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Long-Time SEO Jill Whalen Moves On, Praises Google For Rewarding Content More

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Re: Long-Time SEO Jill Whalen Moves On, Praises Google For Rewarding Content More

#31

Post by throwaway9848 »

Matsta wrote: post #17
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Austen, if you'd be interested in sharing any specifics (companies, keywords, people, etc.) regarding people spamming by leaving millions of links gumming up the web, my team would be happy to investigate in more detail.

Hahaha do you seriously think he's gonna give up the keywords these guys are making money off. Spamming sites still worked pre-hummingbird and infact it works even better now. Even Negative SEO works just as well. Have a competitor you don't like? Give him 100k blog comments with "Buy Viagra" and suddenly he will be de indexed in 3 months or less. I think half the reason she quit is that SEO is so damn unpredictable…

That's the joke.

Re: Long-Time SEO Jill Whalen Moves On, Praises Google For Rewarding Content More

#32

Post by mhoad »

esw wrote: post #7
ahulak wrote: post #4

As someone who first got into SEO about a year before panda and penguin rolled out.. I have to admit, SEO has changed ALOT and Jill hits the nail on the head. Easy keyword related SEO tactics no longer work, Hummingbird has made sure of it.. It makes perfect sense if you break it down over the years... 1) Spammers found out they could manipulate rankings with the meta keywords tag.. shortly after, google started to i…

For what it's worth, Google claims that they never used the keywords tag as a ranking factor.

In fact for what it's worth neither was the meta description tag and the comment about social signals is misleading at best.

Re: Long-Time SEO Jill Whalen Moves On, Praises Google For Rewarding Content More

#33

Post by magicalist »

just2n wrote: post #10

I might be able to take comments like "rewarding content more" seriously if w3schools wasn't still at the top of almost every HTML, CSS, and JavaScript search query. I realized one day that I just use Google to quickly navigate a few websites I actually do use. This is something like the 99.9% case. At that point, I realized my search queries where I include the website I want and keywords I want to find in that site…

agreed on w3schools, but you only need to look at every thread on HN when w3schools comes up (including this one already) for the reason why it's at the top. Tons of people on this site come out in its defense, saying they use it all the time, so what does that say for the rest of the web developer community? Lots of people link to it, lots of people visit it and then visit it again and again on subsequent queries. How can you call that anything but a strong signal that it's relevant and useful content to many people?

The real answer to problems like that is more personalization, which doesn't go over well for many. I do miss that personal blocked-site list google used to have :(

Re: Long-Time SEO Jill Whalen Moves On, Praises Google For Rewarding Content More

#34

Post by GrinningFool »

PilateDeGuerre wrote: post #20
austenallred wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email me - email address in HN profile

No one likes a snitch.

Speak for yourself. Snitches on spammers hold a special place in my heart.

Re: Long-Time SEO Jill Whalen Moves On, Praises Google For Rewarding Content More

#35

Post by Matt_Cutts »

dchuk wrote: post #22
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Austen, if you'd be interested in sharing any specifics (companies, keywords, people, etc.) regarding people spamming by leaving millions of links gumming up the web, my team would be happy to investigate in more detail.

Surely this is something trivial to identify internally for you guys?

We're pretty good at dissecting various techniques, spam networks, etc. But I always like to hear feedback from different places to see how we're doing, uncover new pockets of spam, etc.

Re: Long-Time SEO Jill Whalen Moves On, Praises Google For Rewarding Content More

#36

Post by Matt_Cutts »

Matsta wrote: post #17
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Austen, if you'd be interested in sharing any specifics (companies, keywords, people, etc.) regarding people spamming by leaving millions of links gumming up the web, my team would be happy to investigate in more detail.

Hahaha do you seriously think he's gonna give up the keywords these guys are making money off. Spamming sites still worked pre-hummingbird and infact it works even better now. Even Negative SEO works just as well. Have a competitor you don't like? Give him 100k blog comments with "Buy Viagra" and suddenly he will be de indexed in 3 months or less. I think half the reason she quit is that SEO is so damn unpredictable…

Hey Matt G, I appreciate the suggestion but I already read quite a bit of BHW.

P.S. I enjoyed reading about that Twitter stuff from 2-3 years ago.

Re: Long-Time SEO Jill Whalen Moves On, Praises Google For Rewarding Content More

#37

Post by [deleted] »

Matsta wrote: post #17
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Austen, if you'd be interested in sharing any specifics (companies, keywords, people, etc.) regarding people spamming by leaving millions of links gumming up the web, my team would be happy to investigate in more detail.

Hahaha do you seriously think he's gonna give up the keywords these guys are making money off. Spamming sites still worked pre-hummingbird and infact it works even better now. Even Negative SEO works just as well. Have a competitor you don't like? Give him 100k blog comments with "Buy Viagra" and suddenly he will be de indexed in 3 months or less. I think half the reason she quit is that SEO is so damn unpredictable…

[deleted]

Re: Long-Time SEO Jill Whalen Moves On, Praises Google For Rewarding Content More

#38

Post by bapbap »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #36
Matsta wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hahaha do you seriously think he's gonna give up the keywords these guys are making money off. Spamming sites still worked pre-hummingbird and infact it works even better now. Even Negative SEO works just as well. Have a competitor you don't like? Give him 100k blog comments with "Buy Viagra" and suddenly he will be de indexed in 3 months or less. I think half the reason she quit is that SEO is so damn unpredictable…

Hey Matt G, I appreciate the suggestion but I already read quite a bit of BHW. P.S. I enjoyed reading about that Twitter stuff from 2-3 years ago.

One of my sites was a victim of the negative SEO trick, I kept getting warnings from Google (Site violates Google's quality guidelines) that there were links to my site that violated their guidelines.

It didn't matter what I said in my reconsideration request to explain I had no knowledge or control over it (I've no interest in spammy link sharing or buying links), I kept getting similar canned responses.

I gave up in the end.

Re: Long-Time SEO Jill Whalen Moves On, Praises Google For Rewarding Content More

#40

Post by USblfs-1980 »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #15
austenallred wrote: post #2

"The tricks to beat and spam Google, Whalen said, no longer work as well." LOL. I know a half dozen guys who build millions of automated links every day. They say an easy term and they're in the top 5 results after 5 days, a hard term (a variety of diet pills, etc.) and it takes them a month. They get manually banned from time to time, but they just pull another URL from their pool and start over. It's gotten more so…

Hey Austen, if you'd be interested in sharing any specifics (companies, keywords, people, etc.) regarding people spamming by leaving millions of links gumming up the web, my team would be happy to investigate in more detail.

I work a lot in the EU markets (half German). Here some of the biggest spammers I know

casamundo.de + .nl - auto generating texts and internal, irrelevant links. Outranks every player.

independer.nl/autoverzekering/merken/opel.aspx - generating doorway pages with minimal / none added value

veiligonlinegeldlenen.nl - just check their back link profile and site, and you know enough

meinestadt.de/berlin/ - great start, until you find stuff they really rank on:

meinestadt.de/berlin/dsl - no value add

And many, many more. The German market is competitive but with smart spamming and automated content generation, you can outrank anyone.

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