SEARCHENGINES
Matt Cutts Fought With Sergey Brin & Larry Page Over Google Search Spam Issues
Some of you may know that in the early days of Google, Google’s co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page would say Google Search was immune to search spam. Matt Cutts, the former Google search spam lead, said recently on Hacker News that he actually had to fight with the co-founders to prove that Google was indeed spammable.
Matt Cutts wrote this week on Hacker News about the most impactful things he has built. He started with the SafeSearch filter on Google Image Search, he said “I wrote the first version of SafeSearch, Google’s family filter.” He said that “led to the insight that Google could be spammed.” When he realized that Google Search can be spammed, he said “that led to fights with Google’s founders–Sergey thought Google couldn’t be spammed.”
In a recent interview with Greg Boser, who was well known as an SEO spammer in the early days (he no longer spams), he told a story and Sergey coming to a conference and basically being so confident that Google Search was unspammable that it led to SEOs proving that they could. Greg said “Sergey showed up, he showed up on roller skates to a panel I believe Andre Broder was on. It was a serious panel talking about what search engines were doing to combat spam and he rolled it in laid-on skates and he got up there and basically said we don’t really worry about spam because our algorithm is so good that you know it’s not an issue for us basically.” “But basically he threw out a challenge to a lot of people who said okay cool,” Greg went on to say. It was at that point that he thinks SEOs put more attention to Google Search to prove a point. Greg said “And I wonder a lot like if he had not been so brazen and cocky about that approach, I really wonder sometimes like what the impact would be. Because a lot of us did, they’re like okay, you know because we’ve been you know kind of owning Alta Vista and the other ones for quite a while. And we were confident that we could own Google as well, and we did we, for a long time.”
Matt Cutts on Hacker News said, “Eventually the founders realized that Google could be spammed, so I helped build the team at Google that tries to keep Google’s rankings from being manipulated.”
As many of you know, Matt left Google and joined the USDS, he said on Hacker News “I was also proud to serve in the U.S. Digital Service, which is the groups of geeks that rescued healthcare.gov. The U.S. Digital Service has done a ton of impactful things for Veterans, immigrants, students, small business owners, and many others.”
And then something I did not know about Matt Cutts, he said “most recently, I served as an expert on spam and bots for Twitter in their lawsuit against Elon Musk.”
Figured this would be a fun light story for Friday of Thanksgiving.
Forum discussion at Hacker News.
Source: www.seroundtable.com
SEARCHENGINES
Google Won’t Change The 301 Signals For Ranking & SEO
Gary Illyes from Google said on stage at the SERP conference last week that there is no way that Google would change how the 301 redirect signal works for SEO or search rankings. Gary added that it’s a very reliable signal.
Nikola Minkov quoted Gary Illyes as saying, “It is a very reliable signal, and there is no way we could change that signal,” when asked if a 301 redirect not working is a myth. Honestly, I am not sure the context of this question, as it is not clear from the post on X, but here it is:
More from @methode:
– 301 redirect not working is a myth. “It is a very reliable signal, and there is no way we could change that signal”.#SERPConf2024#SERPConf2024International— Nikola Minkov (@n_minkov) April 19, 2024
We’ve covered 301 redirects here countless times – but I never saw a myth that Google does not use 301 redirects as a signal for canonicalization or for passing signals from an old URL to the redirected URL.
Forum discussion at X.
Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Passover.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Again Says Ignore Link Spam Especially To 404 Pages
I am not sure how many times Google has said that you do not need to disavow spammy links, that you can ignore link spam attacks and that links pointing to pages that 404/410 are links that do not count – but John Mueller from Google said it again.
In a thread on X, John Mueller from Google wrote, “if the links are going to URLs that 404 on your site, they’re already dropped.” “They do nothing,” he added, “If there’s no indexable destination URL, there’s no link.”
John then added, “I’d generally ignore link-spam, and definitely ignore link-spam to 404s.”
Asking if it would hurt to disavow, after responding with the messages above, John wrote:
It will do absolutely nothing. I would take the time to rework a holistic & forward-looking strategy for the site overall instead of working on incremental tweaks (other tweaks might do something, but you probably need real change, not tweaks).
Earlier this year we had tons of SEOs notice spammy links to 404 error pages, John said ignore them. In 2021, Google said links to 404 pages do not count, Google also said that in 2012 and many other times.
Plus, outside of links to 404 pages, Google has said to ignore spammy links, time and time again – even the toxic links – ignore them. The messaging around this changed in 2016 when Penguin 4.0 was released and Google began devaluing links over demoting them.
Here are those new posts in context:
I’d say add both. Lol
— Jeremy Rivera (@JeremyRiveraSEO) April 11, 2024
Sure. But also, save yourself the work completely :-).
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024
Re-reading your initial post – if the links are going to URLs that 404 on your site, they’re already dropped. They do nothing. If there’s no indexable destination URL, there’s no link. I’d generally ignore link-spam, and definitely ignore link-spam to 404s.
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024
… but still… is this a dumb idea?
— Rebekah Edwards (@rebekah_creates) April 11, 2024
It will do absolutely nothing. I would take the time to rework a holistic & forward-looking strategy for the site overall instead of working on incremental tweaks (other tweaks might do something, but you probably need real change, not tweaks).
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024
And in general, Google says it ignores spammy links, so you should too (not new) but this post from John Mueller is:
I would just ignore them, Google ignores them too. Sometimes they’re just more visible in tools, but that doesn’t mean they’re a problem.
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 18, 2024
And then also on Mastodon wrote about a similar situation, “Google has 2 decades of practice of ignoring spammy links. There’s no need to do anything for those links.”
Forum discussion at X.
Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Passover.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Needs Very Few Links To Rank Pages; Links Are Less Important
Gary Illyes from Google spoke at the SERP Conf on Friday and he said what he said numerous times before, that Google values links a lot less today than it did in the past. He added that Google Search “needs very few links to rank pages.”
Gary reportedly said, “We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.”
I am quoting Patrick Stox who is quoting what he heard Gary say on stage at the event. Here is Patrick’s post where Gary did a rare reply:
I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that
— Gary 鯨理/경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) April 19, 2024
Gary said this a year ago, also in 2022 and other times as well. We previously covered that Google said links would likely become even less important in the future. And even Matt Cutts, the former Googler, said something similar about eight years ago and the truth is, links are weighted a lot less than it was eight years ago and that trend continues. A couple of years ago, Google said links are not the most important Google search ranking factor.
Of course, many SEOs think Google lies about this.
Judith Lewis interviewed Gary Illyes at the SERP Conf this past Friday.
-
PPC5 days ago
19 Best SEO Tools in 2024 (For Every Use Case)
-
SEARCHENGINES7 days ago
Daily Search Forum Recap: April 17, 2024
-
SEARCHENGINES6 days ago
Daily Search Forum Recap: April 18, 2024
-
SEARCHENGINES5 days ago
Daily Search Forum Recap: April 19, 2024
-
MARKETING6 days ago
Ecommerce evolution: Blurring the lines between B2B and B2C
-
SEO6 days ago
2024 WordPress Vulnerability Report Shows Errors Sites Keep Making
-
WORDPRESS5 days ago
How to Make $5000 of Passive Income Every Month in WordPress
-
WORDPRESS6 days ago
10 Amazing WordPress Design Resouces – WordPress.com News
You must be logged in to post a comment Login