TRENDING: The All-In-One Digital Marketing Software

Matt Cutts is an American software engineer. He was the former administrator of the US Digital Service. He was appointed as acting administrator, later confirmed as a full administrator in October 2018. Cutts previously worked with Google as part of the search quality team on search engine optimization issues. He is the former head of the webspam team at Google.

“There are lots of ways to do marketing and do it well; there are lots of different ways to get peoples’ attention and to get traction. And the more creative you are or the better the experience is with your website, the more likely you are to be successful.”

“Thinking of ghost-related puns for a spam network. “They try to look super natural, but using them will dampen your spirits.”

“There are some types of link building that are illegal, but it’s very clear-cut: hacking blogs, that sort of thing is illegal.”

“It is true that a lot of SEO is now circling back around to good old-fashioned marketing.”

“One of the big reasons we say softer things (rather than “it’s impossible”) regarding the idea of negative SEO is that we have seen people to pretty crazy things to steal/hijack domain names in the past, like the bizarre history of sex.com: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex.com”

“People talk about negative SEO far more than people actually attempt it, because you’re never quite sure what effect (say) pointing some links to a site might have–it might help the site instead of hurting it–plus it’s typically a better use of your time to develop your own site.”

“Like many of the reports of “successful negative SEO” that we’ve investigated, the claims didn’t hold up. In this case, we had already caught the site in question for spammy links going back years and years–long before the negative SEO campaign started.”

“We are trying to level the playing field a bit. All those people doing, for lack of a better word, over-optimization or overly SEO – versus those making great content and great site. We are trying to make GoogleBot smarter and make our relevance better, and we are also looking for those who abuse it, like too many keywords on a page, or exchange way too many links or go well beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.”

“One common issue we see with disavow requests is people going through with a fine-toothed comb when they really need to do something more like a machete on the bad backlinks. For example, often it would help to use the “domain:” operator to disavow all bad backlinks from an entire domain rather than trying to use a scalpel to pick out the individual bad links. That’s one reason why we sometimes see it take a while to clean up those old, not-very-good links.”

“I’m pretty excited about the ideas behind authorship. Basically if you can move from an anonymous web to a web where you have some notion of identity. And maybe even reputation of individual author. Then web spam, you kind of get the benefits for free.”

“We are looking at Panda and seeing if we can find some additional signals, and we think we’ve got some to help refine things for sites that are kind of in the border zone, the gray area a little bit, And so if we can soften the affect a little bit, for those sites, that we believe have got some additional signals of quality, that will help sites that were previously affected – to some degree.”

“Make a fantastic website that people love and tell their friends about and link to and want to experience. As a result, your website starts to become stronger and stronger in the rankings.”

“In a lot of ways, if you think like a good marketer and think about what will appeal to people, you will find your job as an SEO and getting links or trying to build your links will be easier as well.”

“This is why we can’t have nice things in the SEO space: a trend starts out as authentic. Then more and more people pile on until only the barest trace of legitimate behaviour remains. We’ve reached the point in the downward spiral where people are hawking “guest post outsourcing” and writing articles about “how to automate guest blogging.”

“If someone sends you an email with an SEO offer out of the blue, be sceptical.”

“Beyond clear-cut blackhat webspam, the second-biggest category of spam that Google deals with is hacked sites. The most common reaction we hear from webmasters is “The problem is with the Google search. There is nothing wrong with our website.” That’s a real quote from an email one site owner recently sent us. Sadly, it turns out that the site is almost always really hacked.”