New Google Updates

If you've ever had to move a website, you've maybe been faced with the fear that Google might not figure out that the website is new and it will suffer in the search results until they manage to sort out what happened.

Google has updated their guidelines to help webmasters deal with moving sites, with issues that might come up due to moving a site to responsive design.

Google has also updated information to include moving a site with no URL change, such as if you were to go to a new hosting provider or a new platform that was able to keep the old URLs intact.

When it comes to moving a site that has utterly new URLs, Google goes into quite a bit of detail on how webmasters should map old URLs to new ones, and things to also keep in mind to fix any stragglers that somehow get missed in the transition.

If you have a website that serves different URLs for mobile users versus desktop users, also remember that Google has new smartphone recommendations for webmasters that detail accurately how to handle these kinds of situations, as well as benefits of using responsive design to improve these issues.

When you move your site, you can use Google's change of address tool within Google Webmaster Tools. You need to have both sites confirmed, both the old domain and the new domain, and it is quite simple to do by following instructions.

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Google announced Panda 4.0

Google announced that it’s rolling out Panda 4.0, the most recent upgrade to the spidering and ranking system that the company uses in its search engine. The reason for the fear will be that it is, as with earlier versions, aimed at cutting out the low level and low quality pages from the engine’s search results. 

But that low level end of the web is accurately and precisely about creating low quality pages that then turn up in the search results. The whole game can be seen as a way in which market opposition acts very much like evolution does:

Google’s Matt Cutts announced on Twitter TWTR -0.06% that they have released version 4.0 of the Google Panda algorithm.

Google’s Panda algorithm is designed to avoid sites with poor quality content from working their way into Google’s top search results.

It was Matt Ridley who popularized the idea that progress is rather like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland. It’s essential to run ever faster in order to stand still. The point being that the various vermin which attack any life form or species do themselves get better at doing so over the generations. Not by any method of planning of course, it’s just that there’s random alteration and those that acquire a useful such mutation, one that allows them to attack a host more efficiently, go on to have more descendants that have this mutation.

The same is clearly true of the hosts: only those that are able to survive this new version of the sponge are going to themselves go on to successfully repeat and thus their subsequent generations will also be able to survive it. And we’ve seen both versions of these time and again in human reactions to disease. 

Most of the current extant European population is not as susceptible to plague or the Black Death as most of the European population were pre-1350. Because those without the genes that provided some (however limited) protection simply died along with all their offspring. And we can see the mutation of fleas into new forms every year when the influenza season comes around: it’s always a slightly different form from the year before.

And my point here is that we can think of business, a market, in very much the same terms. We might more often think of products as being gracious, that is symbiotes rather than parasites (say, the companies that make little cases to keep your iPhone in and Apple AAPL +0.26% itself that makes the iPhone) but much the same is going on. Everyone has to keep organization faster just in order to stand still. Not only are other symbiotes (or parasites) changing what they do the product that you are balancing to is also changing. And it’s very much that process that drives the whole system forwards.

 

And so it is here with Google and that Panda 4.0 update. Google believes that those low-level spam page creators are damaging to the Google search product. Thus they are repeatedly changing the algos in order to protect against such parasites. And, of course, the parasites are continually changing their tactics in reaction to Google’s changes: running ever faster just to stand still.

Of course, one can overdo the comparison. For a start, the market and business is all directed experimentation and development is entirely blind and random. But the two basic underlying similarities remain. We all have to keep running ever faster simply to stay abreast of everyone else doing so, and it’s not the changes themselves that determine the outcome but the surrounding environment that selects which innovations will live. Making little iPhone cases in 1935 would not have been a sound business move, doing so in 2014 employs entire factories in China.

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Influence of Google Panda update in Small Businesses Ranking

 Google is working on a restore of Panda, a "kinder, softer Panda," Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts announced at SMX last week. The aim of the next generation of Panda is to help small businesses that may have been impacted by earlier versions of the algorithm that Google has unleashed periodically since the initial launch in February 2011.

Panda was firstly launched as Google's algorithmic answer to low quality and thin content sites that had gained famous rankings in the search results.

While Panda was initially used as battling content farms, the side effect was huge for less authoritative sites, a category that many small websites fall into, regardless of whether they had stellar or poor quality content.

The Panda algorithm was mainly hard on small businesses and greatly decreased their search visibility when compared to larger or "big brand" types of sites that Google seems to favor. This is particularly true for product related searches where sites like Amazon or large retailers dominate the results and smaller sites just can't compete, even if they offer better service or prices.

The same applies for websites offering local services, such as a local real estate agent or a local exterminator. While local search can solve some of these problems, there remains the issue that their content doesn't rank well for usual searches.

On a WebmasterWorld thread on the theme, user EditorialGuy gave an outstanding description of how Panda affects small businesses, using a fake example search:
Take a query like "armadillo grooming tools." In the current Google results, such a inquiry might yield product listings from Amazon, Target, Walmart, Petsmart, Petco, and so on. If I were a Google search engineer testing that query, I'd want to see a mixture of name-brand results and results for specialist sites like armadillofancy dot com that present unique content and show a real understanding of and passion for armadillos."

Last year, Cutts seemed to acknowledge that Panda was having a pretty important impact on smaller businesses. In August he began asking for examples of small quality sites that weren't ranking well in Google. At the time, many small sites that had been negatively impacted by Panda were hopeful that an upcoming Panda update would give them a bit of a improve in the rankings.

There's no word on when webmasters might see the Panda refresh, but since it Cutts mentioned it, we can maybe expect to see it live sometime within the next few months.

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Google Has Announced Changes To Trends Data

Google Trends is a great place for webmasters to spot trends and get some real marketing data. However, the data doesn’t take into account such things as misspellings or alternative meanings. 

Google has announced changes to the way they are displaying Google Trends data to alleviate some of these issues and make Google Trends more useful.

The first major change is help with trends where there can be numerous completely different user intents or meanings for an exacting term. 

The other big transform is that now Google Trends is taking into account misspellings. Many people have seen the chart that shows the hundred or so misspellings for Britney Spears, so now Google trends will combine the accurate spelling of the search term along with all the common misspelling.

 Google also wants to take into account searches where they might not use the name of the person, but include terms where the search results would be the name of the actresses, such as “Lead actress in Iron Man”
 

Google also announced a beta feature in Google Trends called topic reports. They currently have over 700,000 sole topics users can explore either worldwide or in a set of seven countries including Brazil, France, Germany, India, Italy, UK, and the US. They plan to make this available in the future to more regions, as well as adding new topics. 

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Matt Cutts On SEO Drawbacks by Responsive Design

With mobile traffic gaining more market share over the past few years, it's more important than ever for websites to have a mobile version of their webpage, a exact version modified to smaller screens and fast load time. And with it has come a wider acceptance of using responsive design for mobile users versus the traditional mobile sites.

In the eyes of Google, does response design or conventional mobile design leverage a higher SEO value? Fortunately, Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts tackled this topic in a recent webmaster help video.

Responsive Design vs. a Mobile Site

First, a lot of people have questions about what accurately is a responsive design. It is absolutely something that's newer, and many webmasters still don't have a lot of experience designing with it. However, responsive design rapidly becoming the go-to format and is gaining exponential popularity because of the way it scales for any type of screen size, whether it's a desktop or an iPhone.

"Responsive design just means that the page works completely fine whether you access for site URL with a desktop browser or whether you access that URL with mobile browser," Cutts said. "Things will rescale, the page size will be taken into account."

The second common mobile design is just a lightweight version of the site, they can be easily read on small mobile screens but without a lot of the elements on a page that take longer to load.

"Another way to do it is depending on the user agent that's coming you would do a forward, so that a mobile phone, a mobile smartphone, might get redirected to a mobile-dot version of your page," Cutts said.

Cutts said that both ways of doing it are correct ways of dealing with mobile traffic, and that they have a lot of help documents available to webmasters to ensure they are doing everything correctly, particularly ensuring rel=canonical is being used for mobile versions of sites.

Cutts: Responsive Design is the Smarter Option

For SEO value, he states responsive design is the smarter way to go for SEO, mainly because you can have issues when creating a mobile version of the page if you aren't implementing it correctly.

"In common, I wouldn't worry about a site that is using receptive design losing SEO profit because by definition you've got the same URL," Cutts said. "So in theory, if you do a mobile version of the site, if you don't handle that well and you don't do the rel=canonical and all those sorts of things, then you might, in theory, divide the PageRank between those two pages. But if you have responsive design then everything is handled from one URL, so the PageRank doesn't get divided, everything works fine."

Conclusion

There are fewer SEO drawbacks when using responsive design versus a lightweight mobile version of the website, but a mobile site can work just as well as a responsive design, as long as the webmaster utilizes the mobile tools available to them from Google, to ensure there aren't any SEO problems such as split PageRank or duplicate content issues.

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Matt Cutts about Meta Description

Matt Cutts, Google’s chief of search spam, answers a query about Meta descriptions in his latest video where a user writes in to ask:

Is it essential for each single page within my website to have a sole metatag description?

When it comes to metatag descriptions, Matt says there are really only two viable options. You can either have unique metatag descriptions, or you can choose not to put any metatag description at all. Definitely don’t have copy metatag descriptions.

A very easy way to stay away from having duplicate metatag descriptions is by registering and verifying your website with the free Google Webmaster Tools cheer up. Google will crawl your website and notify you if they find duplicate metatag descriptions.

Generally speaking, Matt says it’s probably not worth your time to write a unique metatag description for every single page on your website. Matt doesn’t even bother to do that on his own blog. 

Matt recommends doing this only on pages that in fact matter. Such as your home page or pages that have high ROI. If you observe that some of your pages have actually bad auto-generated snippets, you should consider writing a single metatag description for those as well.

To sum everything up, you should avoid having duplicate metatag descriptions on all pages. as a replacement for, write exclusive descriptions for some pages and just let Google auto-generate the rest.

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Google offering reviews for your websites

Google’s John Mueller announced on Google+ that on Monday, November 18th, they will be offering live, online reviews of websites throughout their office hours.

If you’re a website owner this is an record opportunity to have someone from Google look through your website and provide feedback accurate on the spot.

Feedback will be given during a Google+ hangout where you can watch live as someone from Google reviews websites that have been submitted for review. 

Since the reviews are event live for all to see, this is also a great chance to learn from other sites. During the Hangout you can find out what others are doing right or wrong, and then apply that knowledge to your site.

Have you been annoying hard to please Google to no avail? Here’s a rare chance to find out directly from Google exactly what is hold your site back from achieving the ranking you think it deserves.

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Google begins Indexing App Content

If you have an Android app, you'll be glad to hear the latest feature by Google for app developers. Developers will now have the choice to get their app content indexed, and that content to be opened up within the app on Android devices. This will help give a seamless user experience for users when they are alternating between websites and apps.

Googlebot can now index the content controlled within an Android app, either through a sitemap file or through Google's Webmaster Tools. This means that if someone searches for content that is contained within an app, and the user has that app installed, they will have the choice to view that content within the app, rather than just on a usual mobile webpage. For sites that have content on their main website as well as their app being displayed in the same search results, the app results will appear as deep links within the search listing.

Right now during the testing phase, indexing is only accessible to an initial group of developers. Signed-in searchers within the United States will start seeing these results on their Android devices within a few weeks.

App developers can sign up to let Google know they are involved in having their apps indexed. Developers can fill out an application of interest at Google but they should be aware that they do need to have deep linking enabled within their app . Developers will also need to provide Google with information about alternate URLs, either within their sitemap or in a link element within the pages of the website.

App indexing is only obtainable for Android apps at the time. No word yet on whether it could expand to iPhone or Windows apps as well.

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Matt Cutts about links and google rankings

Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts said that a website with a large quantity of pages won't automatically rank better than others. So addition more pages to your site won't help your home page automatically rank better than minor sites.

However, Cutts said that a site with more pages will obviously get more traffic because each of those individual pages can also rank for their own set of search queries, rising the overall opportunity for sites to gain visitors.

Cutts stressed how links also contribute to rankings, something that a bigger site often has more of naturally.

"Now typically if the site does have more pages, it might have more links pointing to it, which means it has higher PageRank," Cutts said. "If that is the case we might be willing to creep a little bit deeper into the website and if it has higher PageRank, then we might think it's a tiny bit of a better match for users queries.

"So those are some that factors concerned, just having a big website with a lot of pages by itself does not automatically confer a increase but if you have a lot of links or a lot of PageRank, that is leading to deeper crawling within your site, then that might be the sort of indicator that maybe sites would rank just a little bit higher," Cutts said.

So once again, while having a big site is great, those inbound links are still going to play a key role in rankings, much more so than a larger website.

"Again just having the number of pages doesn't give you a increase though," Cutts added. "It might give you a few more opportunities, but usually the only reason you get that chance is because we see more links to your website so we are willing to creep a little bit deeper and find more pages to index.

Bottom line: a larger website doesn't routinely give you a higher ranking, but the aftereffects of having a larger site, such as having more pages and more possible for someone to link to your site as well as getting overall search traffic on those internal pages, does help.

Having a large site is great, but once again you need to make sure that you have inbound links to your site in order to help it rank and get higher PageRank.

Matt Cutts about SEO and Future of Google Search

Matt Cutts kicked off day two at Pubcon with another of his signature keynotes, dispelling myths, talk about spammers and about Jason Calcanis’ keynote from day one, at the influence of the audience.

First, Cutts spoke about Google’s “Moonshot changes,” which he bust down into these areas:

•    Knowledge graph

•    Voice search

•    Conversational search

•    Google now

•    Deep Learning

He exposed that Deep Learning is the ability to make relationships between words and apply it to more words, and how it can help improve search and the nuances of search queries.

Deep Learning in Regular and Voice Search

He explained that voice search is varying the types of search queries people use, but also that it can be refined without repeating earlier parts of the user’s search queries. It does this when it knows the user is still penetrating the same topic, but drilling down to more details.

Hummingbird, Panda & Authorship

Next up, Cutts spoke about Hummingbird and he feels that a lot of the blog posts about how to rank with Hummingbird are not that applicable. The fact is, Hummingbird was out for a month and no one noticed. Hummingbird is above all a core quality change. It doesn’t impact SEO that much, he said, despite the many blog posts claiming otherwise.

Of most interest to some SEOs is that Google is looking at softening Panda. Those sites caught in grey areas of Panda--if they are quality sites--could see their sites start ranking once more.

Google is also looking at boosting authority throughout authorship. We have seen authorship becoming more and more significant when it comes for search results and visibility in those results; Cutts confirmed this is the direction in which Google will continue to move.

Google on Mobile Search Results

Next, he discussed the role of smartphones and their shock on search results. This is completely an area SEOs need to continue to focus on, as it is clear that sites that are not mobile-friendly will see a negative impact on their rankings in the mobile search results.

Smartphone ranking will take numerous things into account, he explained:

•    If your phone doesn’t display Flash, Google will not illustrate flash sites in your results.

•    If your website is Flash heavy, you need to consider its use, or ensure the mobile version of your site does not use it.

•    If your website routes all mobile traffic to the homepage rather than the internal page the user was attempting to visit, it will be ranked lower.

•    If your site is slow on mobile phones, Google is less likely to rank it.

Cutts was attractive clear that with the significant increase in mobile traffic, not having a mobile-friendly site will seriously impact the amount of mobile traffic Google will send you. Webmasters should begin prioritizing their mobile strategy immediately.

Penguin, Google’s Spam Strategy & Native Advertising

Matt next talked about their spam strategy. When they initially launched Penguin and the blackhat webmaster forums had spammers bragging how they weren’t touched by Penguin, the webspam team’s answer was, “Ok, well we can turn that dial higher.” They upped the impact it had on search results. Cutts said that when spammers are posting about wanting to do him physically harm, he knows his spam team is doing their job well.

He did say they are continuing their work on some specific keywords that tend to be very spammy, including “payday loans,” “car insurance,” “mesothelioma,” and some porn keywords. Because they are highly profitable keywords, they attract the spammers, so they are working on

Spam networks are still on Google’s radar and they are still bringing them down and taking action against them.

Bad News for PageRank Fans

For PageRank devotees, there is some bad news. PageRank is updated internally inside Google on a daily basis and every three months or so, they would push out that information to the Google toolbar so it would be visible to webmasters. sadly, the pipeline they used to push the data to the toolbar broke and Google does not have anyone working on fixing it. As a result, Cutts said we shouldn’t wait for to see any PageRank updates anytime soon--not anytime this year. He doesn’t know if they will fix it, but they are going to judge the impact of not updating it. The speculation that PageRank could be retired is not that far off from the truth, as it currently stands.

Communication with Webmasters, Rich Snippets, Java & Negative SEO

Google continues to boost their communication with webmasters. They made new videos covering malware and hacking, as Google is seeing these problems more and more, yet not all webmasters are understandable about what it is and how to fix it. They are working on with more concrete examples in their guidelines, to make it easier for people to determine the types of things that are causing ranking issues and point webmasters in the right direction to fix it.

Cutts worried that he is not the only face for Google search. They have 100 speaking events per year and do Hangouts on Air to educate webmasters. They hold Webmaster Office Hours, to boost communication and give users the chance to engage and ask questions of the search team.

Google is becoming smarter at being able to read JavaScript, as it has absolutely been used for evil by spammers. However, Cutts cautions that even though they are doing a better job at reading it, don’t use that as an excuse to create an entire site in JS.

Matt also says negative SEO isn’t as common as people consider and is often self-inflicted. One person approached Matt to say a competitor was ruining them by pointing paid links to their site. Yet when he looked into it, he exposed paid links from 2010 pointing to their site, and said there was no way competitors would have bought paid links back in 2010 to point to their site, since. the algorithm punishing paid links wasn’t until a couple years after those paid links went live.

The Future of Google Search: Mobile, Authorship & Quality Search Results

On the future of search, he again stressed the importance of mobile site usability. YouTube traffic on mobile has skyrocketed from 6 percent two years ago, to 25 percent last year, to 40 percent of all YouTube this year. Some countries have more mobile traffic than they do desktop traffic. Cutts reiterated, “If your website looks bad in mobile, now is the time to fix that.”

Google is also working on machine learning and training their systems to be able to understand and read at an elementary school level, in order to improve search results.

Authorship is another area where Google wants to develop, because tying an identity to an authorship profile can help keep spam out of Google. They plan to squeeze up authorship to combat spam and they found if they removed about 15 percent of the lesser quality authors, it dramatically increased the presence of the better quality authors.

Matt Cutts Q&A

During Q&A, Cutts discussed links from press release sites. He said Google recognized the sites that were press release syndication sites and simply discounted them. He does stress that press release links weren’t penalized, because press release sites do have value for press and marketing reasons, but those links won’t pass PageRank.

In closing, Cutts said they are keeping a close eye on the mix of organic search results with non-organic search results

YouTube May begin a Commercial-Free Music Subscription Service by End of Year

Rumors are flying this week about the chance YouTube may launch a subscription-based music streaming service to compete with Spotify before the end of the year.

According to the NYTimes , the subscription could cost $10 a month and grant access to videos on demand without advertising interruptions. Users would have the choice of watching the video or simply listening to the track.

No doubt this new service will be primed for the mobile user, as TechCrunch recently reported YouTube’s mobile traffic was at 40 percent, up appreciably from 6 percent in 2011. 

Billboard.com speculated the YouTube service might offer "offline cacheing of songs and videos so users can listen on their mobile devices even when they're not connected or when they're trying to save on bandwidth costs or battery consumption." 

This is a probable situation, as YouTube recently announced it would provide offline viewing to its mobile app users starting in November. 

Billboard also reported that YouTube would already have all the licenses it needs for a service like this, including from Warner Music Group, Sony Music activity and Universal Music Group. According to Billboard, the licenses were obtained through Google as it prepared to launch the Google Play Music All Access service earlier this year.

It’s also believed there will be a free part to this potential music video service, which will likely be “unlimited, on-demand access to full tracks on all platforms, with mobile,” Billboard said.
The free version will also likely include ads, which might just be the boost YouTube needs, as comScore reported AOL was on peak for ad impressions in September, not YouTube.

If YouTube offers a music streaming service, it wouldn’t be the only move by the video stage to further monetize through subscriptions. YouTube announced this week it will extend its subscription-based channel service to all video creators in good standing, with more than 10,000 subscribers, who meet their location and other qualifying criteria. They began piloting the service in May.

YouTube declined to comment directly on its plans, but said in a statement: "We're always working on new and better ways for people to enjoy YouTube content across all screens, and on giving partners more opportunities to reach their fans. However, we have nothing to announce at this time."

Why No PageRank Update until now

PageRank hadn’t been updated for some months and Matt Cutts hinted that PageRank “on track to go away a little bit” in a new webmaster help video. In his keynote at PubCon in Las Vegas, Cutts exposed the reason why PageRank hasn’t been updated and why it likely won’t be updated for a while – if ever.

 

Internally, PageRank updates on a daily basis and every so often, Google would push out the PageRank data to the Google toolbar through a pipeline . The reason we haven’t seen a new PageRank update newly is because the PageRank pipeline broke, so while the PageRank data internally continues to update as it should, webmasters eager to get a fresh look at 

PageRank data are out of luck.

Cutts also revealed they do not have anyone at present working on updating the pipeline and confirms we won’t see a PageRank update anytime this year. They are evaluating it to see if they require make a fix to update PageRank publicly next year.

Many webmasters still obsess over PageRank data, but the truth it hasn’t been updating since early this year means that webmasters have been less dependent on using it as an SEO tool of value. While Google continues to update the algorithm and penalize sites, webmasters can’t use it to spot check if a site has been penalized, as they could in years past. 

Fewer users are using the Google toolbar in Internet Explorer. So fewer people are seeing the data at all. There are still a lot of SEO tools that use and display PageRank information for sites and use it as a metric, mainly in tools that are gauging potential link values.

While it isn’t established we will never see a PageRank update ever again, the fact we will only have a single PageRank update in 2013 and Google isn’t working on a pipeline fix makes it less likely PageRank will be updated or a valuable tool for webmasters going forward.

Google's DoubleClick To suggest Facebook Ad Exchange

Google DoubleClick announced that they will know be able to use Facebook Ad Exchange (FBX) to sell advertising through their DoubleClick Bid Manager, formerly known as request Media.

This will allow advertisers to pay for Facebook Ads through their DoubleClick Bid Manager, without having to go through Facebook openly for the ad space. It also brings the technology for DoubleClick advertisers to target Facebook users based on their visits to webpages outside of Facebook.

The choice to purchase ad inventory on FBX is not available instantly, but will be starting in a few months, according to Google DoubleClick. 

The connection between Google and Facebook has been contentious over the years, particularly with Google launching a competing social network, Google+. However, Facebook did confirm the Doubleclick Bid Manager to track ad impressions in August 2012. Both Google and Facebook have been short in their respective announcements.

 Google released a short blog post on their Doubleclick blog, while Facebook merely stated “We are happy that Google is joining Facebook Exchange. We think that applicable ads, targeted to the right people, are good for people and businesses.”

Google also purchased social agency Wildfire Interactive, a popular provider of Facebook contest applications, last year. Clearly, Google recognizes it is an significant space to be in, despite the fact Google and Facebook are competitors on many levels.

What seems the catalyst for Doubleclick’s addition is that Facebook advertisers were getting increasingly disgruntled over the fact Facebook Ad Exchange excluded Google. Amazon’s Advertising Platform was also apparently granted access to the Facebook Ad Exchange.
There is no concrete timeline for when FBX and Doubleclick Bid Manager will be formally connected, outside of the “in a few months” comment on their blog post.

Google announced launch of Google Media Tools

The Google+ for Media: ATL Summit brought some big news today, as Google announced its start of Google Media Tools, a website designed to help journalists find all the available Google tools they can use for research, organizing stories, and even getting establish online.  

Google mentions the following services they give that are useful to journalists: 

The tools are planned into six sections: Gather and Organize, Publish, Engage, Develop, Visualize, and Additional Resources.

In addition to showcasing its sections that feature present event information (such as Google Crisis Map and Google News), Google Media Tools states that journalists should “consider this your opening point to tap into Google’s suite of digital tools that can enhance newsgathering and experience across television, radio, print and online.”

Besides finding information wanted for story research, Google reminds journalists that they can also utilize Google+, Hangouts, and YouTube to connect with their readers and aim audience.
This public announcement and tools suite built for journalists further showcases Google’s dedication to better news reporting through easy to use tools that are free for everybody to use. By offering free tools that are up-to-date, Google is guaranteeing greater participation in its products by journalists and researchers alike.

Matt Cutts Reminds Webmasters That Google Will Always Be varying

Since Google is been keenly updating its search results, it is hard for people to trust Google anymore. Should one begin focusing on getting leads from social media other than search engine results?

Google will continually be upgrading its algorithm, Matt Cutts said. It's never going to be complete; they will continue to update it as spammers find new ways to rank and as they integrate new signals or change the weight of those signals in the algorithm.

Cutts added that since the begin of the summer Google has been difficult to make it even harder for spammers to rank from black hat techniques.

"So we are always going to be updating, always going to change things to make things better, always trying to innovate the way that we record search algorithms, that's just the nature of the beast," Cutts said. "The goal is always the same, to return the highest excellence set of search results."

He said webmasters could perhaps spend their time better than trying to figure out every little nuance of the Google search algorithm."So rather than trying to figure out reverse engineering our algorithm and trying to find all the different ways to rank higher and trying to take shortcuts, as long as you're trying to make a fantastic site that people love, that's really compelling, that there are always going to, that's the sort of thing that puts you on the same side as Google," Cutts said.

Now what about getting leads from other sources, such as social media leads? Cutts discussed this type of traffic creation next.

"I'm all for having eggs in lots of different baskets, because if your website goes down and then you can always have your brick-and-mortar business," Cutts said. "If your ranking on Google is not as good, then you can have other channels that you can use – from print media advertising, to billboards, to Twitter, to Facebook. So you should always have a very well-rounded portfolio of ways to get leads whether from people walking through your door or Yellow Pages or whatever it is, because you can't count on any one channel always working out absolutely.

"As long as you have great content you should do well in Google," he added. "But you know if people are spamming or you hire a bad SEO that can lead to unpredictable results.
Matt Cutt’s main point that SEOs and business owners alike need to become accustomed in order to have good experiences with Google and other search engines.

By focusing on high quality content and a well-optimized website, instead of expenditure too much time attempting to utilize black hat techniques, webmasters can realize that Google really is on their side.

Build interactive HTML5 sites with Google's free Web Designer tool

Google has now announced a new tool for building interactive HTML5 sites and ads called Web Designer. The new tool, which the company is calling a “professional-quality design tool” is officially out in beta and is available for download for Windows and Mac.

Sean Kranzberg, Engineering Manager of Google Web Designer, states:

HTML5 is a universal language for building beautiful, engaging content that can run across desktops, smartphones, and tablets. We think that Google Web Designer will be the key to making HTML5 accessible to people throughout the industry, getting us closer to the goal of ‘build once, run anywhere.’

Google’s announcement blog post mentioned that many designers are cautious to use HTML5 because they have to build a number of different designs for various platforms like mobile, web banners, etc. The Google Web Designer seeks to improve this problem by allowing designers to create HTML5 ads in minutes and publish them directly to DoubleClick and AdMob, as well as saving them for other platforms.

Even though the name is “Web Designer,” many are arguing that this program is more designed for ads than websites. Features like CSS3, animations, built-in code editing, and automatic uploading options make ad creation easy, but for those waiting for a free complete builder different to Adobe Dreamweaver or another HTML5 design platform, the wait may be a bit longer.

Google Penguin 2.1

Everybody's beloved aquatic bird is back, and now site owners are once again asking how Google Penguin 2.1 has affected their website.

As he did for Penguin 1.0 and Penguin 2.0 Glenn Gabe at G-Squared Interactive has analyzed 26 websites impacted by the algorithmic change to decide what factors contributed to sites that got hit.

Why Sites Were Hit by Google Penguin 2.1

Not amazingly, Penguin 2.1 appears to have recognized newer link spam – those links that were created at a later date than the Penguin 2.0 rollout in May Of that link spam, Gabe said the following stand for the culprits:

•    Forum spam: This includes comments in forums with accurate match anchor text links.

•    Forum bio spam: Biographies of forum users containing accurate match anchor text links.

•    "Do follow" blogs: Blogs that don't add no follow to the links posted. "Let's face it," Gabe said. "Being listed on do-follow store sites can entirely send Google a signal that you are trying to game links."

•    Blogroll spam: Watch for blogroll links gone incorrect. "Some may be fine," Gabe said. "If you are unsure which ones are bad against good, ask for help from a seasoned SEO."

•    Spammy directories: If you've used spammy directories in the past, and still have links out there, Gabe said "nuke them, have them no followed, or disavow them."

•    Blog comment signature spam: Google seems to be targeting these links even when they're not followed, Gabe said.

Gabe also marked a new culprit: classified websites showing up with heavy aberrant links leading to destination websites. He also said that, unfortunately, he has seen proof of negative SEO rearing its ugly head during Penguin 2.1.

"I’ve had several companies reach out to me that are claiming negative SEO," Gabe said. "And after looking at the condition, I have to agree with them. And worse, I saw an entire business category (in a geo area) get hit with spammy links. That seemed very doubtful. All the business owners (who are competitors) were all blindsided."

Tips and revival Recommendations

Its business as natural on how to deal with cleaning up your site for the next visit from Penguin, Gabe said. That means downloading and analyzing the links, creating a plan of attack to take away and disavow as needed, and if you have to, remove pages.

Here are Gabe's top five recommendations on what to do if you've been hit by Penguin 2.1:

•    appreciate that Penguin heavily targets unnatural links. Your new content and social activity won't trigger a recovery.

•    Carefully analyze your link profile, while keeping a keen eye on exact match and rich anchor text. That's what Penguin targets.

•    Remove those links if you can, and disavow the lasting links. And use the domain operator in the disavow file when the domain is low-quality. Don’t try and target specific URLs on a spammy domain, when you can nuke the whole domain.

•    Make sure more aberrant links aren’t being added as time goes on. Gabe said he's had a number of business owners think they cleaned up their situation, only to get hit harder during Penguin 2.1. After checking their link profiles, you can clearly see more spammy links were added during the spring, summer, and fall. This is what got them hit by Penguin 2.1.

•    Move fast and be insistent. Gabe said he has seen Penguin recoveries during Panda updates, so there is a option of recovery prior to the next official Penguin update.

How to develop Your Website to More Languages.

If you have a really fashionable website, the idea of expanding that site to reach more languages has maybe crossed your mind. Such an expansion could mean a broader audience reaches in more countries, higher traffic, and the potential for more revenue.

The latest webmaster help video, featuring Google's Developer Programs Tech Lead Maile Ohye, gives some huge advice and best practices for expanding into additional languages and country-based language variations and ensuring your site is search-friendly.

Much of the video covers belongings like how you should approach a language expansion, things you should consider before doing it, and cases on how this can be done. It also touches on a couple of the more important search issues that can crash a website regarding multiple languages.

One of the more significant things to be sure you include on international variations of a website is the special language and regional tags that can help Google understand how they should be helping your websites and to what languages and countries. The use of rel="alternate" hreflang="x" is highly recommended to avoid many issues. Google has an entire help document on how to use these tags correctly and successfully.

One large potential search issue sites find out with language expansion are when sites the incorrect page is shown in the search results for the incorrect user. Another common issue is when the search outcome show similar URLs from your site, which confuses the user about which pages they should be going to, and why there are two unusual pages offered for apparently the same site and content.

Lastly, search engines might not be alert of all the different languages and language variations that website make, or they omit some pages for special languages because Google doesn't know that the seemingly duplicate pages are actually serving a different audience or language variation.

The entire video is very detailed and extensive. It is well worth watching if you're considering development into different countries and languages, so you can be aware of all these types of problems and how Google recommends you solve them to best serve your users.