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.

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.

Webster’s Dictionary defines link building as… it doesn’t actually.

Why is there no standard definition? It isn’t like link building is a secret. According to a recent survey, 80 percent of companies engaged in SEO are spending more than $1,000 a month on link building.

The lack of a standard definition leads to a large amount of confusion within the industry itself. I’ve met other SEOs and marketers who had a tenuous grasp on link building at best. It’s not like there’s an SEO college. Forget that: SEO is barely taught in universities at all.

So what is link building exactly? If you’re asking me for a bare bones definition, I would say it’s the process of going out of your way to find great links.

But I don’t think that definition truly does link building justice: it ignores the importance of link building. It ignores the crucial role it can and should play in any online marketing campaign. In my opinion, the true definition of link building doesn’t come from just asking what, it also comes from asking why.

Link building isn’t just the aforementioned process of acquiring backlinks that point to your site: it’s also a proven marketing tactic that increases brand awareness and conversions.

The Why

So why should you build links today? You should do it for the same reason you should have built links last year. And the year before. And every year since Google dominated the search market.

You should build links because links are still one of the most important ranking signals in Google’s algorithm, and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

You don’t have to take just my word for it. Listen to Matt Cutts, who emphasized the importance of links at the recent SMX Advanced conference.

Danny Sullivan: Is link building just dead? You keep saying a new tactic is dead, or must be nofollowed, is it really you just don’t want people to try to build links at all?

Cutts: No, link building is not dead. And a very small percentage of links on the web are nofollowed. There’s a lot of mileage left in links.

Even though it seemed Sullivan, the founder of Search Engine Land, was trying to bait him into saying link building possessed little value, Cutts rebuffed that idea.

It’s not just about increasing search visibility and brand exposure, however. Link building can help drive other marketing strategies. There’s a lot of talk about content marketing being “the new link building.” I believe this to be a falsehood.

The two are completely different. Content marketing has ambitions beyond building links; it’s primarily focused on disseminating a brand message.

If you launch a content marketing initiative solely for links, your content will likely suffer. Content marketing and link building may not be synonymous, but they complement each other nicely. Link building can help you to build relationships that can serve to benefit you in other endeavors as well.

Link building is a crucial component to a comprehensive online marketing campaign.

The Ghost of Link Building Past

I can’t accurately provide you with the year when link building started, but I can tell you that link building has existed for a long time. Eric Ward, who is known as the godfather of link building, helped Amazon.com create a link building strategy all the way back in 1994. That’s four years before Google even existed.

Image Credit: Moz

Link building hasn’t always been the prettiest profession. In previous years, there was a links arms race. Everyone knew that links were heavily weighted in Google’s algorithm, and everyone also knew that Google’s algorithm wasn’t sophisticated enough to properly detect improper linking. This led to the creation of some famed black hat tactics, tactics that created horrible user experiences and manipulated search results.

This stuff isn’t wholly in the past; I see examples of some of these tactics being executed on occasion. It may even work for a very short amount of time.

Link building is no longer just submitting poorly written content to dozens of link farms that no one ever sees outside of a web crawler. Link building is no longer hiding keyword rich anchor text underneath an infographic. Google keeps getting smarter and they keep fine-tuning their algorithm to stave off attempts at manipulation.

Link builders are adapting to a new SEO frontier where building sensible and relevant links isn’t merely a suggestion: it’s a requirement in order to stay competitive. A backlink profile filled to the brim with unnatural backlinks will no longer increase your visibility in search. It’s more likely to prompt a penalty.

Link Building Today

At SMX in June, Cutts said it’s possible to do white hat SEO; it just requires, “Sweat plus creativity.” Cutts, despite prompting from Sullivan, and despite having a plethora of reasons for condemning link building – it’d certainly make his job easier – still stood behind both links and link building.

In order to define link building today, you need to understand what “sweat plus creativity” means. To me, it’s not rocket science.

When Cutts says “sweat plus creativity,” he simply means hard work and innovation. That’s all.

The links arms race was responsible for a hefty amount of links designed for no other purpose than to manipulate Google’s algorithm. Google isn’t standing for it anymore: they want links that better serve the user experience.

Google doesn’t want natural links simply because they are idealists; many would argue that the company has shed its idealistic roots in recent years. Google wants this kind of internet because it’s in their financial interest to provide the best, most relevant search results possible. Their ability to return relevant results depends upon natural links; manipulative links will unnaturally inflate rankings.

Even though Google seems to extend into a different tech field everyday, Google still amasses an overwhelming majority of its revenue from advertising on the SERPs.

I want the internet that Google wants too: we all should. The internet is the most powerful communication tool the world has ever known, and it would be an injustice to ruin the experience for those who use it. That means building the kind of links that take sweat and creativity to build.

Is Link Building Another Form of Promotion?

Just like television/radio advertising, link building is firmly placed in the marketing sphere.

How could anyone think otherwise? A large percentage of websites are built to either generate leads or to sell something. That means a website has become the brick and mortar of the digital age.

Just like the interior of a Walmart is a representation of its brand, so are the pages of a website a brand representative. You just need to get people to the website. That can be done through social shares certainly, but search remains the best way to point users to your site in my opinion.

This means that links aren’t just links; they’re votes of confidence. A backlink that points to your site is a signal of trust and authority. No webmasters will want to link to you unless they feel it will provide a better experience for the visitors on the site.

In order to get links, it’s increasingly essential to clarify why you’re worth linking to. This means that link building is slowly turning into another method of promotion.

Conclusion

So what is link building? It’s a lot of things really. In 2014, I would say that link building is:

• The process of going out of your way to find great links.
• A proven marketing tactic that increases brand awareness and conversions.
• A form of promotion.

My definition may vary from yours, and that’s OK. I anticipate my current definition will change five years from now. But unlike the bevy of SEO doomsayers who populate all corners of the web, I know that link building will be a valuable visibility strategy five years from now. I wouldn’t be stunned if it remained just as nebulous though.

Knowledge Graph Expansion

Cutts began by briefly recapping what’s new in Google search. Google is using the Knowledge Graph more and it has now has rolled out around the world. Google has also added Gmail messages to the search results, but noted it’s something people have to ask for. So far, Google has determined that users prefer to see the Knowledge Graph results in a consistent place (at the top or right) and Google is collecting more feedback.

Google’s goal is to make it possible for people to do quick research and get quick stats – to basically make exploration faster, whether it’s by showing collections of rollercoasters in a strip along the top or basic info on people, places or things.

Interestingly, Cutts noted that the Search Quality Team is no longer known by that moniker. They are now known as the Knowledge Team.

Why Panda and Penguin?

Panda came from the last name of the engineer who worked on it. Since Google’s Penguin engineer wasn’t named after an animal, Cutts said they went over a list of the top 100 cutest animals, and Penguin was the final choice. Though the black and white animal was a coincidence, Cutts said it may become a theme for algorithmic updates.

Later during the keynote, Cutts encouraged the audience to do a search for Freebase to understand it. You’re able to download what’s under the hood.

Search Worlds Collide: SES, SMX & PubCon

Grehan and Cutts were then joined onstage by Danny Sullivan, who runs the SMX Conference and Search Engine Land, and Brett Tabke, who runs the PubCon conference and WebmasterWorld, marking the first time that this foursome of search veterans has ever appeared onstage at one time.

The ‘Father of All Penguins’

Is there any plan to release “the father of all Penguins”. Cutts says long term Google wants as close to ideal rankings and best quality search results possible. He could see social becoming a bigger signal in the long term. In the short term, Google won’t leave links behind.

Cutts noted Penguin is still in an early stage, whereas Panda is now monthly and they understand it very well. Google is still iterating Penguin, so the changes will be jolting for a while.

Ultimately, Google doesn’t want people to worry about Pandas or Penguins. Google wants to reward sites that have good signals, said Cutts.

Google Leery of Social Signals

Discussion turned to social signals as a ranking factor. The number of Twitter followers is a potential social signal. Google isn’t able to crawl Facebook, either because people set their profiles to private or Google is blocked from crawling.

When Google lost access to Twitter’s firehose, Twitter blocked Google for several weeks. If Google can’t crawl and see how many people you follow or who follow you, they can’t use that as a reliable signal.

Can Google tell how many times a page has been shared/Liked/tweeted? Cutts said they can do a relatively good job, but Google is a little leery of relying on social as a signal. Google crawls 20 billion pages a day.

Google Tries to Get More Transparent

After recounting Sergey Brin’s claim Google is spam proof from a past SES, Cutts discussed Google’s new found transparency. He began by referencing a tweet that said it’s cheaper to do everything legit than to go under the radar.

Cutts recounted how Google started out slow only giving messages in Webmaster Tools for hidden text and parked domains. Then earlier this year Google sent out messages for everything but egregious black hat spam.

While Google decided to be more transparent, they won’t go so far as to publish the algorithm. Cutts said Google wants to debunk the idea that it gives itself an unfair advantage to its own properties.

Google Doesn’t Hate SEO

As he has in the past, Cutts pointed out that Google doesn’t hate SEO. The goal of SEO is to make websites more crawlable and faster. When SEO becomes an issue is when spam comes into play, such as if you go overboard buying links, doing comment spam links, or keyword stuffing.

Google the Publisher

Discussion then turned to Google transitioning from being a search engine to a publisher with Knowledge Graph, Google Flights, Google Places, among others. Webmasters are worried that Google will eat up their traffic and that if they get on Google’s radar, Google just may add another tab and launch a new product.

Cutts reminded the audience that Google’s aim with the Knowledge Graph, or providing a calculator in search results, or reporting sunrise/sunset times in search results is giving users the answer they want rather than making them go to a website.

Obviously, webmasters want as much traffic as possible. Google is looking at the “value add,” Cutts said, such as creating something original (research, analysis, opinion). In Google’s view, if a website can create pages that give users basic information that takes 3 seconds, then it’s fair for Google to give that same stuff to users directly within the search results.

User expectations go up every year. They expect natural language/query understanding. Google is driven by providing what users expect. Whatever you type into the search box, they try to give the best information.

Facts can’t be copyrighted, whether it’s a video game release date or the height of Eiffel Tower. However, if your site is a collection of facts, then that would become a resource rather than something on the low end of quality.

Cutts says the Knowledge Team doesn’t care whether they make money, lose money, or are neutral. The search team isn’t talking about how much money they’re going to make off of search features, Cutts said.

Google still sends a ton of traffic. People ask for more and more, think Siri, so if Google doesn’t provide that info, everyone’s going to go to another search engine that does. The litmus test is what’s the value add and can Google help users get information faster.

Users have to come first, and Cutts said Google understands that the web is made up of websites and those websites have owners and webmasters and it has to be a good value from everyone or everything will go to apps or walled gardens.

Google is more of an information company than pure search, Cutts noted.

Google Has a Sampling Problem

Google has seen more than 30 trillion URLs and crawls 20 billion pages a day. One hundred billion searches are conducted each month on Google (3 billion a day).

Despite this, Cutts said Google still has a sampling problem. There are always spider traps and the web is always changing.

Cutts said it’s hard to know who published what first. Over time, Google can detect when one site seems to be publishing original content, while another site seems to be publishing duplicate content.

Google has worked hard on returning original content. Google has to crawl, it can’t magically know the web.

Google Doesn’t Put a Lot of Weight on +1’s

How much does Google+ help rankings? It’s a signal Google will look at and they’ll see how good it is. Over time, they will continue to experiment. Cutt said Google doesn’t put a lot of weight on +1’s yet.

Cutts also pointed out that, in response to feedback, when you do searches you’re much less likely to see Google+ in search results, compared to January. The 10 year trend might be the more real you look on search results, the better you will do but don’t assume it’s automatically a ranking.

Hey, Google: Tell Me What to Fix!

Why doesn’t Google rate sites, specifically telling website owners what’s wrong? Actually, Cutts revealed that’s the direction Google wants to move in. As an example, he noted you’ll be alerted if you’ve shot yourself in the foot with robots.txt.

Cutts says they will “turn up the knob” on transparency, to tell site owners that the site is good but Google might not trust some links.

Cutts acknowledged that it doesn’t do anybody any good if they don’t give actionable advice. He thinks Google will get there toward end of year and moving on.

Panda! Penguin! Panic!

After Panda/Penguin, there’s a lot of extreme panic, with some people and websites taking extreme measures such as sending cease and desist letters over links. Google tries to have incremental changes. For the most part gradual and logical.

Sometimes things have drifted off course with link spam techniques and directory schemes. Taking this action was a big change and sites were unhappy but Google thought it was best for users, though people were shaken by the course correction.

Create a site that will stand the test of time, Cutts said. A site that people will tell their friends about and bookmark. That’s the site Google wants people to build.

By this time next year, Cutts hopes people are less likely to do link buying, blog comment spam, etc.

Duplicate Content

Cutts said Google has been consistent. They try to show the content they think came first or has the most value. If you have 2,000 items from an affiliate feed then your site isn’t all that great in Google’s eyes.

You don’t need to worry about duplicate content on your own site unless it’s on massive scale. If you repeat 2-3 paragraphs on every page. Google may not penalize but it may not count in terms of value added.

Make few pages with original content. If it’s a sentence/paragraph it’s fine. Otherwise, Google doesn’t want to highly rank the same content with one different link, as that’s close to doorway pages.

As he said, the update is to impact less than 0.1 percent of English searches. The update is not an actual change to the Penguin algorithm, but a data refresh, meaning data was refreshed within the existing algorithm. Cutts explained the difference between an algorithm update and a data refresh back in 2006 on his personal blog.

Penguin Recovery: It Is Possible

Ross Hudgens wrote up an excellent case study for the SEOMoz blog on WPMU.org and their successful Penguin recovery strategy. He cites the most influential factor in its recovery as the removal of a large quantity of footer links, saying WPMU.org “instantly shut off almost 15,000 ‘iffy’ sitewide, footer LRDs to their profile, dramatically improving their anchor text ratios, sitewide link volume, and more.”

Hudgens notes that several other changes may have contributed to the site’s recovery, including an overall SEO clean-up, Penguin review form submissions, and more. I pinged him on Twitter to see what it is was he had specifically recommended to the site by way of first steps for Penguin clean up and he responded:

A) Remove all of the crap sitewide links, weird anchors first, B) continue building good links and C) take advantage of press by pinging Danny Sullivan to try and get it featured on SEL to get in front of Google. Obviously A) was not going to be completely possible so I was going for “remove most of your crappy links.”

Penguin Isn’t Indiscriminately Targeting Sites

WPMU.org was just one of the many sites reportedly hit by Penguin. Last week, Danny Goodwin wrote about sites profiled in a WSJ.com article, such as The Internet Hockey Database and Oh My Dog Supplies LLC. Like WPMU, they had issues that might have taken a bit of digging, but do explain why they succumbed to the evil Penguin.

It may seem at times that Google’s updates are indiscriminate, raping and pillaging swaths of small business sites and leaving a wake of destruction in their path. However, Penguin in particular seems to have a very narrow focus and an objective site review can help highlight the specific issues dragging the site down.

Right after Penguin came out in April, Goodwin wrote about five types of link issues harming affected sites:

1. paid links with exact match anchor text
2. comment spam
3. guest posts on questionable sites
4. article marketing sites
5. links from dangerous sites

SEW author Pierre Zarokian later added links from irrelevant sites, footer links, consecutive sponsored links with no text between, and sitewide links as other potential culprits.

Penguin Recovery Resources

It’s refreshing (and promising) to see an actual step-by-step report from Hudgens. You can find tips for Penguin clean up here at SEW from Bruce Clay, Simon Penson, and Guillaume Bouchard. 

In addition, Lisa Buyer and Jeff Slipko offer alternative strategies to help marketers diversify, to lessen the effects of algorithm updates like Panda.

Have you undertaken a Penguin recovery effort? Let us know whether you’ve seen results in the comments!

Others, such as open industry, content quality, and the reputation of the SEO industry are certainly well known and much-debated topics within the community, though they may not register outside of search marketing. Others still may not seem an issue to you at all right now, like cookie and tracking laws, though the potential fallout of such legislation could affect how we do our jobs. It is our job, says Essex, to promote awareness of what these issues mean within the community and beyond. We agree.

Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand.com is also beating the war drum, saying 2011 was “alarming to me. After years of moving forward, the search engines took a big step back.” He calls attention to those of Google’s changes most significant to SEOs from the last year, some of which seemed like direct hits on the industry as a whole, in his article 2011: The Year Google and Bing Took Away From SEOs & Publishers.

These issues concern us here at Search Engine Watch and you, as a marketer. Some could affect everyone who uses the Internet. We asked search industry leaders Mike Grehan, Danny Sullivan, Jonathan Allen, Chris Boggs, Rand Fishkin, and David Harry for some tips and advice on how the SEO community could best influence the change that needs to happen.

SOPA and Its Quieter, More Insidious Sibling PIPA

Rosetta’s Chris Boggs, President of SEMPO, told us the search marketing organization is sending a letter opposing SOPA to both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. Why, they ask, is SOPA necessary when many of the provisions it is being pushed through on are already covered under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act?

As SOPA protests, largely driven by social media rage on around the web, another influential player threw their hat in the ring yesterday. WordPress urged their 60 million users to visit Stop American Censorship and take action against SOPA & PIPA. What can you do? Visit and act on their recommendations before January 24th, when Senate is scheduled to vote on the Internet censorship bill; 41 senators are needed to block the vote.

Not Provided Keyword Referrer Data and Missing Link Data

There seems to be two camps on this one; those who think Google is being disingenuous and dealt the industry a blow by withholding keyword referrer data, and those who think it’s an overblown issue. Both sides have merit. Whether you think it’s worth getting hot and bothered about probably depends on how it’s affected your business, so consider these points of view.

Sullivan offered some workable solutions in his article, if the community can get fired up and take action. Pressure Google as to why they’re deliberately preventing people from studying link data; what do they have to hide? Don’t let Google preach about openness when they practice it only selectively, he writes. Hold their feet to the fire over privacy as the reasoning for withholding keyword data when they make it available to their advertisers. Finally, he recommended, withhold your own data and give them a taste of their own medicine.

Boggs told us, “We’ve got an average of 9-10% of data from a pretty large sample, but it ranges all the way up to over 20%. Still, 20% is not a huge number when you’re comparing the return on online marketing, even without it, to other types of marketing.”

Mike Grehan, Global VP – Content for Incisive Media (our parent company) doesn’t think we should sweat it and said, “Many blacksmiths had to move on and retrain when demand demised after the introduction of automotive transport. And the SEO industry has to do the same. Think of the important signals these days for Google, which are around end user data and intent. It’s not about markup code and server issues that need fixing anymore.” Google owns their keyword data, he points out; it’s theirs in the first place. Besides, said Grehan, “End user behavior is more important than 90% of google ranking factors.”

Finally, David Harry, President of Reliable SEO and Sifu at the SEO Training Dojo said, “Yes, we lost some keyword data, boo hoo. But consider this: for years, I have talked about personalization and behavioral data, then social graph. One thing people would say to me all the time was, ‘We don’t know how many people are logged in, so we don’t know the value in targeting peronalized elements.’” He continued to show the silver lining, saying, “Hop skip and a jump… we now have this data. The (not provided) signals the % of visitors to the site that are LOGGED IN. This means we now know the level of people coming to the site via potentially personalized means. This, of course, means that you can align social media and other strategies accordingly. If your site gets 1 million visitors a month and your (not provided) is 22%, that’s considerable. Time to assess the social graph and personalization elements of the SEO program…”

Promoting Open Industry

Essex is concerned that open industry might be at risk as brands tighten up privacy controls. He believes SEOs might be discouraged from sharing experiences and data that help spur innovation and raise standards if their clients are unhappy about their speaking openly on their SEO strategy.

Harry says, “So what? We work with many corporate clients and even other SEO agencies that want us to fly under the radar. They may not want it public what or who is handling their SEO efforts, or they may not want to talk about ranking issues they may be having (we do recovery consulting). There are many reasons, but it is quite normal for clients to want us under wraps. And being one for the Art of War (SEO Style), I likely also don’t want their competitors’ SEOs to know I am lurking.”

So what can you do about it? “I don’t see that this inhibits us from sharing knowledge,” said Harry. “We run an SEO community and by and large no one talks about actual client names nor URLs, except for the in-house folks. You simply sanitize the data and share findings, theories and concepts.” Again, educating and preparing clients from the outset is key.

Wage War on Low Quality Content

On content quality, Essex would like to see search marketers do their part to clean up the web. He points to rubbish content designed to generate ad clicks and affiliate income as a growing plague. We all heard the outrage this past year as sites were chased down by rabid Pandas and knocked to their knees. But was it really a bad thing for the industry?

Grehan believes Google’s Panda was a blessing in disguise. The emphasis on content quality means marketers now have to face the fact that they can’t put all their chickens in one basket. He notes that many have enjoyed a party with lots of free money from Google and are crying now because the party is over.

He also reminds us of a basic business principle: never let anyone own more of your business than you do. Grehan said, “When you have 80% of your traffic (revenue) coming from one source (Google) and a Panda comes along and takes it away, what were you thinking about in the first place? You have no more right to rank at the top of Google than the billions of other web pages out there.”

Crap content plagues the Internet. This is not new. Panda update put a dent in it, but do we have to rely on Google to constantly police us? What can you do about it? Essex suggests you block junk sites every time you come across them. And here’s an idea: stop writing garbage designed for nothing but generating revenue. We really are our own worst enemies sometimes.

Lying Liars and the Lies They Sell

Speaking of being our own worst enemies, Essex also calls out those who may know exactly what they’re doing, yet choose to use tactics that damage the industry’s reputation. We asked Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz what we can do as individuals and as a group to fight this:

“Marketers who engage in fake reviews, falsified comments, puppet accounts and misleading tactics don’t just hurt the consumers they may fool, they also damage the field of Internet Marketing itself. Marketers already have a tough time earning the respect, budget and creative freedom to help businesses and ideas that desperately need help earning awareness and customers. When these tactics take center stage, they bring our industry down, our salaries down, our reputation down and none of us should stand for that,” he said.

Fishkin continues, “I hope the web marketing field becomes more transparent and more willing to call out these actions and the operators behind them. If we’re seen as a group who huddles to protect our own rather than proactively identifying and discrediting spam and fake content, we’ll be held in contempt by more and more of the web and technology world. Regulating our own field hasn’t been a strength of SEOs, but I hope it becomes one before governments or outsiders decide to do it for us.”

Fake SEOs Who Give the Industry a Bad Name

Along the same lines, Essex loosely defines fake SEOs as those who don’t know what they’re doing and aren’t willing to learn, making promises they can’t deliver on to clients.

We asked Sullivan how he felt they should be dealt with: “There are a lot of what I’d call unprofessional SEOs; people who aren’t diligently trying to perform a real and valuable service, something a client could measure. Unfortunately, a lot of them have more visibility and give the industry a bad rep, because of the cold call emails they send. But I’m not sure that this problem is easily corrected,” he said. “It’s been around for ages, and no one’s solved it yet. Ideas like certification failed in black hat/white hat debates (which is an entirely different issue from delivering value). These days, I guess I just figure that the industry has survived it all so far, so the professional SEOs should just hunker down and get on with work.”

Google Results Ever Changing, with Paid Bumping Out Organic

Fishkin foresees a mainstream backlash against Google’s increasingly aggressive ad placement on SERPs in his 8 Predictions for SEO in 2012 post (see #5).

Search Engine Watch Director Jonathan Allen looks for the silver lining, saying, “All the new types of paid search ads and Google+ pages do seem to be taking up more and more real estate on search results pages and crowding out organic/natural positions. However, losing key positions to new search engine features is not necessarily a new thing and has been increasingly the case since Google’s universal search update in 2007. As an SEO, you learn to turn it to your advantage. It is often the case that what we lose in terms of rankings we often gain in terms of back doors into the top of search results that take considerably less “donkey work” and rely on smarter and more holistic SEO strategies. In most cases, the change is simply to how Google presents a media type and businesses just have to intelligently engage with that change. So, in that sense, Google still rewards the smart marketers who embrace the connected consumer.”

He continues, “However, I can’t be 100% upbeat about Google PPC ads crowding out organic positions. Google’s landing page quality score generates a double bind for the average small business. They need to advertise to get new customers, but they face a higher cost per click because their websites are generally not as elegant as the large companies they compete with. Small businesses realize the need to invest in better websites, but it is much harder for them to bootstrap their way to the top because these are fixed costs that need to be recovered ahead of their ability to be profitable. Arguably, this means that the most entrepreneurs are forced to spend more to compete than they used to; effectively roadblocked by larger incumbents. Nonetheless, one has to wonder how different this is from the offline world.”

So what can you do about it? Essex suggests you should contact Google as well as the mainstream media to raise awareness. Allen thinks this issue is best solved on an individual level, noting that “Consumers have drastically changed the way they consume content in the last few years and are becoming more selective about what services and what devices they will use to access it. Going forward, that makes SEO less about technicalities and more about how to engage and connect with an increasingly fragmented audience that wants to consume content whenever they want via multiple media types and different destinations. Rather than worry about rankings, businesses should look at streamlining every “touchpoint” with the customer, segmenting audiences and focus on generating active endorsements. Search marketing is no longer about minimum viable SEO but instead about creating an online product that resonates with your market.”

According to Allen, “In reality the SEO industry product which we sell is a bunch of bets and educated guesses on the future of consumer search behavior (which, for now, is primarily centered around increasing your chances of appearing on Google) – of which the total value is derived from the opportunity cost, rather than simply on the value of services rendered. The only reason we ever sold ‘top positions’ on Google was it was the easiest way to turn our knowledge into a conceptual product that other people could buy. But as an industry, we’ve never really sold rankings – we’ve sold online marketing and PR strategies that are worth more than failing to have one at all.”

Cookie Laws, One to Keep an Eye On

It’s not likely we’ll see these new cookie laws passing in North America any time soon. However, it is important that we stay vigilant – look how far SOPA got into the process of convincing lawmakers it’s necessary and fair before the public outcry really picked up. ClickZ offers a look into where this stands now in their Do Not Track article.

Watch the video below for details, or read the transcription on the Koozai blog.

What do you think of Koozai’s take on the issues we, as a community, need to work on and these recommendations? Are these actions you’re ready and willing to take? Join the debate in the comments.

And why should I care?

Is this something that as a search engine marketer I should be concerned with? Is Bing involved in some type of industrial espionage? Was there a crime committed? Will Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt be led away in handcuffs any time soon?

The entire thing smacks of sensationalism. Google laid out their “honeypot” – yes they used that term – in great detail and apparently took months researching it. They set up search results – manually adjusting their results no less – for non-existent words and had engineers do searches from home and other sites off the Google complex to generate searches that Bing would see through their toolbar and Internet Explorer browsers to see what Bing did with them.

Sure enough, Bing took the bait and added the terms to their own search results.

“Cheater, cheater,” Google cried – and Google’s Spam Czar Matt Cutts echoed at the BigThink session.

Now both engines use hundreds of ways to gather and rank listings in their search results. Matt made a point of stating Google did not use Bing as a source of their search results. Fair enough, but does that mean Bing cannot use input from Google?

Throughout all this, there were questions I wanted answered that both parties did not address. Why didn’t Danny ask how does Google use the information it gathers from its toolbar? Do they monitor what links are clicked on a page that is loaded? If so how do they differentiate when someone is using Bing or just a regular site page?

So why did Google make this information public? Are they worried about Bing’s growing marketshare? Was this a play to embarrass Microsoft with their partners? Was Bing taking away search partners and Google wanted to be able to tell them – “hey they just copy us so why not go to the source”?

What did I learn from all this that may impact my search marketing?

One, Google CAN manually impact search results and I tend to believe big spending advertisers could influence that. As someone who was in charge of a major spend at Google, I had my organic results changed when an algorithm glitch dropped the site from the rankings.

Two, both engines admitted they use click information as a ranking factor – not something new to blackhats.

Three, Google thinks they can gather information about every other site, but no one can use information on their site. Basically, a Google search result is a web page, so why can’t it be used. Microsoft has said it is trying to improve their results and if I was working there I would be looking at what Google was doing. I do link research of competitors for my clients. I watch where they rank for relevant keywords and what new content they add to their web sites.

Good online marketers keep an eye on any new information, apps, platforms, etc that are launched in their clients’ industries. Decisions are then made to see if they are worth emulating. Isn’t that what Bing was doing? Hey there is a new term people are searching for over at Google and there are pages listed for it – given it is on a page in the public domain and the pages are not Google’s, why shouldn’t a good search engine add them to their lists?

Has Google gone too far with this one? In my opinion, yes, and now I want to know the motives behind it.

First, it says, “Online chatter about DecorMyEyes, even furious online chatter, pushed the site higher in Google search results, which led to greater sales.”

Second, it states, “A call to Google was returned by a member of its publicity team, who agreed to speak only if his ideas would be paraphrased and not directly quoted. He said that he would send a follow-up e-mail that could be quoted, but that e-mail never arrived.”

You’ll want to read the article for yourself — if you haven’t already read it.

So, why did Segal’s article prompt anyone to contact me? Because I’ve been writing and speaking about SEO and PR since 2003 — and this is a case study of a search engine product failure compounded by a public relations process failure.

Now, when Google shutdown Google Wave and Nexus One back in August, it celebrated its ability to “fail fast and learn.”

So, I’ve got to believe that Google’s software engineers, who change the search engine’s algorithm on a daily basis, will take time today to review how Vitaly Borker, the founder and owner of DecorMyEyes, “exploited this opportunity.”

But I’ve also got to hope that Google’s PR professionals — who don’t change their policies and procedures on a daily basis — will also take time today to review whether it was wise for a company spokesman to sidestep the question of “whether utterly noxious retail could yield profits.”

Oh, and then the Google spokesman recommended that Segal talk to Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of the blog Search Engine Land.

Now, I’ve known Sullivan since 2002 — and he’s widely considered a leading “search engine guru.” But he’s not the company spokesman for Google.

Imagine if White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs sidestepped tough questions about the economy and recommended that reporters talk to an economic guru instead.

So, the Google’s PR department — as well as Google’s software engineers — need to “fail fast and learn.”

Hey, they’ve already failed fast — so they’re halfway there. What do you think?

But looking at the articles is a good way to see how Google has addressed user needs over the past three years.

In the Hate article, some things were addressed – the user interface, easier access to tools, RSS feeds, use of Open Directory titles and descriptions, breaking out search revenues, and Gmail customization.

But many still have not been changed – some may not need to be – such as making things paid or putting brakes on self-served AdSense – but there are some that just show a disregard for the users.

Search counts still make no sense, results are still stacked with pages from the same sites as you drill down in the hopes of better information, country specific search (Danny’s idea of a universal result seems a little dated in these days of international marketing and information written to specific cultures), giving advertisers the ability to pick and choose search (expanded has gotten even more out of hand), copyright infringement on blogger still not addressed and links to referring sites in Analytics.

Danny’s call to “fix the philosophy” is a concept many people have complained about and derided for years. I guess Google believes in there is no such thing as bad publicity – as their continuing of “Do No Evil” is just a joke at this stage.

In his “love” list there are a few elements that I disagree with. Google Analytics while a decent product has killed an industry without antitrust examination. Returning search to its glory is a little too much love – Google is fast becoming a monopoly of search – and as it is the source of most people’s information that is a scary thing to have in the hands of a money motivated corporation – though the government would do little better.

And if you think the willingness to censor Chinese results or have a set of rules that go beyond what is legally limited to a corporate vision is wrong. Their stance on RipOff Reports is just one such example that shows disregard for people especially when they do censor other areas.

Google has not really addressed the issues, despite Matt suggesting the artciles be looked on as bug reports. Come on guys it has been three years and yet you still have the major issues Danny listed yet to be changed.

If you want to be the big brother then act responsibly.

Yesterday the debate amongst search marketers flared to full blown public jamming in major SEM blogs and virulent comment threads. Aaron Wall, venerable blogger-purveyor of SEOBOOK, restarted the conversation with his post, “How I Got My Google Ranking #6 Filter Removed.” The post was bookmarked in Sphinn and SEO scientists argued about Position 6 throughout the day, resulting in passionate posts (and even arguments) in trade publications.

Is Position 6 real?

Respected SEM technician Sebastian reflected the position of many SEM pros and noted a lack of studies that that provide ”proof instead of weird assumptions based on claims of webmasters jumping on today’s popular band wagon that aren’t plausible nor verifiable…such beasts don’t exist.”

Danny Sullivan joined the fracas with an SEL post and his impression that Position 6 is real. “Well, I’ve personally seen this weirdness. Pages that I absolutely thought ‘what on earth is that doing at six’ rather than at the top of the page. Not four, not seven — six. It was freaking weird for several different searches. Nothing competitive, either.”

Is Position 6 an actual Google penalty or fodder for SEMs who are imagining patterns where none exist? Have you experienced Position 6? Real or imagined, it’s certainly generating a lot of attention and links amongst search marketers and webmasters. Stay tuned and watch your Google organic SERPs.