Here are four things Google has said and done to help marketers improve SEO that you may not be aware of.

Google added an ‘SEO’ audit to its Lighthouse extension

Google is actively giving developers advice on how to improve the sites they work on: its Lighthouse auditing tool now has an SEO component that can analyse any page for basic SEO competency and tell you how to make it better.

This is a nice change for search marketers, who have for a long time made up for Google’s radio silence with research and educated guesswork. Some of the tips offered by the audit extension are fairly obvious and well known (tile tag exists, canonicals not broken, etc.), but others give an interesting insight into how Google assesses a page – such as the importance of making sure your text is big enough. Beyond being useful to marketers, it’s interesting to see how many different factors contribute to a positive user experience and correlate with a higher search engine ranking.

Google made significant improvements to Search Console

Search Console – formerly known as Webmaster Tools – helps you understand what’s going on beneath the hood of your website. It’s a comprehensive piece of software that, in its latest beta version, allows you to immediately index blogs and view up to 16 months of data in the search analytics (Performance) report.

For search marketers, this is particularly important; just think back to the days before ‘(not provided)’ was your most common GA keyword. Now you have a rich bounty of keywords, just waiting to be incorporated into your search strategy.

It’s worth mentioning that Google is taking Search Console seriously: it’s actively asking for suggestions and potential improvements, and even implementing some of them.

Google has revamped its SEO guide

By relaunching its SEO starter guide, Google is offering newbies an easy way to improve the quality of their websites. If you’re reading this, you’re probably a bit beyond starter guides, but it never hurts to brush up on the basics, especially when they’re directly from the horse’s mouth – after all, who knew text size was such a big deal?

It’s a useful primer for anyone looking to brush up on their on-site optimization, and a strong indicator that Google is taking organic search as seriously as ever. With content, for example, it dedicates a whole section to advice on organising topics, understanding readers’ desires, optimising copy, images, and headlines for users (not engines), writing link text, and generally creating blogs and web pages that your target audience actually wants to read.

Google has hired a new public search liaison

Finally, Google’s hiring of a public search liaison suggests not only that organic search is here to stay, but that the company is willing to be more open and transparent about it.

When Matt Cutts – who led Google’s WebSpam team and served as a kind of unofficial liaison between the company and the SEO community – resigned in 2016, search marketing professionals started communicating with Google in a number of different ways. They popped up in Google hangouts with engineers, asked questions in official Google Threads, and turned up to conferences where Google’s employees were present.

Google, in turn, started communicating more with them via  the Google Security Blog, the Google Chrome blog, the general Google blog,  the Google Webmaster Central Blog, the Google Analytics blog, and the Google Search blog. It then appointed its first public liaison for search in October 2017: Danny Sullivan, a former SEO journalist and analyst.

No doubt he’ll prove a useful resource for the SEO and marketing communities. But more importantly, perhaps, is what Sullivan’s appointment says about Google’s shifting philosophy to search marketing. If it was once obscure and opaque about organic search, it’s now open and consultative.

Luke Budka is director at integrated marketing agency TopLine Comms.

Knee-jerk reactions are rarely based on sound judgement. Instead they are driven by emotion. In such scenarios, you would be better off giving due consideration prior to taking action.

The problem is that this advice is lost upon what would appear to be a worryingly large portion of the SEO world. At critical points, the SEO community has proven that they are prone to not only making knee-jerk reactions, but then vehemently defending these reactions long after the dust has settled.

It is somewhat excusable though. Search Engine Optimization is an imperfect science. Google is continually changing their fiendishly complex algorithms and will often neither confirm or deny such changes.

It’s a poker game where everyone wears masks and keeps their cards very close to their chest – and no-one shows their cards for free. Add to this the threat of your website being heavily sanctioned by one of Google’s many bizarrely-named updates due to ‘spammy’ techniques, and you can see why people are on edge.

To add to this, the amount of ‘how to’ SEO articles on the web is staggering, and can be intimidating even for those working in the industry every day. It can be a challenge to decipher which research to trust or whose advice to take. As a direct result, SEOs tend to hang on every last word released by Google.

Filter this down and the recognized names in the industry – the likes of Rand Fishkin, John Mueller, Danny Sullivan and Neil Patel, among others, hold considerable sway over how the industry acts.

So what’s the problem?

Well, it’s the knee-jerk nature of reactions to news or statements made by Google or the aforementioned industry experts. The community treats these like a call to arms, without considering the individualistic nature of any SEO campaign or the often countless other factors that should be taken into account.

Matt Cutt’s denouncement of spammy guest blogging in 2014 was one such example:

“Guest blogging is dead!”

In January 2014 Google’s very own leader of the crusades against spam, Matt Cutts, posted an article on his blog titled “The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO”, a strongly-worded commentary on how the SEO community had used guest blogging as a manipulative SEO technique. They had ignored the distinction made by Cutts himself between high quality and low quality guest posting, a distinction that was central to the point he was making.

What followed was a deluge of articles warning readers not to engage in any sort of guest blogging. That guest blogging was “dead” and would fetch heavy penalties – irrespective of whether you were contributing heavily researched articles to major media outlets, that were then engaged with and shared on the web hundreds or thousands of times.

The reaction was so one-sided that Cutts had to add a final paragraph to his blog stating that he was not “throwing the baby out with the bath water” and that high-quality guest blogging was acceptable; marketers just needed to make sure it was of the right quality.

However, the myth of “dead” guest blogging has persisted, and you’ll still find people who fail to make the distinction.

“SEO is dead!”

Following the sudden release into the wild of Google’s pet Panda and Penguin earlier this decade, there was a surge in statements that “SEO is dead”. Many despaired, while others sought quick fixes – but there were some who realized that in fact, only the old spammy version of SEO was dead.

The quality, relevance and user driven SEO environment was actually more important than it ever was. Speaking to Josh Steimle on the subject, he had the following commentary:

“We get sweeping statements about the state of SEO because it’s human nature–we want quick fixes, easy solutions, and above all, we want safety and predictability. It’s easier to say that guest post blogging is dead, don’t do it, than it is to say that some guest post blogging is good, some is bad, and that you have to consider each situation on its own merits to determine what’s what.

“The good news, at least for SEO experts and companies who use SEO wisely, is that alarmist commentary helps separate the professionals from the amateurs, which gives an advantage to those who keep a cool head and do the work required to truly understand SEO.”

Don’t deviate from the path

The fact is that yes, technical SEO can be pretty darn complex and there are a lot of factors to consider. But isn’t that the same with any campaign, or indeed any business venture?

Many may complain that Google moves the goalposts but in actual fact, the fundamentals remain the same. Avoiding manipulative behavior, staying relevant, developing authority and thinking about your users are four simple factors that will go a long way to keeping you on the straight and narrow.

The Google updates are inevitable. Techniques will evolve, and results will require some hard graft. Every campaign is different, but if you stick to the core principles of white-hat SEO, you need not take notice of the sweeping statements that abound in our corner of the marketing world. Nor should you have to fear future Google updates.

The irony is not lost on me that I have made some rather wide-ranging statements of my own in this post. Nevertheless, I urge you to stop and take a breath before reacting to the next piece of revolutionary news that comes up in your Google alerts.

SEO will continue to be a critical marketing function for years to come, and abiding by its core pillars will prevent you from having to lose the metaphorical baby when dispensing of its bathing water.

If so, you’re in luck, because there’s a documentary just for you: it’s called SEO: The Movie.

The trailer for SEO: The Movie

SEO: The Movie is a new documentary, created by digital marketing agency Ignite Visibility, which explores the origin story of search and SEO, as told by several of its pioneers. It’s a 40-minute snapshot of the search industry that is and was, focusing predominantly on its rock-and-roll heyday, with a glimpse into the future and what might become of SEO in the years to come.

The movie is a fun insight into where SEO came from and who we have to thank for it, but some of its most interesting revelations are contained within stories of the at times fraught relationship between Google and SEO consultants, as well as between Google and business owners who depended on it for their traffic. For all that search has evolved since Google was founded nearly two decades ago, this tension hasn’t gone away.

It was also interesting to hear some thoughts about what might become of search and SEO several years down the line from those who’d been around since the beginning – giving them a unique insight into the bigger picture of how search has changed, and is still changing.

So what were the highlights of SEO: The Movie, and what did we learn from watching it?

The stars of SEO

The story of SEO: The Movie is told jointly by an all-star cast of industry veterans from the early days of search and SEO (the mid-90s through to the early 2000s), with overarching narration by John Lincoln, the CEO of Ignite Visibility.

There’s Danny Sullivan, the founder of Search Engine Watch (this very website!) and co-founder of Search Engine Land; Rand Fishkin, the ‘Wizard of Moz’; Rae Hoffman a.k.a ‘Sugarrae’, CEO of PushFire and one of the original affiliate marketers; Brett Tabke, founder of Pubcon and Webmaster World; Jill Whalen, the former CEO of High Rankings and co-founder of Search Engine Marketing New England; and Barry Schwartz, CEO of RustyBrick and founder of Search Engine Roundtable.

The documentary also features a section on former Google frontman Matt Cutts, although Cutts himself doesn’t appear in the movie in person.

Each of them tells the tale of how they came to the search industry, which is an intriguing insight into how people became involved in such an unknown, emerging field. While search and SEO turned over huge amounts of revenue in the early days – Lincoln talks about “affiliates who were making millions of dollars a year” by figuring out how to boost search rankings – there was still relatively little known about the industry and how it worked.

Danny Sullivan, for instance, was a newspaper journalist who made the leap to the web development in 1995, and began writing about search “just because [he] really wanted to get some decent answers to questions about how search engines work”.

Jill Whalen came to SEO through a parenting website she set up, after she set out to bring more traffic to her website through search engines and figured out how to use keywords to make her site rank higher.

Rae Hoffman started out in the ‘long-distance space’, making modest amounts from ranking for long-distance terms, before she struck gold by creating a website for a friend selling diet pills which ranked in the top 3 search results for several relevant search terms.

“That was probably my biggest ‘holy shit’ moment,” she recalls. “My first commission check for the first month of those rankings was more than my then-husband made in a year.”

Rand Fishkin, the ‘Wizard of Moz’, relates the heart-rending story of how he and his mother initially struggled with debt in the early 2000s when Moz was still just a blog, before getting his big break at the Search Engine Strategies conference and signing his first major client.

The stories of these industry pioneers give an insight into the huge, growing, world-changing phenomenon that was SEO in the early days, back when Google, Lycos, Yahoo and others were scrambling to gain the biggest index, and Google would “do the dance” every five to eight weeks and update its algorithms, giving those clever or lucky enough to rank high a steady stream of income until the next update.

Google’s algorithm updates have always been important, but as later sections of the documentary show, certain algorithms had a disproportionate impact on businesses which Google perhaps should have done more to mitigate.

Google and webmasters: It’s complicated

“Larry [Page] and Sergey [Brin] were fairly antagonistic to SEOs,” Brett Tabke recalls. “The way I understood it, Matt [Cutts] went to Larry and said… ‘We need to have an outreach program for webmasters.’ He really reached out to us and laid out the welcome mat.”

Almost everyone in the search industry knows the name of Matt Cutts, the former head of Google’s webspam team who was, for many years, the public face of Google. Cutts became the go-to source of information on Google updates and algorithm changes, and could generally be relied upon to give an authoritative explanation of what was affecting websites’ ranking changes and why.

Matt Cutts in an explanatory video for Google Webmasters

However, even between Matt Cutts and the SEO world, things weren’t all sunshine and roses. Rand Fishkin reveals in SEO: The Movie how Cutts would occasionally contact him and request that he remove certain pieces of information, or parts of tools, that he deemed too revealing.

“We at first had a very friendly professional relationship, for several years,” he recollects. “Then I think Matt took the view that some of the transparency that I espoused, and that we were putting out there on Moz, really bothered him, and bothered Google. Occasionally I’d get an email from him saying, ‘I wish you wouldn’t write about this… I wish you wouldn’t invite this person to your conference…’ And sometimes stronger than that, like – ‘You need to remove this thing from your tool, or we will ban you.’”

We’ve written previously about the impact of the lack of transparency surrounding Google’s algorithm updates and speculated whether Google owes it to SEOs to be more honest and accountable. The information surrounding Google’s updates has become a lot murkier since Matt Cutts left the company in 2014 (while Cutts didn’t formally resign until December 2016, he was on leave for more than two years prior to that) with the lack of a clear spokesperson.

But evidently, even during Cutts’ tenure with Google, Google had a transparency problem.

In the documentary, Fishkin recalls the general air of mystery that surrounded the workings of search engines in the early days, with each company highly protective of its secrets.

“The search engines themselves – Google, Microsoft, Yahoo – were all incredibly secretive about how their algorithms worked, how their engines worked… I think that they felt it was sort of a proprietary trade secret that helped them maintain a competitive advantage against one another. As a result, as a practitioner, trying to keep up with the search engines … was incredibly challenging.”

This opaqueness surrounding Google’s algorithms persisted, even as Google grew far more dominant in the space and arguably had much less to fear from being overtaken by competitors. And as Google’s dominance grew, the impact of major algorithm changes became more severe.

SEO: The Movie looks back on some of Google’s most significant updates, such as Panda and Penguin, and details how they impacted the industry at the time. One early update, the so-called ‘Florida update’, specifically took aim at tactics that SEOs were using to manipulate search rankings, sending many high-ranking websites “into free-fall”.

Barry Schwartz describes how “many, many retailers” at the time of the Florida update suddenly found themselves with “zero sales” and facing bankruptcy. And to add insult to injury, the update was never officially confirmed by Google.

Fast-forward to 2012, when Google deployed the initial Penguin update that targeted link spam. Once again, this was an update that hit SEOs who had been employing these tactics in order to rank very hard – and moreover, hit their client businesses. But because of the huge delay between one Penguin update and the next, businesses which changed their ways and went on the metaphorical straight and narrow still weren’t able to recover.

“As a consultant, I had companies calling me that were hit by Penguin, and had since cleaned up all of their backlinks,” says Rae Hoffman.

“They would contact me and say, ‘We’re still not un-penalized, so we need you to look at it to see what we missed.’ And I would tell them, ‘You didn’t miss anything. You have to wait for Google to push the button again.’

“I would get calls from companies that told me that they had two months before they were going to have to close the doors and start firing employees; and they were waiting on a Penguin update. Google launched something that was extremely punitive; that was extremely devastating; that threw a lot of baby out with the bathwater… and then chose not to update it again for almost two years.”

These recollections from veteran SEOs show that Google’s relationship with webmasters has always been fraught with difficulties. Whatever you think about Google’s right to protect its trade secrets and take actions against those manipulating its algorithms, SEOs were the ones who drove the discussion around what Google was doing in its early days, analyzing it and spreading the word, reporting news stories, featuring Google and other search companies at their conferences.

To my mind at least, it seems that it would have been fairer for Google to develop a more open and reciprocal relationship with webmasters and SEOs, which would have prevented situations like the ones above from occurring.

Where is search and SEO headed in the future?

It’s obviously difficult to predict what might be ahead with absolute certainty. But as I mentioned in the introduction, what I like about the ‘future of search’ predictions in SEO: The Movie is that they come from veterans who have been around since the early days, meaning that they know exactly where search has come from, and have a unique perspective on the overarching trends that have been present over the past two decades.

As Rae Hoffman puts it,

“If you had asked me ten years ago, ‘Where are we going to be in ten years?’ Never would I have been able to remotely fathom the development of Twitter, or the development of Facebook, or that YouTube would become one of the largest search engines on the internet.”

I think it’s also important to distinguish between the future of search and the future of SEO, which are two different but complimentary things. One deals with how we will go about finding information in future, and relates to phenomena like voice search, visual search, and the move to mobile. The other relates to how website owners can make sure that their content is found by users within those environments.

Rand Fishkin believes that the future of SEO is secure for at least a few years down the line.

“SEO has a very bright future for at least the next three or four years. I think the future after that is more uncertain, and the biggest risk that I see to this field is that search volume, and the possibility of being in front of searchers, diminishes dramatically because of smart assistants and voice search.”

Brett Tabke adds:

“The future of SEO, to me, is this entire holistic approach: SEO, mobile, the web, social… Every place you can put marketing is going to count. We can’t just do on-the-page stuff anymore; we can’t worry about links 24/7.”

As for the future of search, CEO of Ignite Visibility John Lincoln sums it up well at the very end of the movie when he links search to the general act of researching. Ultimately, people are always going to have a need to research and discover information, and this means that ‘search’ in some form will always be around.

“I will say the future of search is super bright,” he says. “And people are going to evolve with it.

“Searching is always going to be tied to research, and whenever anybody needs a service or a product, they’re going to do research. It might be through Facebook, it might be through Twitter, it might be through LinkedIn, it might be through YouTube. There’s a lot of different search engines out there, and platforms, that are always expanding and contracting based off of the features that they’re putting out there.

“Creating awesome content that’s easy to find, that’s technically set up correctly and that reverberates through the internet… That’s the core of what search is about.”

SEO: The Movie is definitely an enjoyable watch and at 40 minutes in length, it won’t take up too much of your day. If you’re someone who’s been around in search since the beginning, you’ll enjoy the trip down Memory Lane. If, like me, you’re newer to the industry, you’ll enjoy the look back at where it came from – and particularly the realization that there some things which haven’t changed at all.

Yet recognizing such patterns requires gathering a whole lot of data from which to learn, something humans aren’t so great at.

Machines, conversely, are great at gathering data, but they’re not so good at recognizing patterns, figuring out how those patterns fit into the big picture, and understanding what they mean. Basically, they can’t read the writing on the wall the way humans can.

So computers and people need to work together in order to perform the complicated process of information gathering and analysis that lies underneath a search engine’s results. Wouldn’t it be great if somehow, the two could simply be fused together?

Enter RankBrain, Google’s machine-learning artificial intelligence that processes a “very large fraction” of search results each day, the AI that not only gathers data, but also sees the patterns therein.

Hi, RankBrain. what are you?

RankBrain has not usurped PageRank’s throne. Rather, it’s a part of the bigger algorithm that takes search queries, interprets what the user is searching for, and figures out how to submit that request in new ways.

Take the search term “Matt Cutts,” for example. A few years ago, Google and other search engines would have looked for pages matching that exact term. Nowadays, Google’s algorithm understands who “Matt Cutts” is a lot better.

Searching “Matt Cutts” might also grab pages and information that match “Google spam team,” “SEO,” or even “cookie guy.” (If you don’t know why that result would come up for Matt Cutts, look it up. It’s a funny story.)

In short, Google can now do a better job of recognizing the relationships between words — what they mean, what concepts they reference, and why they’ve been strung together to make a search term. RankBrain deepens this understanding.

According to Bloomberg, it “uses artificial intelligence to embed vast amounts of written language into mathematical entities — called vectors — that the computer can understand. If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly, making it more effective at handling never-before-seen search queries.”

Think of RankBrain like a clerk at Bed Bath and Beyond. If you walk into the store and say that you’re looking for “that plastic doohickey that squeezes the juice from a lemon without getting any seeds in the vinaigrette,” the clerk — or the AI — will synthesize that string of words and respond, “Oh, a citrus squeezer? Those are in Aisle 11; follow me.”

RankBrain? Don’t you mean SkyNet? Or Agent Smith?

Nope. RankBrain is not sentient. Saying that RankBrain “learns” doesn’t mean that you could sit down with it, show it the basic principles of algebra, and set it loose to solve equations for X.

Instead, it is fed quantities of historical searches and their results, and extrapolates this information to make predictions about future searches.

If these predictions are deemed to hit the mark with relative accuracy, then the humans who engineer RankBrain release its latest version. To continue the math analogy, it’s somewhat like a student who takes multiple practice SATs to ensure she can score well before sitting down to the real thing.

And RankBrain has proven that it can score really well.

Google’s search engineers, who craft the algorithms that underpin the search software, were asked to take a look at some search results and guess what they thought would be ranked on top. They did pretty well, choosing the correct ones 70% of the time. RankBrain, however, was right 80% of the time.

In fact, Google found that turning off RankBrain “would be as damaging to users as forgetting to serve half the pages on Wikipedia,” Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist at Google, told Bloomberg.

Okay, but what will RankBrain do to SEO? Is it going to kick over our sandcastles?

Considering the fact that Corrado told Bloomberg that RankBrain is the “third-most important signal contributing to the result of a search query,” it’s logical to say that it can and does affect SEO.

Although Google began rolling out RankBrain a few months ago, it hasn’t had the same effect that Panda or Penguin did.

If anything, RankBrain has probably helped SEO by pulling in more relevant search factors. Where a local pizzeria may not have ranked as well in some local results pages before, it may now be earning a top slot, thanks to RankBrain’s intuition.

For now, RankBrain is less like HAL 9000 or the Terminator T-800, and more like Johnny 5 or Wall-E: a friend, not an enemy.

My (thoroughly human) prediction is that smart SEO agencies will begin to experiment, particularly when it comes to small businesses and local search, to find out if they can pull back the curtain on RankBrain and learn what makes it tick — thereby increasing their clients’ chances of movin’ on up in SERPs.

Unless you were a government, a school or a non-profit, the only top-level domain (TLD) that made any sense was .COM. Naturally, everyone from plumbers to politicians flocked to secure important .COM domain names.

However during the last 10 years, social media, apps, mobile and the internet of things have changed the relevance of the domain name.

With the expansion of the internet from these four tried and tested TLDs to now more than 1,000, what should your chief marketing officer (CMO) know about the new generic top level domains (gTLDs) and dot brands?

Is it just a fad? Will it soon fade away like other top-level domain extensions that struggled to take off, such as .BIZ, .MOBI, .TV or .TRAVEL? Will domain names continue to matter?

Will the fact that half the world’s top brands – Google applied for 101 new top-level domains, Amazon applied for 76 – now own a dot brand change things? Will the ability to more specifically define your product, service, slogan, campaign or company into a category more closely aligned with your messaging win in favor of the oldie but goodie, .COM?

Here are a few things your CMO should know.

1) Search will change in the next few years

Many speculate that the top-level domain doesn’t matter. But it likely will in the future.

In the past, the top-level domain didn’t mean a lot because everyone was either in .COM or a CO.CountryCode. These big piles of domains didn’t distinguish one company or product from another, so naturally the top-level domain didn’t have a lot of weight.

In the past, algorithms have recognized when top-level domains started to have meaning or become signals. When .CO was introduced to mean company or commerce, as opposed to the country of Colombia, the algorithm eventually recognized that shift.

“There have been enough people using .CO around the world that we are not treating it as if it is specific to Colombia,” said Google’s Matt Cutts after .CO shifted its meaning. The same is likely to happen here.

When most of the web sites in the domain name .PLUMBER or .DENTIST are in factplumbers or dentists, and when those plumbers and dentists optimize their websites using those names, it will become a signal.

More importantly, when big brands start using their dot brands and introduce new products, campaigns, or secure logins, the algorithms will start to recognize the dot brand top-level domain.

The signal will be that this is the one true brand and everything to the left of the dot can be trusted. This will change search and have a trickle-down effect.

2) User experience

New domains and dot brands will allow marketers to create a user experience more tailored to the consumer. Whether it’s hyper-personalized down to the individual level or just personalized to a demographic or geographic area, the dot brands have the ability to create interesting user experiences.

For example, Calvin Klein could build out YourCloset.CALVINKLEIN, Miami.CALVINKLEIN, or FallJeans.CALVINKLEIN to drive people who are interested in a specific experience directly into a space.

Tiffany & Co. could also build out specific spaces, such as Mom.TIFFANY, HolidaysAt.TIFFANY or Anniversary.TIFFANY.

Major League Baseball can tailor domains to specific teams, cities, or events, or even just what’s happening right now with Now.MLB.

Organizations can focus on creating a user experience solely targeted to what the user is seeking, rather than hoping they find it from the homepage experience.

3) Data

The other big trend on the horizon is using the dot brand space to collect new forms of data.

Dot brands will have the ability to know if people are searching for a domain that does not exist in their domain spaces. This means that if HBO sees that everyone is searching for Sports.HBO or Shop.HBO it may want to create a dedicated space to use that new interest.

It also creates the opportunity for dot brands to architect a natural language-based infrastructure to their online experiences tailored to driving traffic and behavior in a slightly different way than was previously available.

This ability to architect the dot brand could create new and instantaneous data points that enhance what is currently available.

4) Security

New dot brands will also have the ability to offer greater security.

Dot brands can run security scans at all levels and facets of their Internet neighborhoods, where they have complete control, and can add products and services to enhance scans and security settings.

For financial institutions, insurance companies and pharmaceuticals this will have great value if it’s executed properly. For everyone else, it offers something more to consumers in a security-conscious society.

5) Digital transformation

Many will argue that domain names are dead. While social media connects us and apps make life easy on the go, most people still access the internet through traditional browsers at some point during the day.

Even my 12-year-old son, who lives most of his life in new social media and texting, still turns to a laptop and browser when he needs to do his homework or wants to search YouTube.

These new ways of using the internet – when it’s connected to flat panels throughout your home, car and other places – will evolve how domain names are used.

Domain names will still be relevant and with more natural language – WhatHappensIn.VEGAS or when flu season hits, Cold.SOLUTIONS – they will become more memorable and targeted.

The next generation will grow up with this wide variety of naming opportunities and they will someday wonder why everyone used a .COM back in the old days.

There are many facets to the digital transformation underway and the new tailored, custom domain name space is one piece of it.

So what does your CMO need to know?

These new domain extensions could transform what consumers come to expect when they search from a browser. The idea that domain names are more desirable and trusted than old-school domain names is a natural evolution of the domain name space.

What’s interesting to observe is that this happened 20 years ago. Remember the original .COM boom? Many companies failed to act and later suffered because they didn’t have important digital assets they needed. They didn’t think the .COM thing would last.

CMOs have largely learned not to make that mistake again and to focus on the future, but so much is happening so fast it’s hard to keep up.

CMOs need to understand how domain names fit into a larger part of digital transformation and consider what naming-convention strategy will lead your company into the future.

Google Webmaster Guidelines says, “Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.” The big problem: the word “intended” is still part of that statement.

Some would say that those who engage in content marketing intend to get a link. But you can argue that content marketing, PR and other digital marketing activities are not, in and of themselves, an attempt to get a link or manipulate rankings. They’re promotion. And sure, you hope to get a link out of it, but that’s very different from scheming to get a link.

In my last post, I wrote that Google’s policy gives well-known brands an advantage because they can get links simply by posting (often very mediocre) content on their websites, while small businesses with no brand awareness cannot. In the comments on that post, R. Rogerson wrote, “Come on Adam, Show your stuff … why don’t you show people how they can get links – instead of further instilling the false concept that they cannot?”

First, a correction. The point of the post was, “Small businesses are not going to get links just by virtue of having good content” and “Small business owners have to do something to start the ball rolling, and that something is content marketing.” That – content marketing – is exactly what every small business has to do. Let’s take a look at some content marketing activities and other actions that are geared toward promotion and brand building, but do have the potential to get a link.

Guest Blogging Got a Bad Rap

Though Matt Cutts wrote, “If you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop … if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging, you’re hanging out with really bad company,” people who guest post on respected sites like Search Engine Watch are not in bad company. Guest blogging is about brand-building and tapping into an audience of people who are interested in your industry. If you can get in front of someone else’s audience, like Search Engine Watch, and show you’re knowledgeable about your industry, people will check out your website.

When they get to your website, they will find all of that interesting content that you’ve posted. Maybe they’ll link to it, maybe not. Maybe they’ll follow you on Twitter and other social properties, and possibly link to something you put out there in the future. As our friend R. Rogerson wrote in one of his many comments, “Why the blazes do you think Adam’s getting stuff published on this site? For his own karma? Out of the kindness of his heart to plead your case to Google? Hell no! It’s attention – it’s brand building – it’s link baiting.”

Can’t argue with that. And due to the ambiguous Google guidelines, we have to pretend we write for Search Engine Watch without any intention of getting links? Huh? Why can’t we be honest? Google created this incentive system, anyway.

Outreach that Puts Audience First

Outreach to local newspapers, building community relationships and networking with others in your industry can get publicity that doesn’t contain a single link. That’s OK. Some of the best PR doesn’t have a direct link. Exhibit A: HubShout was featured in the Business section of The Washington Post. That’s huge! But, no link. No links in write-ups in Falls Church News Press and Rochester Business Journal either. That kind of publicity spreads awareness of your brand and gets Tweets, Facebook shares, and sometimes phone calls and new clients. All of that publicity has the possibility of a link somewhere down the line, but it’s not the only reason for taking the time to be interviewed, or to participate in a community event.

The Kind of Content that Gets Shared

Create valuable, shareable, great, outstanding, useful, educational, quality, content. What exactly does that look like? Someone with an established brand and a huge following – Seth Godin, for example – just puts things out there and people link to it. That doesn’t happen for most people. Here are a few things that can get you noticed and help you start to build your brand:

• Original Research. Run a survey, conduct a focus group or compile a list of statistics from research done by others. Write an interesting summary to accompany the collection of data. Share it on social media and pitch it to others who may want to share it and link to it.
• Infographics. Of all the content we produce, infographics are, by far, our most shared and linked asset. Infographics sometimes require original research, or:
• Make it Ten Times Better. Add significant value to someone else’s content or research. Improve something that’s already been done. Create an infographic out of it. If you find a high-ranking research report that was done two years ago, create a similar report with information that’s relevant now. If you find a study on a topic that’s ranking well, create a similar report that’s more fine-tuned to a particular niche. As Rand Fishkin said, “I’m going to pursue content in areas where I believe I can create something 10 times better than the best result out there.” That is excellent advice. We have these same discussions at HubShout.

All That Hard Work and Then…Nothing?

When you invest your time into creating content and you post it on your website, despite what Google says, it won’t be found, shared and linked to. It’s not going to happen, unless you’re a well-known brand. And unless you’ve already built a social media following, nothing is going to happen there, either. Spend the money to promote your post or Tweet. People will share it. The threshold to Tweet is very low. The amount of content people share and promote on social media is very high.

There is value in Tweets and social media shares. In a recent survey conducted by TrustRadius, 80 percent of respondents indicated that “engagement” – likes, shares, comments, followers – is the most important metric for social media campaigns. And the most common goals of social media programs are brand awareness, website traffic, and audience reach. When you’re sharing your content on social media and paying to promote it, engagement is what you’re going for. If you’re content is really good, you’ll get a link. A link is truly a measure of how good your content is.

Conclusion

The road to a link is usually very long and winding and sometimes, you don’t quite arrive at your destination. But all the stops along the way are worthwhile. You connect with new people and sometimes take a detour that leads to new opportunities. Keep at it, put serious effort into improving upon the content that’s ranking on page one, and don’t pass up any opportunity to share and promote your content. Who knows – someday, when you least expect it, even months later, you might get a link out of it. Not that you intended for that to happen.

The Penguin algorithm, launched more than three years ago now, has drastically improved Google’s ability to algorithmically detect and punish sites with manipulative links. Google’s ability to detect such links continues to improve every year. If you’re building low-quality links, you’re putting your site and business at risk. Conversely, I’ve witnessed the impressive impact that quality links can have on a site’s visibility, traffic, and engagement.

Recently, in SEMrush’s Twitter chat, the overwhelming response to their question regarding link-building mistakes was trying to take shortcuts. In one form or another, almost every reply dealt with the variety of ways sites and SEOs try to shortcut the link-building process.

Matt Cutts, former Head of Webspam at Google, famously referred to this as “putting the cart before the horse” in his interview with Eric Enge, later citing link building as “sweat plus creativity.”

I’ve created a list of questions you should be asking about your own link-building activities, to ensure you’re only pursuing quality links. Asking these questions will ensure you’re creating links that improve the human experience on the web, as well as your site’s performance in search. Bear in mind that no single question will 100 percent guarantee link quality, but taken together, enough of these questions should shine light on the value of the link.

Without further ado, let’s launch into it.

1. Questions Pertaining to Link Relevance

• Is the site relevant to your site?
• Is the site relevant to your page being linked?
• Is the linking page relevant to your page?
• Is the link relevant to the content surrounding it? Is it contextually relevant to the page?

2. Questions Pertaining to the Human Value of a Link

• Is the link a citation, recommendation, or resource?
• Does the link provide value in the context it’s presented?
• When a person clicks the link, will they be happy with the result?
• Would a person be surprised where the link takes them?
• Does the link improve the page it lives on?
• Does the link improve the web experience?

3. Questions Pertaining to Site Quality (of the Linking Website)

• Is the site’s content compelling, clear, thematically relevant, and free of errors?
• Does the site have clear and present value?
• Are there real humans associated with the site?
• Is there an address listed for the physical location of the business or site owner?
• Are there signs of other humans engaging and interacting with the site?
• Does the site have a social profile? Things to keep in mind include follower versus followed count; Facebook fans; Google+ interaction; overall engagement and interaction; and content shared.
• Does the site link primarily to other good sites? Is it a “good link neighborhood?”
• Is contact information listed for the owner or manager of the website?
• Does the site appear to be part of a larger network? This could be a potential red flag.
• Is the design of the website up-to-date?

4. Questions Pertaining to the Marketing Value of a Link

• Can this link lead to a relationship or partnership?
• Will this link generate exposure to a new, relevant audience?
• Will this link generate further exposure to an important site or business asset?
• Does the link represent a positive brand endorsement?
• Will the page foster a positive user experience with your brand and site?

5. Questions Pertaining to the SEO Value of a Link

Can Google crawl the link?

• Is the page crawlable?
• Is there a meta robots tag? Does it include noindex or nofollow? These will block Google from crawling the page.
• Is the page blocked in robots.txt?
• Is the page using AJAX?
• Is the page using JavaScript? Google can now crawl JavaScript.
• Is the page indexed?
• Is the link hidden behind a redirect?
• Is there anything else that might interfere with Google’s ability to crawl the link?

Tag attributes:

• Is the nofollow attribute used?
• Is the link an image? Is the alt attribute tag used?

Anchor text:

• Is a keyword used in the anchor text?
• Is the link over-optimized? This is bad, especially if done at scale.
• Was the anchor editorially created?
• Did you ask for specific anchor text?
• Is it a naked URL? (a linked full URL i.e. https://www.google.com/)
• Is white noise such as “here,” “click,” or “this” used?
• Does the anchor text appear natural in context?

Link placement:

• Is the link site-wide? This is typically bad.
• Is the link on a relevant page?
• Is the link in content?
• Is the link high on the page?
• Are there many other links on the page?
• Are those links relevant to your page?
• Are the other links to quality content and sites?

On-page elements:

• Are the header tags relevant to your page?
• Is the title tag relevant to your page?
• Is the URL relevant to your page? Does it contain the word “link” or “list?”
• Does the page contain 500 words or more?

6. The Gut Check

• Are we happy to show the link to the client?
• Are we happy to show the link to colleagues?
• Would we be happy to show the link to other SEOs?
• Would we be happy to show the link to family and friends?

This is not a 100 percent comprehensive list – it would be impossible to list every consideration possible to gauge the value of a link. The important thing is to be sure that you’re critically examining your links for value, the real gauge of link quality.

A link should be valuable for:

1. The people who click the link
2. The page the link lives on
3. The site hosting the page
4. Your page and website
5. Google, as this link will signal the relevance and authority of your page

There should be no shortcuts in this process – build links that have value, and you won’t need to worry as Google updates their algorithms.

The Google mantra: “Create great content and it will earn links,” works for big business, but not for small ones.

According to Google, the best way to get other sites to create high-quality, relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the Internet community. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice and the more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it.

Greater the chances? That’s hilarious. Small business owners realize that doesn’t really work and they’re not laughing.

Google’s False Premise

Small businesses are not going to get links just by virtue of having good content. Google policies are seemingly oblivious to this reality: without links, small businesses get no traffic and without traffic, they get no links. A chicken and egg scenario. A conundrum. An impossibility.

So, Just Sit There and Wait?

Wait for something that’s either not going to happen or will take years to happen? We’re talking about someone’s livelihood. Small business owners have to do something to start the ball rolling and that something is content marketing. Google should be OK with content marketing.

All the hard work that goes into content marketing should “earn” links. Not build, but earn. Google should acknowledge the difference.

When Matt Cutts said, “Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging, you’re hanging out with really bad company.” He should have continued on to say, “but I know that small businesses can’t really get links from great content on their websites. Here’s what they can do so they don’t get run over by the big businesses that don’t have to do much to get links.” We’re still waiting.

When small business owners – or the SEOs who work for them – spend hours upon hours networking with bloggers and looking for and guest post opportunities in an effort to get a link – yes, an obvious effort to get a link – they have earned that link.

Google: Consider This

In my post from earlier this month, “The Collateral Damage of Google’s Link Policy,” I included quotes and opinions from small business owners. My sources were well-researched and each one of them contributed a thoughtful response to this question: “Have you been denied a link?”

All of the individuals who were quoted in the article understand the value of a link from a high-authority website. They actively seek out opportunities to be quoted as an authority for the sole purpose of getting a link. Though no promises were made, certainly all of them hoped for a link.

At first, the links were left out, which led to an interesting debate in the comments. But in the end, they all got links. Is that manipulative? Are those natural links? I believe so. There was no monetary compensation and the links were certainly reviewed by the editorial staff for appropriateness to the audience, as Google would have wanted. Sources quoted in online articles are guest experts, no different from a person who gets publicity from an appearance on CNN.

Consider this scenario: a shark attacks two people in North Carolina – which, of course, really did happen earlier this month. An expert in shark behavior contacts CNN and offers an educated opinion on why the shark may have behaved in such an uncharacteristic manner. CNN invites the shark expert to appear on a primetime show. The host conducts the interview but refuses to mention the person’s name, credentials or anything about his or her background…nothing.

It’s hard to imagine because it wouldn’t happen. It wouldn’t happen because CNN has vetted the person, believes the person has value to the audience, and has no problem giving credit where credit is due. Additionally, the interviewee expects a little publicity for his or her company, charitable organization, recently-published book or whatever. It’s give-and-take for both sides.

Sources get credit. Sources in online articles get links. Sources earned those links.

Conclusions

Lest anyone think rankings happen without links, a Moz ranking correlation study found that out of the top search results, a full 99.2 percent of all websites had at least one external link and more links correlate with higher rankings. In his blog post about the study, Cyrus Shepard wrote, “If you want to rank for anything that’s even remotely competitive, the chances of finding a website ranking without external links is very rare indeed.”

A small or new business can have a flawless website with spectacular content, a zillion times better than any Fortune 500 company, but it doesn’t matter at all because no one is going to find it. Ipso facto, no organic links for the little guy. Ipso facto, the little guy needs to promote his content with the intent of improving his rankings. Google should be OK with that.

As Josh Rubin, suggested in a comment on my last post, “The rule should be, generate content that doesn’t suck and then ceaselessly promote the heck out of it.'” That sounds about right.

Google spokespeople are masters at the art of fear, uncertainty and doubt. The search giant’s webmaster trends analyst John Mueller is no exception.

“We do use links as a part of our algorithms, but we use lots and lots of other factors, as well,” Mueller said during a Google+ hangout a few months back. So only focusing on links is probably going to cause more problems for your website than it actually helps.”

The takeaway for many observers is to avoid link-building. But over the years, I have learned how to properly parse these messages out. Sure, Google has “lots and lots of factors” built into its algorithm, but they are weighted very differently. In fact, only two factors have an additional and independent algorithm dedicated to them, one of those being links (Penguin).

The query posed to Mueller at 55:40 in the Google+ hangout was, “Is link-building in any way good for webmasters?” The short answer is an unequivocal yes.

Why the Mixed Message?

Mueller heads up Google’s Webmaster Central Help Forum, which is dedicated to crawling, indexing, and ranking. I took a lot of heat in the comments of this post from the mods in that forum after chastising them for giving out erroneous advice, specifically “Building followed links is against guidelines.” (It’s not).

I think the moderators do their best to help an endless stream of webmasters get their bearings straight. I don’t think anyone is intentionally trying to mislead webmasters. That said, many of the people seeking help in the forum are not seasoned SEOs and don’t understand the nuance between link-building and link-scheming. Coming from that frame of reference, the mods often respond to link building queries with a stock link-scheming answer: just don’t do it.

Back to that “Nuance” Thing

In the world of SEO, there are really only two kinds of links: those that conform to Google Webmaster Guidelines and links that don’t.

According to Google, the more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it.

When Mueller says link-building is problematic, he’s refering to some common link-building schemes:

• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link. This is probably the fastest path to both rankings and a manual penalty. Exact match anchor text on powerful pages still drive rankings.
• Excessive link exchanges (“Link to me and I’ll link to you”) or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking. The important point of distinction here is “excessive.” I would also emphasize that any link exchanges should be limited to related sites that only link to other high-quality and related websites.
• Large-scale article marketing with keyword-rich anchor text links. There’s no value in article marketing in 2015. Guest posting the right way is now more about PR than links, but still a great way to drive traffic.
• Using automated programs or services to create links to your site. This is akin to spam on steroids. There is no legit application for programs like SEnuke; be equally wary of cheap link-building services on Fiverr. If I can spot a “Fiverr Pattern,” so can Google.

Additionally, creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of Google guidelines. Here are a few common examples:

• Text advertisements that pass PageRank
• Advertorials or native advertising where a payment is received for articles that include links that pass PageRank
• Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites
• Low-quality directory or bookmark site links
• Keyword-rich, hidden or low-quality links embedded in widgets that are distributed across various sites
• Widely-distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites
• Forum comments with optimized links in the post or signature

Will Backlinks Ever Lose Their Importance?

Though Matt Cutts said that “backlinks still have many many years left in them,” I suspect their weight in the algorithm will diminish over time as technology like Knowledge Based Trust evolves. Google’s ranking algorithm may utilize “lots and lots” of factors, but the right combination of website architecture and optimization, web content and backlinks still rules the SERPs.

We continue our look back at some of Cutts’ blog posts, videos, and thoughts to get a better understanding of where Google’s been, which in turn can be a great way to get a feel for where Google (and therefore SEO) is going next.

If you’re just joining us, we’ve been going year by year, highlighting two or three of the biggest splashes he made. This post has been split into three time periods:

• 2000-2005
• 2006-2010
• 2011-2014

From 2011 onward, things should be pretty familiar to most of you. Still, there is much to learn from the past few years.

Matt Cutts in 2011

This was the year of the first Panda update and, let’s be honest, it’s easier to remember things from 3 years ago that 13. Believe me, in searching for the past stories I knew were out there I was off by as much as a couple years in the events from the early 2000s.

So let’s look at the top few things from Cutts in 2011 …

Rel=”author”

This video is a good watch for anyone interested in how Google wanted to treat the authorship tag:

At this stage it wasn’t cross-domain but it’s alluded to, but more interesting (to me anyways) is when Cutts discusses authors themselves holding a value that will pass to their content on the sites of others (when cross-domain authorship applies). There’s also a little slip around the four minute mark where he talks in the present tense about cross-domain authorship (but catches himself quickly).

Authorship is important; I think we all know that. It’s interesting to hear what it’s intended to do and while we can debate now how authorship value is passing, knowing what it’s intended to be can shed light on what Google is likely working toward in their quest to understand individuals and their trustability.

Bing Copying Their Results

Cutts doesn’t seem to get angry much (I suppose that’s easy enough when you can simply get even), but when rumor spread that Bing may be copying the search results from Google, Google ran a test and confirmed it and Cutts blogged about it – well… yeah. I suppose since he couldn’t get even with Bing it makes sense that he seemed a little mad.

Before we get into his comments on the subject, let’s compare a sample set of search results for gibberish phrases that Google purposely set the results for in their testing:

There were more examples and if you read his full blog post on the subject here you can see them as well as read his full rant about the subject and even watch a video of him squaring off against Bing’s Harry Shum and Rich Skrenta from Blekko. As he noted, he’s not great at being snarky but directs those hoping for more to watch the following:

But to hear it straight from Cutts, his words on the subject were:

“If clicks on Google really account for only 1/1000th (or some other trivial fraction) of Microsoft’s relevancy, why not just stop using those clicks and reduce the negative coverage and perception of this? And if Microsoft is unwilling to stop incorporating Google’s clicks in Bing’s rankings, doesn’t that argue that Google’s clicks account for much more than 1/1000th of Bing’s rankings?

I really did try to be calm and constructive in this post, so I apologize if some frustration came through despite that–my feelings on the search panel were definitely not feigned. Since people at Microsoft might not like this post, I want to reiterate that I know the people (especially the engineers) at Bing work incredibly hard to compete with Google, and I have huge respect for that. It’s because of how hard those engineers work that I think Microsoft should stop using clicks on Google in Bing’s rankings. If Bing does better on a search query than Google does, that’s fantastic. But an asterisk that says “we don’t know how much of this win came from Google” does a disservice to everyone. I think Bing’s engineers deserve to know that when they beat Google on a query, it’s due entirely to their hard work. Unless Microsoft changes its practices, there will always be a question mark.”

Why is this important? Well for one this is the first time I think I’ve ever read or heard Cutts get publically mad. I’m sure it happens privately but I’d yet to actually witness it (even when I thought it was deserved),

Secondly, this event highlights a moment in search history. The moment when not just the technologies were being infringed on, but the final product. Google may have patented everything else, but apparently that didn’t extend to the finished product. If I was a lawyer I probably would have had some fun with that, but I’m not – and it’s 2014, not 2011.

A Panda Attack

I promised it earlier and it’s only fair to include what was the biggest SEO event of the year, the attack of the Panda. On February 23 it hit hard affecting 12 percent of search queries. In describing the update he said:

So it wasn’t an attack on spam, it was an improvement to search quality. An important internal distinction I’m sure but to me that’s a bit like saying (as he has), “There is no sandbox, there are just elements of the algorithm that may look and act like them.” (I’m paraphrasing) In November of the year he spoke on the subject of recovery when he said:

“Improve the quality of content or if there is some part of your site that has got especially low-quality content, or stuff that really not all that useful, then it might make sense to not have that content on your site.”

He also discussed the issue of scrapers in a reply to a question sent to him:

The Panda update was a turning point in SEO and, as had become usual, Cutts was the figurehead for Google in helping webmasters get a handle on what was happening. Onsite SEO took a hard turn from a focus on keyword density (remember that?) and pure mathematics to compelling copy and visitor experience.

While anyone doing SEO might not have loved this change (or any other major shift for that matter) it put the focus where it should be to maximize a website’s health. Finally the goal of Google in working to results that users like match with the efforts of SEO professionals in seeking rankings. In the end it works well for site owners who want conversions and where the path to them is via rankings.

Matt Cutts in 2012

2012 was probably the most turbulent year in SEO. Pandas and Penguins ransacked the results pages and Cutts was at the center of it all (at least from a public standpoint).

On top of that the nature of the Internet itself was in question PIPA was on the table. And of course, Cutts was vocal about that too. Let’s take a look at some of the top Cuttsisms.

PIPA (Protect IP Act)

If not before, Cutts made his position on the issue very clear in his blog. He wrote:

“Now it’s time to rally and get loud. It’s time to call your Senators. Heck, it’s time to ask your parents to call their Senators. If you think the internet is something different, something special, then take a few minutes to protect it. Groups that support SOPA have contributed nine times more money in Washington D.C. than our side. We need to drown out that money with the sound of our voices. I’d like to flood every Senator’s phone, email, and office with messages right up until January 24th.”

So Cutts extends his influence past search and into the political spectrum (not for the first time but certainly the most aggressively I’ve seen). While interesting purely from the context of Cutts’ career, it’s also interesting to look through his time with Google and in the technology sector as he grew from the SafeSearch guy with not a ton to say into the search guy speaking not just on Google but on Bing thefts and now political issues.

Google Penguin

Penguin was an algorithm designed to target low quality links built only to impact search rankings. Rather than work on ways to determine which links are low quality, Google opted to punish website owners who had these links.

The logic of this approach being that if the punishment is severe enough, people won’t use the strategies thus making the life of a Google engineer easier. Like cutting off the hand of a thief for stealing a pie.

Yes, the punishment far exceeds the crime, but people will think twice about taking that pie, no matter how hungry they are. Yes, what I’m saying is that Google acts a lot like the medieval judiciary system.

But back to Cutts…

When discussing the update and whether it was a penalty he said:

“No, neither Penguin nor Panda are manual penalties,” explaining that Penguin was designed to tackle “the stuff in the middle” between fantastic, high quality content and spam. Panda was all about spam, but the need for Penguin arose from this middle ground.

“It does demote web results, but it’s an algorithmic change, not a penalty. It’s yet another signal among over 200 signals we look at.

A penalty is a manual action taken against a site and you will pretty much always be notified in Webmaster Tools if it’s a penalty affecting your site.”

So, what we have here is the explanation that Penguin was built to filter link quality. I found it a bit coincidental that the Penguin update took place at roughly the same time as 1 million “unnatural links” warnings were sent out to webmasters.

Now, I pick on Google a bit (as you can tell) but in the end, we created the bed we were lying in. I can blame Google for over-punishing (true in many cases), but when we look back at what Cutts has told us over the years and how any advice got almost immediately abused, we really can’t blame them.

So now website owners were suffering due to the actions of previously successful strategies that we were told not to do. But there was a darker side and Cutts needed to address that too. If poor quality links can trigger a penalty (or algorithmic devaluation) then the issue needed to be addressed…

Negative SEO

2012 was the year that negative SEO returned to the forefront of our consciousness. I know that I personally had a client suffer a sudden spike in poor quality links with the anchor text “payday loans” and other similar permutations. The client wasn’t at all involved with loans or the financial sector at all and yet… the unnatural links warning followed.

The concern (and legitimate obviously) was that a competitor could simply purchase large numbers of known-bad links and negatively impact your domain. Here’s what Cutts had to say on the subject:

First, interesting that he refers to the webspam team thinking about negative SEO when it’s in the context of algorithm updates that he noted previously weren’t from that team, but let’s set that aside.

Second, the big problem here is that Cutts is basically suggesting that website owners now have extra work on their plates in monitoring all their links and making sure to disavow the ones that might be a threat. This assumes that all website owners know how to do that or even that they should.

Another issue from this video is that he states, if a competitor is trying to frame someone in the eyes of the webspam team, there’s a simple way to deal with it using the disavow tool. This directly contradicts Google’s own statements on reconsideration.

Let’s say that the webspam team takes the bait (and I’ve seen it with my own eyes). Google specifically states that once a penalty is in place they need to see efforts to remove those links prior to a reconsideration request being filed. So now the site owner is dealing with lost revenue, the cost and/or effort of getting the links removed as best they can, the time delay in hearing back from Google and then the delay in getting their rankings back.

While I don’t blame Cutts for this issue obviously, his explanation of how Google’s working for site owners here is simplistic and not altogether truthful.

And this brings us to…

Matt Cutts in 2013

2013 was the year of links, link penalties, and content and Matt Cutts stood as the voice of Google throughout. From taking down blog networks to changing the way we view content and queries with the Hummingbird update he helped up all understand what was going on and more importantly, why.

Guest Blogging

Let’s be clear, this wasn’t the first time we’d heard about guest blogging from Cutts, but he gave some great clarification. With all the confusion over guest blogging based on a few of his previous statements, Cutts does a decent job of bringing it all back to Earth in this video.

In short the message is, “Don’t build links on crappy sites and use guest blogging as a method among others to get your name out there.” A good reminder that there’s very little black and white in the realm of SEO, just common sense. Thanks, Matt.

Matt Cutts on Everything

Speaking at PubCon 2013 Matt pretty much covered the full gambit of SEO-related topics. From discussing Hummingbird (more on that later) to rich snippets. The video can be viewed at:

I obviously can’t cover all the areas he addressed here (see a great recap here), but the big takeaway from the content of this article (who is Cutts and why is this of key importance) is that in this video he discusses the “why” of some of the huge changes. At about the 3 minute mark Cutts gets goaded into replying to the thrashing the day before by Jason Calcanis (which is a bit entertaining), but at the 35 minute mark he does a great job showing us what they’re dealing with on their end.

It’s interesting; we generally view Google as an entity without remembering that it’s filled with people. As he lists off the critiques of the services by major media outlets and the problems outlined in them (scraper sites, spammers, content farms, etc.) and the picture he paints and his reaction, while guarded as always, is one of the first times it really hit home to me personally that on their end it’s not a matter of fighting little battles it’s a matter of having the world watch you, say you’re not doing a good job as you put in another late night, and suddenly the view of Cutts and the crew at Google take on a more human form.

While I’ve always found Cutts to be a pleasant guy when I’ve talked to him, one always goes away with the impression that while humorous and personable, he’s got skin as thick as a tank and the ability to take you down. This was a change to all that in which we saw that he is affected by what’s going on around him, that black hat is almost a personal attack.

While there were tons of tidbits in the session on a pure SEO level, none of it was really unknown at the time (though nice to have it all put together into one long presentation) the reason this video struck me as one of the more important the second I saw it was this human element I hadn’t seen before.

The final Cuttsism we’ll cover for 2013 will leave us with one of the highlights of the year…

Hummingbird

The actual Cutts comments on Hummingbird are in the Pubcon video above but the quiet launch of it on August 20 (announced to the public on September 26) makes the following video from July 8 more interesting:

In the video, Cutts is answering a question about how voice search is changing query syntax. He gets into discussing the changing way page content needs to be viewed. While I didn’t first see this video and think, “Hey, they can’t do that effectively yet,” it was very interesting when the update did finally roll out.

Hummingbird was more of an infrastructure change. While 90 percent of queries showed adjustments, they were very minor. This update was more about adjusting the infrastructure and rewriting the algorithms to deal with the more complex tasks Google was working on (like voice).

This video is important because it highlights the importance of listening not just to what Cutts is saying but what it might mean. When he talks about changes in how Google needs to treat content in light of shifting user behavior or technology, we need to stop and think, “Have any of the recently algorithms done that?” If the answer is “no” or “not well” and it’s a topic he’s covering, you know that a change is coming.

Matt Cutts in 2014

This may well be the last entry and for those in the industry, you’ll know why. For those who don’t, read further – it’ll be the last of the major announcements and I’ve gotta say … kind of a sad day it it goes the way I’m thinking it will. More on that later. But first, let’s chat about some of Matt’s big events with Google in 2014.

My Blog Guest

Today we took action on a large guest blog network. A reminder about the spam risks of guest blogging: http://t.co/rc9O82fjfn

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) March 19, 2014

And that blog network was MyBlogGuest.com. Ann Smarty, the foundr of MyBlogGuest Tweeted this shortly after confirming the penalty:

[Official] Even though #myblogguest has been against paying for links (unlike other platforms), @mattcutts team decided to penalize us…

— Ann Smarty (@seosmarty) March 19, 2014

So why was this done? While Ann asserted that the setup wasn’t a network, it was a large-scale collection of publishers and authors and nofollowing links was not allowed. To me this is the big issue that Google was facing. On top of that, authors were selling links in their posts and SEOs were using the system for pure SEO value as opposed to the traffic and value that Google wants us all building content for. On top of MyBlogGuest.com taking a hit, many of their clients started seeing unnatural links warnings in Webmaster Tools. Google is nothing if not thorough.

In the end this was done to send a message and once more, Matt was the one to announce the issue. I think the guy has on a bulletproof vest however as no matter how many times people try ot shoot the messenger, he always seems to walk away.

Lesson learned for link building, plausible deniability doesn’t cut it. Either your links are clean and your content built to provide value to the web or not. And if it’s not … you’re not safe. And don’t bother whining about it

Matt Cutts on the Death of Links

Personally I love when I hear people say that link building is dead. I’m almost hesitant to post this section just to keep that myth going and hold an advantage against people who just don’t know any better. But I’m an author and I like to think decent human being so we’re going to cove here two of my favorite videos from Matt in 2014. Both are on links.

In the first video Matt answers the question, “Is there a version of Google that excludes backlinks as a ranking factor?” So let’s watch …

Did you all catch that part where he says, “the results are much much worse”? So, let me ask, is link building dead? Of course it’s not. Has the nature of link bulding changed? Definitely. Here’s my issue, people say link building is dead simply because it’s different. To me that’s a lot like saying Web design is dead. Let me tell you, it’s not the same as when I was building sites in 2000, the tools barely even resemble what they did and the sites are totally different. So is Web design dead? No, it’s just different – just like links.

For more on that let’s hear more from Matt when he answers the question, “Will backlinks lose their importance in ranking?”

In this video matt talks about Google’s goal of being able to better understand authorities and make decisions about quality outside of backlinks he also says specifically that they have, “many many years left in them.”

The great thing about these videos is that they tell us two things:

1. That links matter and so link building is important. That it may not always be but it will be for at least a few years. And,
2. That Google is actively working to find new ways to determine the quality of content and how it will match user intent.

Once again Matt passes us the information we need to have to not only help our sites in the short term, but also gives us hints as to what they’re working to accomplish and letting us extrapolate ways that could be done and adjust to cover those as well.

Matt Cutts Goes on Leave

On July 3, 2014 Matt announced on his blog that he was going to be taking a few months of leave. He still wasn’t back by the end of 2014. While we’ve heard from him from time-to-time on Twitter commenting on events ranging from link schemes smashed to Net Neutrality he’s not back in his old role and it’s starting to look like it may stay that was.

For those of us in the industry Matt was a friendly face at conferences and willing to chat. You knew where you stood and generally you know, if he said something it was true – he just might have not said a lot, too. Reading between the lines while listening to him became a fun game where you could almost get as much from what he didn’t say as what he did.

There are many diffeent ideas about why he’s been off so long and what might be next. He’s clearly still involved to some degree but in what roll? Only time will tell of course, is he on different projects, is he retiring slowly because … you know … once you have more than you can possibly spend in a lifetime why keep doing it? Or is he being pushed out as some believe. I tend to lean to him being move to other projects, one of my staff (hat tip to Angela Duckworth) brought up the point that his past work with the NSA could well have him working more on the privacy side of things now and working with contacts there to insure they’re doing enough to keep them safe from US issues similar to what they’re facing in the EU. Not a bad theory.

The following video taken last month of Matt giving a lecture at the University of North Carolina talking about his early years at Google sure gives us some hints that he still wants to be out there and is still on amicable terms with Google.

Whatever the reason, Matt – if you’re reading this – you are and will be missed. So long and thanks for all the fish.

Matt Cutts in Conclusion

I’ll let each reader draw for themselves the impact Cutts has had or what’s more important. These are the highlights of his career with my eyes and in retrospect but as mentioned in the beginning, I welcome your additions in the comments below.

Before we end this post, I’ll leave you with a few of the funner (not officially a word but it should be) things I’ve seen over the year and in compiling and sorting the content for this article. Just a few things to lighten the mood while still calling it work.

Matt Cutts at School

Want to read the papers Cutts worked on when he was at UNC? Well you can at http://www.cs.unc.edu/~cutts/papers/.

Matt Cutts as a T-Rex

Enough said.

Matt Cutts on Ranking #1

This great mashup by Sam Applegate is a great way to close out the article. Enjoy!

Have a favorite Cutts highlight that isn’t included here? Share it in the comments!