Matt Cutts — What Are Google’s SEO Guidelines the Next Few Months
Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team recently released a video titled, “What should we expect in the next few months in terms of SEO for Google?” Certainly the last few years have been full of SEO updates and changes from Google, including the penguin and panda updates. The web sites that were doing well several years ago may not be doing so well right now and websites with a different focus might be doing very well.
Here’s a summary of what Matt’s predictions for Google SEO Guidelines for updates over the next few months.
He said the SEO focus of webmasters should be working on is building a great site. That should be the constant focus of your effort in search engine optimization. That great site should be one that users love, and a site that they love to tell their friends about. He said that if a great site is your goal, then Google’s efforts are aligned with your goal. Google is working hard to show your high quality content to as many users as possible.
Matt said that one reason they don’t like to talk about the plans are working on is because those plans can change. He said there getting relatively close to deploying the next generation of capitalize Penguin, call it Penguin 2.0. it’s a change that’s designed to target black hat web spam. Penguin 2.0 will be a little bit deeper and more comprehensive than the original Penguin and Google expects it to have more of an impact.
Google has also been looking at advertorials, so if someone pays for coverage or pays for an ad, those ads should not flow page rank. There are some websites in the US around the world the take money and build websites and pass page rank, and Google will be looking at those sites. Google will be a little bit stronger in its enforcement of advertorials that violate its quality guidelines. There’s nothing wrong with advertorials and native advertising but they should not flow page rank according to Google. And there should be clean and conspicuous disclosures.
Matt also said that Google is focusing more on some specific queries like, “payday loans” and some pornographic searches. Google’s updates might have much more of an impact in those sectors of search that tend to attract spammers.
Google is also looking at ways to go upstream to deny the value to link spammers, people who spam links in various ways. Google has ideas that will make those tactics less effective in those ideas will roll out in updates over the next few months. In fact Google is working on a more sophisticated system that does more intense link analysis. Google is testing these link analysis updates and it’s excited about the possibilities.
Google is also working on detecting hacked sites. And when Google protects a hacked site, it’s looking for ways to communicate better with webmasters to inform them of problems with their sites. The same effort is targeting sites that serve up malware. Ideally you’ll have a one-stop shop so that webmasters who realize they’ve been hacked can go to Webmaster tools and have one single spot where they can go and get a lot more info about what’s happened with your site.
So if you have high quality content you’re doing SCO or search engine optimization, you shouldn’t have to worry about any of the updates that are coming down from Google. If you’ve been hanging out a lot a black hat forums and training different types of spamming package tips, then these changes from Google might be a much bigger problem for you.
Google’s also working on ways to help in a better way, regular webmasters. Looking at better ways to detect when someone is an authority in a particular space. It could be medical, or representing some other profession. Google wants to try to find ways to make those websites rank a little bit more highly. Google is also looking at identifying additional signals of quality that might help sites that have been previously affected by panda.
People of told Google that if they look at search results more than cut a couple of pages deep they find a cluster of websites from the same domain. You be less likely to see it on the first page but more likely to see that on some of the following pages. They’re working on a change that would make it less likely that you would see several clusters of websites and results from the same domain. So if you see a cluster of results from one domain, that apparently will make it much less likely that that same domain will occur later in search results.
Matt said he is really excited about a lot of these changes because Google really does see a lot of improvement in search results in testing these changes. People who do link spamming or various types of black Spam will be much less likely to show up in search results by the end of the summer. He says that hopefully these changes will help small and medium-size businesses do better in search results.
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