Matt Cutts At SMX Advanced Seattle - Day 1
It’s day 1 at Danny Sullivan’s inaugural event since splitting from Search Engine Strategies, and there’s a room full of people listening to Google’s Matt Cutts. It’s an interesting mix at what has been billed as the first search marketing event aimed solely at those with more advanced knowledge; plenty of the more well known names in the industry, as well as a lot of people whose businesses depend on the search engines.
Matt is taking questions from attendees about Google policies on a number of issues and how they effect rankings. To summarise:
- Google still don’t like paid links (but they totally respect your right to use them - they just reserve the right to ignore them [if they can find them/get people to tell them where they exist)]
- The webmaster guidelines are brief because they just aim to give the impression of what they look for in a website - it would be too long if they tried to cover everything
- ‘Real’ people (i.e. those who don’t work in the tech sector) like Wikipedia, so it’s fine that they rank so highly so much of the time
- The actual question that prompted this was “When are you (Google) going to break up with Wikipedia?!”
- Matt is very polite - he was very diplomatic about Jason Calacanis’ attempt at a people powered search engine.
- There is a link bombing algorithm (some have suggested that Google tweak the results manually to remove politically embarrassing results) - it just isn’t run every day.
Matt does a great job at putting a human face to Google and has done a huge amount to improve Google’s standing in this sector. But in another example of how MSN are really looking to woo the search marketing industry whereas Google are perhaps more blase about this, last night MSN put on an event with a free bar for 500 people for 4 hours. Tonight, Google are giving everyone 2 free drinks and that’s it. I guess that $3.6 billion just doesn’t go as far as it used to
