Matt Cutts about Link Network

 Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, made an announcement on Twitter that action has been taken on another link network:

In a tag on up to that tweet, Matt added in the form of a reply: “today France; Germany soon.” So expect news in the near future of a German link network being taken down.
That marks two more link networks to fall victim in Google’s ongoing crusade against websites that openly violate Google’s guidelines.

Buzzea is one of the few to really take offence to being called a link network and attempt to protect themselves. In a translated statement posted on their website they state that they “oppose this declaration since we never stopped wanting to keep the ethical side of sponsored articles focusing on quality and natural links created.”

However, in the same statement they also decided it was time to leave their business behind: “This marks the end of an adventure for our team but also the end of our collaboration with thousands of publisher sites, agencies and advertisers who have given us their trust.”

That trust Buzzea speaks of will likely result in a warning in Google Webmaster Tools very shortly, as well as a dip in rankings. It would be wise of anyone who participated in the link network to disavow the links immediately and stay far away from anything resembling a link network in the future.

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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 Targets Spammy Queries, Bad Mobile Sites with latest Ranking Updates

Google’s Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts has announced that a new ranking update, one that targets spammy queries is now live. Separately, Google is warning that if you have a bad mobile website, your search rankings will soon be hurting.

New Ranking Update for Some Spammy Queries

The ranking update for spammy queries, which will impact 0.3 percent to 0.5 percent of queries in English, shouldn’t come as a surprise to most. This was one of the changes we were told by Cutts to look forward from Google this summer. . Cutts particularly mentioned that the change would affect queries such as “payday loans” on Google.co.uk and pornographic queries.

The ranking update is a work in progress, Cutts noted on Twitter, adding that it’s an “a multifaceted rollout that will be happening over the next 1-2 months.”

Smartphone Rankings Changes

Bad mobile SEO will cost you. In a post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog, Google warns that “we plan to roll out several ranking changes in the near future that address sites that are misconfigured for smartphone users.”

Google called out two specific areas in their blog post – faulty redirects (“when a desktop page redirects smartphone users to an irrelevant page on the smartphone-optimized website”) and smartphone only errors (when “sites serve content to desktop users accessing a URL but show an error page to smartphone users”).

Google’s advice on properly configuring your mobile site: “Try to test your site on as many different mobile devices and operating systems, or their emulators, as possible.”

In addition, just as site speed has played a part in Google’s web search ranking algorithm since 2010, you can expect site speed to have an impact on the rankings of mobile sites, Cutts announced at the SMX Advanced conference.