Matt Cutts Updates : Google Penalties Get More Severe for Repeat Offenders (December 11, 2013)

"Google tends to look at buying and selling links that pass PageRank as a violation of our guidelines and if we see that happening multiple times, repeated times, then the actions that we take get more and more severe," Cutts said. "So we're more willing to take stronger action whenever we see repeated violations." View Full Story

SEO News (23-oct-2013) #Pubcon Matt Cutts

 

 Today we are at Pubcon, live with Matt Cutts.  Matt starts off talking about the history of Pubcon and that this is his 11th Pubcon that he’s been too!

Hummingbird

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Generally, most people should have to worry about this.  One of the things Hummingbird goes after is signals for sites that are in the grey zone of Panda. This helps them and makes them more relevant to the search queries people are searching for. If you’re a resource, keep becoming a bigger authority
Smartphone ranking is something we’re trying to help.  Help getting deeper pages ranked a bit higher on mobile. 

Penguin 2.0 and 2.1

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We’ve been going after spammy queries like “payday loans” and other very spammy things.  He jokes about trolling blackhat forms… seeing people unhappy.  This is a very good signal to me!We’re trying to create content and videos on malware and hacked sites.Trying to give concrete examples in guidelines of sites that are violating things.We’re going to keep machine learning.Mobile is HUGE. 2011 – YouTube had 6% of traffic from Mobile phone, 2012 it had 25% Mobile traffic.  In 2013 YouTube has 40% of all traffic from Mobile Phones.  What does this mean for you?  Means that we should be busting our butt to make our sites mobile friendly.

Webspam

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Going to be honest, you won’t see many updates for the next six months.  We’re going after hackers and extreme spammy people.

No PageRank – we have our own that updates daily.  PageRank to toolbar broke the other day.  We have nobody on staff to fix it.  So we won’t update it for the rest of the year. Sorry

Matt Cutts SEO Advice from Pubcon

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• Mobile: Be ready
• Learn about requestAutocomplete – annotate your forms
• Ad-heavy pages about the fold – more of an impact.  Get rid of your ad that’s at the top center of your webpage.
• Tightening Authorship – 15% reduction.  We want to improve the credibility of the authors for readers.  Quality is huge.
• Rich snippets may depend on site quality. We’ve found a middle ground and going to implement a lot more of it.
• Google is getting smarter on JavaScript.  If you want to use common frameworks and still be indexed well.  We’ll keep improving this.

Matt Cutts – Things to do now

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• Signup for Webmaster tools today if you haven’t.  We’re trying to give you everything there.

Negative SEO

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We’ve built the algorithm such that ONE person couldn’t torpedo a site  There are so many people thinking about negative SEO and their competitors are going after them.  We put up disavow tool for you.  You should be able to disavow on a site level as well.  This is very minimal and doesn’t happen that well.  With Google Webmaster Tools, you can get up to 100k links that your site has and get rid of whichever ones you don’t like or think are negative to you.  You can sort by most recent.  Do it!