Matt Cutts Speech Penguin 2.0 SEO Google

What should we expect in the next few months in terms of SEO for Google?
MATT CUTTS: Hey everybody, today’s webmaster video is answering the question: “What should
0:05we expect in the next few months in terms of SEO for Google?”
0:08Okay, so, first off, we’re taping this video in early May of 2013, so I’ll give you a little
0:15bit of an idea about what to expect as far as what Google’s working on in terms of the
0:18webspam team. In terms of what you should be working on,
0:22we try to make sure that is pretty constant and uniform. Try to make sure you make a great
0:26site that users love, that they’ll want to tell their friends about, bookmark, come back
0:30to, visit over and over again, ya know, all the things that make a site compelling. We
0:34try to make sure that if that’s your goal, we’re aligned with that goal, and therefore,
0:39as long as you’re working hard for users, we’re working hard to try to show your high
0:42quality content to users as well. But at the same time, people are always curious
0:46about, OK, what should we expect coming down the pipe in terms of what kinds of things
0:50Google’s working on. One of the reasons that we don’t usually talk that much about the
0:54kinds of things we’re working on is that the plans can change. Ya know, the timing can
0:59change, when we launch things can change. So take this with a grain of salt. This is,
1:03as of today, the things that look like they’ve gotten some approval or they look pretty promising.
1:08Okay, with all those kinds of disclaimers, let’s talk a little bit about the sort of
1:12stuff that we’re working on. We’re relatively close to deploying the next
1:16generation of Penguin. Internally, we call it “Penguin 2.0?. And again, Penguin is
1:21a webspam change that’s dedicated to try to find blackhat webspam and try to target and
1:28address that. So this one is a little more comprehensive than Penguin 1.0 and we expect
1:37it to go a little bit deeper and have a little bit more of an impact than the original version
1:40of Penguin. We’ve also been looking at advertorials that
1:45is sort of native advertising and those sorts of things that violate our quality guidelines.
1:50So again, if someone pays for coverage or pays for an ad or something like that, those
1:56ads should not flow PageRank. We’ve seen a few sites in the US and around the world that
2:03take money and then do link to websites and pass PageRank. So we’ll be looking at some
2:07efforts to be a little bit stronger on our enforcement as far as advertorials that violate
2:13our quality guidelines. Now there’s nothing wrong inherently with advertorials or native
2:18advertising, but they should not flow PageRank and there should be clear and conspicuous
2:23disclosure so that users realize that something is paid, not organic or editorial.
2:30It’s kind of interesting. We get a lot of great feedback from outside of Google. For
2:34example, there were people complaining about searches like “payday loans” on Google.co.uk.
2:40So we have two different changes that try to tackle those kinds of queries in a couple
2:45different ways. We can’t get into too much detail about exactly how they work, but I’m
2:51kind of excited that we’re going from having just general queries be a little more cleaned
2:56to going to some of these areas that have traditionally been a little more spammy including,
3:00for example, some more pornographic queries. And some of these changes might have a little
3:04bit more of an impact in those kinds of areas that are a little more contested by various
3:09spammers and that sort of thing. We’re also looking at some ways to go upstream
3:16to deny the value to link spammers–some people who spam links in various ways. We’ve got
3:21some nice ideas on trying to make sure that that becomes less effective and so we expect
3:26that that will roll out over the next few months as well.
3:28And in fact, we’re working on a completely different system that does more sophisticated
3:32link analysis. We’re still in the early days for that, but it’s pretty exciting. We’ve
3:37got some data now that we’re ready to start munging and see how good it looks and we’ll
3:41see whether that bears fruit or not. We also continue to work on hacked sites in
3:47a couple different ways, number one trying to detect them better, we hope in the next
3:50few months to roll out a next generation of hacked sites detection that is even more comprehensive,
3:55and also try to communicate better to webmasters, because sometimes they/we see confusion between
4:01hacked sites and sites that serve up malware, and ideally you have a one stop shop where
4:06once someone realizes that they have been hacked, they can go to webmaster tools and
4:12have some single spot they can go where they get a lot more info to sort of point them
4:15in the right way to hopefully clean up those hacked sites.
4:19So if you’re doing high quality content whenever you’re doing SEO this shouldn’t be some big
4:24surprise you shouldn’t have to worry about a lot of different changes. If you’ve been
4:28hanging out on a lot black hat forums and trading different types of spamming package
4:33tips and that sort of stuff then it might be a more eventful summer for you.
4:37But we have also been working on a lot of ways to help regular webmasters. We’re doing
4:43a better job of detecting when someone is sort of an authority in a specific space,
4:48could be medical or could be travel or whatever, and trying to make sure that those rank a
4:52little more highly if you’re some sort of authority or a site that according to the
4:58algorithms we think might be a little more appropriate for users.
5:02We’ve also been looking at Panda and seeing if we can find some additional signals and
5:07we think we’ve got some to help refine things for the sites that are kinda in the border
5:11zone/in the grey area a little bit. So if we can soften the effect a little bit for
5:15those sites that we believe have some additional signals of quality that will help sites that
5:21might have previously been effected to some degree by Panda.
5:26We’ve also heard a lot of feedback from some people about that if I go down three pages
5:29deep I’ll see a cluster of several results all from one domain. We’ve actually made things
5:35better that you’re less likely to see that on the first page and more likely to see that
5:41on the following pages. And we’re looking at a change which might deploy which would
5:47basically say that once you’ve seen a cluster of results from one site then you’d be less
5:51likely to see more results from that site as you go deeper into the next pages of Google
5:56search results. And that has been good feedback that people
5:59have been sending us. We continue to refine host clustering and host crowding and all
6:06those sorts of the things. But we’ll continue to listen to feedback and see what we can
6:09do even better. And then we’re going to keep try figuring
6:13out how to get more information to webmasters. I mentioned more information for sites that
6:17are hacked and ways they might be able to do things, we’re also going to be looking
6:21for ways we can provide more concrete details, more example URLs that webmasters can use
6:27to figure out where to go diagnose their site. That’s just a rough snapshot of how things
6:33look right now, things can absolutely change and be in flux we might see new attacks, we
6:39might need to move our resources around, but that’s a little about bit of what to expect
6:43over the next few months in the summer of 2013.
6:47I think it’s going to be a lot of fun. I’m really excited about a lot of these changes
6:52because we do see really good improvements in terms of people who are link spamming or
6:58doing various black hat spam would be less likely to show up I think by the end of the
7:02summer. And at the same time we’ve got a lot of nice changes queued up that hopefully will
7:06help small/medium businesses and regular webmasters as well. So that’s just a very quick idea
7:13about what to expect in terms of SEO for the next few months as far as Google.
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