I have not been live blogging at the extreme but I figured I do so on very specific panels. The first one is via SMX West, the The Search Police: Matt & Duane’s Excellent Search Engine Adventure.
This is always a fun panel and sometimes, if we are lucky, we will get new tidbits of information from Google or Bing related to the algorithm.
So sit tight and please excuse my incredibly fast typing because there will be typos.
Feel free to ask questions as I am doing this live.
FYI, live blogging platform not working, so I'll do this old fashion...
We are starting in about 3 minutes, at 6:30pm PDT.
They just left the stage...
You will have to manually refresh this page for the updates...
They play a clip of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure:
And then they walk up on stage in costume...
Here is a video via Ari N.
Pretty funny....
Matt Cutts called this "Albert Einstein level spamming..."
Not naming the financial company who fell for this...
Then he goes into some other spam, more typical spam, like cloaking...
He then shows the live spam slideshow that Google added over at this page (FYI, I built an archive of them at this page)...
He then shows other spam, like doorway pages, autogenerated content, there is even auto-generated spam that features the web spam team (yea, images of Matt in spam), keyword stuffing, gibberish is similar to keyword stuff but it makes no sense at all, hacking, he shows examples and asks us not to share them...
He then goes into paid links, blog/comment spam also are issues.
Make great sites that people want to go to.
That is his presentation... Open Q&A soon.
Duane is now up...
Make sure you know the history of a domain name, don't buy a domain name that was spamming and hacking.
Analytics... Look at sessions over queries...
"If users love you, then we want a piece of you."
Markup your content.
Prepare for mobile.
Avoid shortcuts... i.e. like-farms...
Content is number 1, then social is #2, user experience, then link building and then SEO.
Lots of SEO slides... I want the Q&A... You should see the Qs I submitted, so let's get to them....
Q&A time...
(Q) The disavow tool is some trick, since you are reporting yourself. Any truth to that?
(A) Matt, the point where you are using this tool, you are already having issues. So what do you need to lose? Yada yada... He adds they pulled a link network down a week or so ago (see here) and they will do another link network in a week or two from now.
Duane said they are tricking everyone (he is joking).
Matt, when you are disavowing, disavow the whole domain if it is a really bad domain. The format of the file is a text file, not an excel file, etc.
(Q) Does Bing understand responsive design? What should we do here?
(A) Duane says yes. We understand responsive design. He goes into the long answer.
Matt agrees and says responsive design is a great technique...
(Q) My q... Matt, how would you rank that chart... Content is number 1, then social is #2, user experience, then link building and then SEO
(A) Duane explains this is not how their algo works, just how he would prioritize stuff.
Matt, he would wrap content and user experience into one. You need great content that is easy to find. Then link building, SEO, viral, etc gets easier. Long term, social and identity will mean a lot more than they do now.
Links still matter more than social signals on Google and Bing. Social has a heavier influence.
(Q) Does having a lot of Google+s change my ranking for the better?
(A) Matt, I honestly do not know. Same with Facebook.
Duane, they do have partnerships with social networks and when you are logged in it does make a difference and they also use it in aggregate.
(Q) When is the next Penguin?
(A) They are working on the next generation of Penguin.
Duane, we do not have a zoo.
(Q) When is the next Panda update?
(A) Maybe Friday or Monday this week.
(Q) What is the next big update everyone will be talking about in 2013?
(A) It is weird because we never know what people will complain about... But there is a new Penguin update, big one, coming...
(Q) Duane, do you plan on any penguin/panda updates?
(A) We take a different approach to this. It is less noticeable when we release them because we test them. A diss at Google?
(Q) Why does site X get away with doorway pages. I.e. a big brand.
(A) Big brands cannot do whatever they want. They look at value add, etc. Faster, better, better UI, content, etc.
It is weird, Google does take action on big sites and big sites often do not like to talk about it. So it happens a lot.
(Q) Are you going to kill the Google Toolbar?
(A) It turns out real people really do use the toolbar indicator, not just for SEO purposes. This is a bias sample.
(Q) Google, why you going after rank scrapers?
(A) 10+ years ago, I saw one scraping software and it was taking up 4% of Google's queries. It takes thousands of servers to server queries to these scrapers.
That is all folks. One more session, which should be good, not sure if I will live blog it. Follow me on Twitter, may tweet it at @rustybrick.
