One of the highlights of the year for me is Matt Cutts talk at PubCon. So me not being there, being 6,000+ miles away, was unfortunate. It was the first PubCon I've missed in, well, I can't remember.
Anyway, there was some excellent note taking of his presentation, plus PubCon streamed it live, so I saw a glimpse of it. I wanted to pull out the highlights and most important things Matt shared, specific to topics SEOs should be concerned with for the end of this year and 2014.
First, the live blogging I took this from include Bruce Clay, Search Engine Journal, Pole Vault Media, Search Mojo, Search Engine Land and Google+ via Brian Patterson. Of course, there is a ton of Twitter action from the event.
- Black Hat Hacking will be a core topic Google's web spam team will focus on. They hope to go after the hard core hacking tactics and reduce that impact on the search results.
- Child pornography will be blocked significantly in all countries, not just the US.
- Toolbar PageRank may or may not be fixed. The "pipeline" to export the quarterly data broke and Google has no immediate plans to fix it.
- Mobile is going to be a key area in 2014, so pay attention to it.
- Autocomplete, look to add requestAutocomplete to your forms.
- Top Ad Heavy Algo will get refreshed in a big way, see the previous update over here.
- Authorship 15% Reduction - Google is going to get picky on who they show authorship rich snippets for. So don't be surprised if yours goes away, look for ways to make yourself more authoritative. This includes rich snippets for your site...
- Better At JavaScript so don't be surprised to find out what Google gets into.
Update: Here is the video of Matt's talk:
Forum discussion at Google+ & Cre8asite Forums.
Image credit to @aknecht
