Head Of Google’s Web Spam Team Matt Cutts Is Going On Leave

Google’s Matt Cutts – who holds the title of “distinguished engineer” — is taking a break from his duties as Google’s chief web spam fighter. Cutts has announced on his personal blog that he’s taking leave through October.
It will be the longest break Cutts has ever taken from Google since he started with the company back in 2000 and since he began overseeing the web spam team in 2004. It’s also one that he writes is overdue. From his post:

When I joined Google, my wife and I agreed that I would work for 4-5 years, and then she’d get to see more of me. I talked about this as recently as last month and as early as 2006. And now, almost fifteen years later I’d like to be there for my wife more. I know she’d like me to be around more too, and not just physically present while my mind is still on work.

Screen Shot Of Google’s New Rejection Notices For Reconsideration Requests

At SMX Advanced last week, Google’s head of search quality, Matt Cutts, announced that they will be revising their reconsideration requests rejection notices with more detailed responses in some cases.
We’ve now located an example of the new rejection notices, as shared with me on Twitter.
The new notice has a new section at the bottom titled “A note from your reviewer.” Then the Google reviewer was able to give specific advice that, at least in this case, would be extremely helpful to the webmaster with the manual action.

Webmasters Complain Of Google Structured Data Items Dropping

I've received several reports from webmasters that the Google Structured Data report in Google Webmaster Tools is all of a sudden showing a huge drop in the items being reported.
Some are saying they've gone from 3,000 items to 250 or so items being reported in that tool.

oogle has not yet responded to the complaints about this on Google Webmaster Help but some TCs, top contributors, are saying these reports may have issues.
Have you noticed a large drop in your structured data items being reported? Check out your Google Webmaster Tools to be sure.

Google To Warn Searchers When A Mobile URL Redirects To The Homepage

Don’t annoy mobile searchers. That’s the message behind a new warning that Google is showing in mobile search results on smartphones.
On the Webmaster Central blog, Google alerted webmasters late yesterday that it will let smartphone searchers know if it thinks a website has a “faulty redirect” in place that sends the searcher to your home page, not the page they clicked on.

We’d like to spare users the frustration of landing on irrelevant pages and help webmasters fix the faulty redirects. Starting today in our English search results in the US, whenever we detect that smartphone users are redirected to a homepage instead of the page they asked for, we may note it below the result. If you still wish to proceed to the page, you can click “Try anyway.”

June 2014 Google Webmaster Report

May was an incredibly busy month for Google SEO related topics, specifically seeing Panda 4.0 roll out, the Google Spam algo being updated, press release sites taking a dive and several unconfirmed updates that Google wouldn't talk about.
We also saw eBay get slapped, a popular site named MetaFilter talk about their Google penalty and a Nest competitor call out Google.
So it was a busy month!

Google May Be Pushing Out A New Update: Possibly Penguin?

I am seeing very early signs of another possible Google update both based on chatter at the WebmasterWorld and in other forums and social media spaces. I am also getting private data shared with me by those who are tracking this closely.
Update: Google tells me this is not Penguin or any spam quality control change.
The feeling is that Google is testing a new Penguin refresh and that it may be rolling out slowly. Or that it might be something else. So you know, we had a Panda 4.0 update last week, and then last weekend (before Panda 4) we had a Spam algorithm update. Prior to that we reported on tons of ranking shifts which Google denied despite all the signs of an update.

Google Begins Rolling Out Panda 4.0 Now

Google’s Matt Cutts announced on Twitter that they have released version 4.0 of the Google Panda algorithm.
Google’s Panda algorithm is designed to prevent sites with poor quality content from working their way into Google’s top search results.
But didn’t Google stop updating us on Panda refreshes and updates since they are monthly rolling updates? Yes, but this is a bigger update.
Panda 4.0 must be a major update to the actual algorithm versus just a data refresh. Meaning, Google has made changes to how Panda identifies sites and has released a new version of the algorithm today.

Those Google Ranking Shifts Are Not A Google Update, Google Denies Any Algorithmic Changes

Over the past week or so, there has been a lot of various signals across the search community that Google’s algorithms and rankings were updating; so much so that people were bracing themselves for a major Penguin or Panda-like algorithm announcement from Google. Google never made the announcement, and so I asked Google if anything was going on. Google told me that nothing was going on, that there is nothing going on at their end that would result in what is being reported by the community.

How to Avoid Getting Slaughtered by Penguin 3.0

According to Google, Penguin 2.0 only affected 2.3% of English-US queries. That sounds like a low number, but in the scheme of algorithm rollouts, it was the third largest to date. It wasn’t just queries that received a jolt. The unleashing of Penguin 2.0 impacted web traffic of thousands of sites. Webmasters reported reductions in traffic of up to 90%, which basically crippled businesses and halted online revenues.
Today, we may be on the verge of another major algorithm upset: Penguin 3.0.
But don’t worry; I’m here to share some news about what’s going on with Penguin and to show you how you can prepare yourself.

What number Penguin is this?

 

The Head Of Matt Cutts Tells Us The Body Is Important Too

In a magical video where Google's head of search spam, had his body removed all to make a point that the body of a page's content is really important.

Yes, Matt actually removed his body, in a way to show just how important the body is.
The head alone, while important also, is not enough, you need a good and fit body to go along with your good and fit head.
In short, title tags, meta descriptions, and the rest of what you put in your header on your web pages are important. But so is the body content and you need to make sure both are high quality, unique and useful.

Google Penalizing HARO Links? Not Really.

Bill Hartzer wrote that Google has targeted HARO, Help A Reporter, links in the latest manual action of unnatural links.

HARO links? Really? Would Google do that?

Well, not exactly. The links were because of HARO but the links that caused the penalty were not on helpareporter.com.

 Bill told me it was due to an interview received through HARO, which was then syndicated on other sites.
The other sites were called out as bad and unnatural links.

Google's Matt Cutts: Anticipate The Query To Better Control Titles In Google

Google's Matt Cutts posted a video explaining why and when Google may use something other than your title tag for the search results title snippet.
Matt Cutts suggested that it is best for your to try to anticipate what the user will search for when crafting your title tags. When you do that and then when it matches the query, then Google will likely show your title tag.
Google uses three criteria when determining if they should use your title tag:
(1) Something that is "relatively" short
(2) Have a good description of the page and "ideally": the site that the page is on.
(3) And that it is re
levant to the query.
If you fail on these criteria, then Google may use (1) content on your page, (2) anchor text links pointing to the page and/or (3) may also use the Open Directory Project.

Google Index Status Count Drop After Update Line

Google's John Mueller posted an excellent example of a case of where a webmaster is nervous about a report in Google Webmaster Tools, when in reality, all is good.

He posted this on Google+ and shared a screen shot by Jodi Bennett. The screen shot, as you will see below, shows a complete drop off of indexed pages after the update line.

Google: Nothing Is Changing With Google+

Google's Moritz Tolxdorff, the Google+ Community Manager said on Google+ in response to the rumors of Google+ being cut down, saying that is not true. He said:

Yes, no one is moving anywhere. Everything will stay as it is.

You can Moritz's response in this Google+ thread on April 25th.
Chris Lang asked the question that got the response from the Google+ community manager.
Forum discussion at Google+.

Google Test Lab For Experimenting With Google's Rankings

Rand Fishkin, the co-founder of Moz, announced on his personal blog a new thing he is playing with he named IMEC, aka Internet Marketing Experimental Collective.

The goal is to increase the number of people experimenting with Google's search results, so they can give more validity to the experiments they run. Rand said, "The goal is to assemble a group of marketers who care about producing high-quality, consistent, repeatable experiments in search engines and on social media to learn more about how these platforms work."

Here is an example of an experiment one would run:

How to Reverse a Google Manual Spam Action in 3 days

I spontaneously decided to write this article due to getting some interesting Feedback on my Google+ Post (German). The subject, Reconsideration Request, once again creates a stir, and that is why I now present you an interesting case. At the end of March 2014, an entrepreneur asked me to create a SEO Analysis for his Online Shop, because in the past couple of months he was not happy with its development on Google.de. Something had to happen. So, I thankfully accepted his request.

I immediately asked my client for further information. Quickly, I found out that the organic traffic is already heavily declining for months, which of course affected the profitability of the Online Shop.

Penguin 3.0 is Coming Soon. Will Your Site Survive?

Clean up your site’s backlink profile with Link Detox before it’s too late

SEOs around the world still shudder when they think of when Penguin 2.0 launched. Google’s algorithm change penalized countless sites. Rankings plummeted, traffic dropped, it was the apocalypse. We all knew it wasn’t the end, and Penguin 3.0 is almost here. Save your site by running Link Detox on it today!

Have you done your Link Risk Management?

Proper SEO strategy requires ongoing link audits of your backlink profile to find your toxic links. Cleanup those bad links or proactively disavow them, just like Google recommends.

Google Adds New Features To The Keyword Planner Tool

Google has added nine new features to the Google Keyword Planner Tool today.

Here are the new features in the Keyword Planner tool that you should be able to play with yourself today. The images and descriptions are from Kim Clinkunbroomer’s blog.

(1) Nice graphical visualizations and estimates for geographics that breaks out locations with volumes. You can change your time views as well.

 

Google's Matt Cutts On How To Buy Domain Names

Google's Matt Cutts posted a video on the question How can I research a domain that I may want to purchase?

Matt Cutts gave a few tips on what to do, what steps to take, when researching a domain name buy.

SEOs Mixed On Fearing Google's Knowledge Graph

Last month, we created a poll asking if you fear Google's knowledge graph.

The reason was surrounded around the news of Google's Singhal around the swiss army knife analogy and if that is Google's true intent. Go read up about that if you do not know what I am talking about.

In short, the SEO space is kind of mixed on their feelings of fearing or being scared of Google's end goal with the Knowledge Graph.

Most said, 45%, that they do not fear Google's Knowledge graph but 17% said they sometimes do and 37% said they do fear it. So 55% do fear the knowledge graph on some level and 45% said they do not.
Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld.