a warning on my contact page that I will flag link buying offers to Google Webspam Team. If I could really flag that messages to Google, I think it will be beneficial to Google to spot those secret link buyers.

2) Be transparent in penalties. If you could transfer the reason for penalties if any imposed on a site through web master console, the web masters could rectify the mistakes had it occurred due to their ignorance.

3) Sites found with viruses: Same as suggestion #2.

4) Better customer service: At least a one-sentence reply that “Google will look into the matter and get back to me” if I report anything to Google especially reconsideration requests if any.

My suggestions as a web surfer:
1) Spam local maps.

2) Still better search results, re: For eg., just now I searched for bakers cyst synonyms and the first result that I got was from a respectful site which has these terms in the title tag but the content has “No entries found.”

3) In this era of Google, the relevance of directories does not exist for searching anything. So no results from directories of any sort, even your pet DMOZ.

4) I’m still getting doorway pages or link pages whatever you call it for searches I make.

5) I tried to compile a list of some companies that are into one particular business and while searching for some company names, I got fed up with “aboutus.com” coming at top of the results page instead of a particular company’s web site.

6) Personalizing my search: I will be much pleased if I have an option to exclude some sites appearing in my search results for some information that I’m searching for. Eg., Wikipedia, answers.com.

Still I may come back again to put in here all those things that I may have forgot to write in one go.

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1) Google to take a top-down approach on Spam. I.e. Ban the site of the “professional SEO” when they use Web spam to boost their clients site(s). That SHOULD include the “professional SEO” who informs their client of the risks.

2) Stop pussy-footing around with Clayton penalties and actually BAN sites for a min of 6 Months, longer for repeat offenders.

3) For Google to STOP sponsoring Conferences where ANY sort of Web spam is taught. It sends a mixed message to site owners.

4) Stop showing TBPR on the Google toolbar.

5) Maintain a list of “SEO professionals” caught spamming via email and Web spam.

6) Have an email where Webmasters can forward spam emails they never solicited from “SEO professionals”.

7) Don’t except any old site for AdSense. Be selective.

REALLY crack down those selling PR in the form of links.

9) Google KNOWS the SEO forums that promote and condone Web spam already.

“Evil prevails when good people do nothing” can be changed to Blackhat prevails when Google does little to discourage it.

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I agree with Hawaii SEO. I’m tired of seeing Wikipedia promoted as if it’s an authoritative site. You once said Google felt it was okay to promote questionable content like Wikipedia articles because average users don’t know any better.

But who is Google fooling when stub articles are promoted to the top of search results? Why not at least filter the Wikipedia stubs?

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Google has a tool to check if a site map has no errors
Google has a tool to check if a web site has crawler issues
Google has a tool to check if there are no duplicate issues (like titles and descriptions)
W3C has a tool to check of a website is HTML (browsers) compliant
W3C has a tool to check if a CSS file is compliant
There are tools to achieve a better load performance
etc…
All tools in favor of the ’searcher’
Why not giving Webmasters a tool to check if a website (or page) is compliant with Google’s guidelines? (which, according to Google is in favor of the ’searcher’)

Ciao!

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I see the site’s indexed, keyword stuffing and all.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:alexchiu.com+plasma&filter=0

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Howdy Matt, long time reader, first time commenter here.

I’d like to see Google drop spammy pages from it’s listings. If I get a call from an unknown number, I Google the number. I cannot tell you how many times I get pages with lists of 100’s of phone numbers on it with no information other than where the area code and maybe exchange is. It normally takes me 5-6 clicks to find a site with actual information. Those pages with 100’s of phone numbers are clearly SE spam.

One thing I’d like to see is a toolbar tool that alerts users to spammed links. If for instance I click on a blog and one of the comments is bunch of viagra links. It’d be pretty cool if the tool bar could just strike through the links so it takes more incentive out spamming for spammers.

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I think Google does a very good job already. I don’t see many spam sites now like I used to. What is happening though is that vast sums are being spent by the ‘big players’ on buying links. The number One player in my niche, travel, has number one rankings in thousands of keywords. I set up a Google Alert several months ago for their domain name and nearly every day I get an email telling me where they have obtained links. It’s obvious these are not natural. Their site is similar to mine and they are the same age but because I don’t buy links I don’t get the rankings.

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Spam Blogs - Blog search results could be a LOT better. I get a lot of scraped RSS feeds and other sorts of auto generated or re-posted garbage when I do blog searches.

Wikipedia Spam: I’m sick of Wikipedia showing up at the top for everything. It should be on the page somewhere but at the top for almost everything??? There is no reason why you folks can’t penalize Wikipedia so they don’t show up above the #4 spot. Save the top 3 spots for others and help to create some variety.

Thanks!

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Hey Matt. These wordpress scraper sites are getting pretty annoying …some are even ripping my links out of my own RSS feed and pointing it to their own URLs … Even showing up on Google News when we don’t.

I would like to see you guys make a definate stance on the DP network - do you count the links or not? lol - Happy New Year

PS - is the algorithm recognising and rewarding Trade Mark citations yet? That would be great!

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