matt cutts

Matt Cutts confirms: we return(ed) random Pagerank data

Marketing Fan — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:46:57 +0200

I’m here at the SMX Advanced in Seattle, and there’s def a coverage of the show on many blogs out there, but I guess this little juicy nugget of information might be missing on most of them.

Last night in the “You & A” session Matt Cutts responded to Jay Young talking about building an “Archive of pagerank data” and giggled when he confirmed that they already take care of people querying the PR data too much or too heavily.

In fact he confirmed that years ago already they started to return stupid random data based on some signature they found in the guy’s query signature. He added, that TODAY, they of course are a lot smarter in making sure people don’t overdo the pagerank queries.

For me this is a clear confirmation that they have implemented some (obviously needed) measures to

detect bot type patterns in the PR queries – i.e. if more than 50 pages from a domain are requested within 2 minutes, it must be a bot, mustn’t it
implement kind of “quotas” for PR queries (I had clients using Aarons SEO toolbar seeing only white or gray anymore)
return random or white/grey PR data based on above findings

This again is a clear argument (as Adam Audette said as well in his great presentation) that PR cannot and SHALL NOT be used as a basis for decisions like

PR sculpting / siloing (how do you know what you’re doing if you get crap data input?)
link building – or removing built or paid links based on PR changes

Interesting sessions here btw… but more even more important and interesting private talks ! well worth the travel!

DataFeed Import the easy way

Marketing Fan — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:14:44 +0200

Last week Stefan Everaet, the owner of Niche Content Packages (a top quality PLR content provider), released a new site building tool called DataFeedR which promises the painless creation

of datafeed driven sites based on Wordpress.

Well – thin affiliates sites – (as Matt Cutts calles them), driven from a database that was replicated 1000s of times over the whole web were killed years ago by Google’s duplicate content filter – back in 2005 or so. The idea of DataFeedR is bascially the same – import a generally available database into your wordpress, and manage it from there… but…

DataFeed Sites a’la 2008

The improved concept of filling up Google’s index with product descriptions and images from big vendors here is the augmentation with content written by yourself, your writer or maybe your users (i.e. blog comments). Of course the fine line between success and failure here is HOW you do that job… imported the datafeed and leaving it as is would probably be just a waste of money…

DataFeed Pre Processing

One major feature of DataFeedR is the possibility of creating a selective mix of products from multiple merchants and even affiliate networks (big ones like CJ, LinkShare and ShareAsale are supported). One word on the datafeeds: it IS required that a datafeed is PRE-processed by DataFeedR before you can actually blend and download it for you own use. That means whenever you come across some niche, you have to tell Stefan first. This means two things – first they check if that feed is really (technically and semantically) usable. This might take some time, but in the end you save some work for yourself. But second this means that you expose this feed to other users, and if that is very narrow niche that you just discovered or want to test with, that might be something you do not want to do.

But at least you get Stefan to sort our and clean up the merchant’s datafeed mess for you and provide you a quality download. And judging from the quality of his content packages those feeds must be killer quality.

And on the other hand, assuming that you have some funky programmer’s inhouse, you could still builld your own converter tools for feeding into this plugin and then use it “only” as a data management tool and forget about Stefan’s feed processing service at DataFeedR.

I mailed Stefan about the selection of merchants supported currently and got confirmed that not all CJ and Shareasale and Linkshare merchants are yet available but several times a week they add more merchants to Datafeedr. As Commission Junction (CJ) has around 1000 merchants with datafeeds at this moment they focus only on those with good network earnings (EPC) and which are already several years in the network (and this is another pre-processing work done for you).

Unfortunately there is no converter tool available to use datafeeds other than the ones included in Datafeedr. But if you want specific merchants just let Stefan as mentioned above. I guess a full documentation of the DataFeedR import format is the missing link we need here and will ask Stefan about it.

Merchant’s supported so far

Stefan made some quick screenshots of merchants supported currently here and here and here

DataFeedR’s price

The price tag of $97 monthly recurring for DataFeedR is not cheap.

In fact it’s a pretty hefty price for a word press plugin.

But what you get for this is a rock-solid data feed management solution with attached data pre-processing services I’ve yet to find. And it supports Wordpress 2.2-2.3 AS WELL AS the new 2.5.x

Other features

Support Forum – the young forum is there – it’s up to Stefan and his team how he lives up to our expectations

Update only parts of products – obviously you need to rewrite and optimize the product descriptions, so when you update your product list, the following values are updated with new product information: Affiliate Link (URL to the network), Price, Image URL, Thumbnail URL – This means that when you have changed product descriptions and product names these changes will NOT be overwritten by uploading a new datafeed version. But you can customize that behavious as explained in the forum

Embed products within your blog posts – you can add multiple products to your WordPress Posts or Pages – check this out

I’ll keep you posted about DataFeedR and comparable products (which all seem to suck compared to DataFeedR) and my experiences with them. Some impressive features that are announced to be here soon are

Meanwhile you can go check it out yourself

Are won links = paid links?

Marketing Fan — Thu, 10 May 2007 13:03:45 +0200

You know there’s a weeklong “paid links” debate that Matt Cutts started last month … nice link bait and a couple of people gotten pretty frigthened…

Sorry, I’m just too lazy to link to all those posts pro & contra, but somethink made me think today.

The sweepstake for my survey on online community motivation research that I run on Digitalpoint gives away text links and presell pages that you would have to pay $4,500 for, unless you win one of the prizes.

So,

1. they do have an incentive for participating in the survey (after allyou have to click thru those 25 questions)

2. they would HAVE TO be paid, normally – but they are not

3. the links you win will still be suject to manual review and approval by the brokers Text-Link-Ads and PresellPageMan

Are these essentially “paid links” in Google speak?

What’s your take on this?

Just because others pay $4,500 – you might not… How does Google tell the difference?

High Quality Link Building

Marketing Fan — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 14:33:54 +0100

The last days a couple of great resources for link building were released, so I think it’s time to round-up and put some of them together – completed with my thoughts and comments on the various sources

For novice link builders

SeoLogs Father’s link building guide —- Badi Jones put together a nice roundup to start explaining your old daddy how to build some traffic to site … worth a read and a digg, and while it’s not 100+ ways to build links it’s something you can READ and talk about easily to non-SEOs

Why Link Reciprocation Kills your Ranks is a bit lenghty but greatly detailled post about why doing recip link exchange not only is worthless but can kill your rankings

Linking out is important and was just confirmed again by Matt Cutts and Rand Fishkin as they took care of where their users link out to .. Jim re-visited the whole co-citations and outlinking as he already explained it in big detail last summer… now everybody should be aware that outlinks are important for a site’s trust rank ... the times of page rank hording are really over, I agree with Jim

For advanced link builders

Blog post services not detectable is the common sense of Rand’s post about a Chicago session… well frankly that’s only true for THOSE blogs that are REAL blogs and not only setup to feed PayPerPost, blogvertise and other “pay per blogpost” services

Aaron chimes in suggesting to get high quality reviews at ReviewMe – a service I still have to try.

Quality Score the new pagerank – thoughts about publishing the Adwords Quality Score to advertisers… that’s the next big thing in Link Valuation IMHO... and I agree with Aaron that the Quality Score is influenced by the organic results… Amazon and ebay DO pay less for advertising their products than any PPC arbitrager … makes sense to me

Indirect linking is a concept I’ve been talking about for months to my clients – and since Chris want’s to talk about better natural link building anyway, I felt can talk about this idea in public anyway … after all the audience of this blog is pretty limited anyway – so enjoy if you haven’t already

Domain Trust concept vs. page trust – with presell pages on .edu domains being sold for some time (and I heard they sell like hot cake) it becomes obvious that the concept ob using an old domains trust to power your younger site is some that simply works!... Aaron Wall thinks the concept of domain trust will be lowered or narrowed down pages on those domains that are REALLY old and got a lot of links…

Aaron Wall wrote:

I think Google is going to have to reduce their weighting on domain trust and place more on how well the individual page is integrated into the site and integrated into the web as a whole.

Well frankly that’s how it already works today – the more links the better, the older the page, the better it is if you get a link there… I think Aaron’s point is (and I agree) is that the overall influence of an old domain is SO strong, that it creates a real incentive to buy old sites as Jim and others do on a large scale

Getting links from .edu and .gov sites is a very valuable thing, as even the SEJ talks about recommendations for .gov link hunting —- however I wouldn’t call using pages like this and this for paying money to get a .gov link under the radar ... I’m sure none of these sites pass any link value

For the black hats

Forum spammer software – while I don’t link to it, you should know that there’s software out there that cracks captcha security , fakes user accounts by auto-registering that on free-mail services and of course does all that crap via 100s of anonymous proxies … and that’s just the start … oh – and of course blog spamming software that cracks CAPTCHAs and other protection is out as well – but IMHO there’s more attention on fighting blog spam than forum spam… does PHPBB and Vbulleting have an akismet plugin? I assume no.

Forum Private Mail spammer software – the end of spam free forums is near – software to send out MASS-PMs to all registered users is available and it’s the same principle as with email spam… send out 1,000,000 PMs to get 10 or 20 buys…

Video spam – again something I won’t endorse with a link, but the cat’s out of the bag that posting stuff on YouTube helps your rankings – no wonder – it’s a great trusted domain … getting a link from there is like getting a link from Yahoo or an old .edu site… and if it’s not for the link juice, it’s for human traffic… there are companies out there selling this service already

(note – all these blackhattish things won’t result in high quality links, despite the title… it’s more a high-tech armed link spamming toolkit I would put such stuff into … DO NOT USE SUCH STUFF AT HOME OR GET YOUR SITES BANNED)

New link Builder tools for all

Of course you have to checkout Jim’s new updated SEO tools

Michael provides a couple of handy bookmarklets – reminds me I need to reveal and update my own “SEO Bookmarklets”: once again (heck I couldn’t even find the page they are located on… how could YOU ? ... TODO)

If you ever wondered about the perfect link then Jim’s team member wrote a little story about his experiences with Jim’s take on it… :-)

Matt Cutts at "Meet the engineers" at Google Dance 2006

Marketing Fan — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 03:00:25 +0200

Matt Cutts at "Meet the engineers" at Google Dance 2006

Google Dance 2006

Marketing Fan — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 02:45:53 +0200

Here come some new pictures from the Google Dance 2006 event last week at the Googleplex

Aaron Wall AKA SEOBOOK.com at “Meet the engineers”

Griffin “Gage” Granberg and Christoph the MarketingFan

Mike Glenn and Christoph C. Cemper at the Google Dance 2006

Greg Hullender, the MSNDUDE on WMW – discussing with Matt Cutts at “Meet the engineers” at the Google Dance 2006

Matt Cutts at “Meet the engineers” at Google Dance 2006

Search Celebrities at the Bodog party in San Jose

Marketing Fan — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 16:59:00 +0200

I got to bed late last night, so I went up early today to post some of the fun pics I shot yesterday at the private Bodog party in San Jose… thanks again Greg for the invitation btw :-)

The party was a great warmup event with roughly only 100-150 people there a very cosy and private athmosphere… Matt Cutts from Google and Tim Meyer from Yahoo where there as well and had the usual crowd of 15 people around them, so taking pictures wasn’t so easy :-) – in any case you can check out Matt Cutts and me at the PubCon in Vegas last year

Some impressions from the party following…

Laura Lippay from Yahoo, Greg Boser Boser”:http://general.webguerrilla.com/ses-party-sunday-night/ and Christoph C. Cemper in San Jose 2006

Danny Sullivan and Christoph C. Cemper in San Jose 2006

Jim Boykin, Monte Baumgartner and me at the Bodog party Aug 6 in San Jose

Marcus Tandler aka Mediadonis from Cia.de and me at the Bodog party

Laura from Yahoo New Media team, Greg Boser aka WebGuerilla, Rand Fishkin from SeoMoz and me

Chris Boggs and Jim Boykin

Pascal Fantou and me in San Jose 2006

In case you didn’t hear that – we will have one of the most prominent names in the search engine industry on stage here on Wednesday. Google CEO Eric Schmidt will join Danny for a conversation, in a morning session where they will discuss Google’s “growing and dealing with challenges and issues in search.”

Great place to be!

Update: Dave has some more pics

Technorati Tags: ses, ses san jose 2006, yahoo, google, askjeeves, search engine strategies san jose 2006

SpamRank - my interpretation

Marketing Fan — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 19:59:10 +0200

One of the papers I listed in The Top 15 SEO research papers is about SpamRank with the goal of Fully Automatic Link Spam Detection

Preparing for the SES tomorrow, I want to share my observations and interpretations of that WWW2005 paper

Goal

obviously search engines need a good and automatic way to identifying link networks and link farms – sites that are built soley for inflating page rank or a group of webmasters that join together for a link rink or a link exchange network

Method

research paper wrote:

key assumption is that

supporters of an honest page should not be overly dependent on one another, i.e. they should be spread

across sources of different quality

This means having too many high ranking sites is bad, while having only low ranking sites is bad too – emulate natural web

Quote:

as in the case of the entire Web, the PageRank distribution of an

honest set of supporters should be power law.

You want a natural linking pattern for your sites

The two key observations in detecting link farms

assumption 1 wrote:

Portions of the Web are self-similar; an honest set of supporter pages arise by independent actions of individuals and organizations that build a structure with properties similar to the entire Web. In particular, the PageRank of the supporters (ed: the linking sites) follows a power law distribution just as the case for the entire Web.

Again, you want a natural linking pattern for your sites

assumption 2 wrote:

Link spammers have a limited budget; when boosting the PageRank of a target page, “unimportant” structures are not replicated.

If you need “unimportant” structures for your site, then go for low-value links like PR0, PR1, PR2, links from uncached pages, links from new sites, hell – any link – just make sure you build a GOOD, NATURAL (again) mix

So how can I lower my SpamRank ?

These are my interpretations & recommendations only:

Get a good mix of backlinks, where the PR follows a power-principle, say a power of 3 have 3^5 = 243 PR0, 81 PR1, 27x PR2, 9 PR3, 3 PR4 and 1 PR5 … you get the idea?
THEREFORE: Don’t bother buying links on High PR pages like PR9,PR8 that sure will stick out of your link profile immediately
Look at your competitors and their backlink profiles and try to emulate that
Get links from within content (presell pages), not only sidebar, navigational or footer links
Add “useless” pages like About, Sitemap, Contact us etc to your sites
Add “useless” links to your sites – some nofollow links, some PR0, some uncached

Hell – and don’t count on every single link… make your site evolve naturally, the days where you bought 3 PR7 and got a PR6 next month are over for YEARS... (I still get questions from people who believe those 2003ish myths that are burried in some old abandoned webmaster forums and minds)

Two other algorithms are cited and I’m sure they are in development or production already

B. Wu and B. D. Davison. Identifying link farm pages.

and with 22 scientific citations and only via payables from Springs this here

H. Zhang, A. Goel, R. Govindan, K. Mason, and B. V. Roy. Making eigenvector-based reputation systems robust to collusion.

More to read on the topic of link farms and link spam detection is listed here

Yahoo’s Link Farm detection patent

Using Rank Propagation and Probabilistic Counting for Link-Based Spam Detection

Undue Influence: Eliminating the Impact of Link Plagiarism on Web Search Rankings

Sidenote: Barry and others already reported from last years’ Chicago show (I think it was Chicago) that Matt Cutts from Google was playing with

his notebook to point out rented links and links from link farms.

While it’s not clear that thes algos are in effect for all search queries, all websites, all countries or languages, it’s sure Google & Co have implemented MANY of them – as the pure calculation is pretty simple once you have the huge database of web site vectors (interlink data) as Google & Co have.

Pubcon X - Photos of WebmasterWorld Nov2005

Marketing Fan — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 01:44:13 +0100

Just saw that Jim, who returned today - 2 days after me - already put up some pics, so I chose to upload few of the nicer pub pics ASAP

Jim Boykin CEO of webuildpages and me

Find another nice shot of us at Jim's and Dale's website

Dale, I'm hotlinking this superfunny one here for now... please LMK and I'll remove it asap / or host it here:

Matt Cutts and me

Aaron Wall / SEOBOOK , Caveman and Roger/Martinibuster

I broke my Ixus 750 after this event - but could download all the pics luckily - and I got a new cam already as of today...