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What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

mattcutts.com

11–20 of 96 posts

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#11
post #7

If matt says it's more substantial than penguin 1.0 then its going to have a big ripple effect, the last penguin update effected more than 10%+ of SERPS. If your worried about this update then you haven't being doing "SEO" right.

Penguin opened the world to scalable negative SEO. This is now a common tactic in competitive markets. If you rank well it is worth worrying about.

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#12
Black hatters these days don't really even care about long-term rankings, they're more about exploiting the inadequacies in the algorithm in the first month or so of a site's live. Build it, rank it, bank cash, and burn it out. That's the modus operandi right now...I don't see this update changing much of that.

It's going to be great for those of us building out quality sites though!

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#13
post #7

If matt says it's more substantial than penguin 1.0 then its going to have a big ripple effect, the last penguin update effected more than 10%+ of SERPS. If your worried about this update then you haven't being doing "SEO" right.

There was a lot of collateral damage done to innocent sites during both Panda and Penguin. I think there's good reason for everybody who relies on Google traffic to worry a bit.

I understand it's all algorithmic and there will be some truly innocent collateral damage involved but Google wouldn't be pushing this out if they didn't feel the overall quality of search would increase.

Most of the collateral damage is going to be people straddling the grey hat line and rightly so in my own opinion.

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#14

Skip to the 3 minute mark. The problem with these spam signals, like comment SPAM, it's very hard to know if they are from the target of the links, or from some other person trying to damage your reputation online and hoping you get penalised. Google doesn't see the IPs / email addresses that submit these comments. So it's impossible to know if they are legitimate or not when it comes to who has created them.

This is my biggest problem with Penguin. No website controls who links to them. Google should do a better job at discounting/ignoring spammy links, rather than penalize a website with spammy links. It's essentially the same thing, though one is easier to come back from.

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#15
post #7

If matt says it's more substantial than penguin 1.0 then its going to have a big ripple effect, the last penguin update effected more than 10%+ of SERPS. If your worried about this update then you haven't being doing "SEO" right.

Right? Not enough keywords and you just don't rank, too many bold keywords and you're hit. Nowadays you get a penalty far before you do anything black hat (Though Penguin should not be about onpage).

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#16
post #7

If matt says it's more substantial than penguin 1.0 then its going to have a big ripple effect, the last penguin update effected more than 10%+ of SERPS. If your worried about this update then you haven't being doing "SEO" right.

Penguin opened the world to scalable negative SEO. This is now a common tactic in competitive markets. If you rank well it is worth worrying about.

I can't deny negative SEO is a worry and yes whilst Google opened up the doors for it they also recognised it and have started providing ways to hopefully protect yourself. (Disavowing links etc)

If your in a competitive market where you have to worry about negative SEO so much so that it is making an impact on your SERPs then I'm sure the web spam team would be more than interested in hearing from you

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#17
post #7

If matt says it's more substantial than penguin 1.0 then its going to have a big ripple effect, the last penguin update effected more than 10%+ of SERPS. If your worried about this update then you haven't being doing "SEO" right.

Right? Not enough keywords and you just don't rank, too many bold keywords and you're hit. Nowadays you get a penalty far before you do anything black hat (Though Penguin should not be about onpage).

Keyword stuff is abusive, bolding all your keywords should rightly get you penalised. It's not far off the old days of stuffing the defunct meta keywords tag.

First point on googles webmaster guidelines says it all. Your chasing google, build a site for your users first, google will follow because it's in there interest to provide the most relevant content.

  Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.
  A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee.
  Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#18

Skip to the 3 minute mark. The problem with these spam signals, like comment SPAM, it's very hard to know if they are from the target of the links, or from some other person trying to damage your reputation online and hoping you get penalised. Google doesn't see the IPs / email addresses that submit these comments. So it's impossible to know if they are legitimate or not when it comes to who has created them.

This is my biggest problem with Penguin. No website controls who links to them. Google should do a better job at discounting/ignoring spammy links, rather than penalize a website with spammy links. It's essentially the same thing, though one is easier to come back from.

> No website controls who links to them

This is clearly nonsense when some webmasters were buying thousands of links.

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#19
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a lot of collateral damage done to innocent sites during both Panda and Penguin. I think there's good reason for everybody who relies on Google traffic to worry a bit.

I understand it's all algorithmic and there will be some truly innocent collateral damage involved but Google wouldn't be pushing this out if they didn't feel the overall quality of search would increase. Most of the collateral damage is going to be people straddling the grey hat line and rightly so in my own opinion.

I don't disagree, but look at it from the perspective of the small business owner that gets 80% of their revenue from Google traffic. Even if they were one of the few unlucky ones, their livelihood is lost.

Re: What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video]

#20

Black hatters these days don't really even care about long-term rankings, they're more about exploiting the inadequacies in the algorithm in the first month or so of a site's live. Build it, rank it, bank cash, and burn it out. That's the modus operandi right now...I don't see this update changing much of that. It's going to be great for those of us building out quality sites though!

Exactly. If you really want to know what black-hatters do and how they get around Google's filters, here it is:

1. Buy a ton of domains 2. Put up picture-based landing pages on those domains. The user only really sees pictures. 3. Put up or spin content with relevant keywords, put it underneath the images. Google only sees a couple pictures (it doesn't know what they are) and a bunch of really relevant content. 4. Build a shiz-ton of links. This is where black hatters really make their money. I usually build about 125,000 links/day from completely legit sites, and to Google it pretty much looks like it's going viral. If you know where to get the links, know how to generate the content, and can make them seem human, Google has a really hard time finding you. 5. Link the landing pages to your money site using affiliate links. 6. Wait until your site gets manually reviewed and pulled down.

So any somewhat decent black-hatter will have hundreds of sites in the works at any given time. The worry of taking a site down isn't a big one, even though if you take down one site a black-hatter's traffic could drop 3,000 visits/day. The sites I work on usually remain up for an average of 6 months at a time, and the only way for them to be caught is a manual review. Some only stay up for a couple weeks, but some stay up for years. There have been times when landing pages are getting a couple thousand visits a day but I haven't had time to go back through and redirect the traffic to the money site or update them from the generic landing page.

Since all of the actions taken mimic closely enough what humans would do, it's really difficult to be caught by webspam teams.

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