Google Penalty World

Robin Good: At SMX Advanced this week, Matt Cutts mentioned that Google is considering offering a tool that would let webmasters disavow certain links.

Here's what he said as reported by WebProNews:

"The story of this year has been more transparency, but we’re also trying to be better about enforcing our quality guidelines.

People have asked questions about negative SEO for a long time.

Our guidelines used to say it’s nearly impossible to do that, but there have been cases where that’s happened, so we changed the wording on that part of our guidelines.

Some have suggested that Google could disavow links.

Even though we put in a lot of protection against negative SEO, there’s been so much talk about that that we’re talking about being able to enable that, maybe in a month or two or three."

...

Once Google launches this tool, assuming that it actually does, it will be very interesting to see how the rankings shake out.

It should be an indication of just how important links actually are these days.

As you may know, Google has sent out a ton of Webmaster Tools warnings this year, and such a tool would help users take quick “manual action” on links rather than spend a ton of time sending link removal requests to other sites."

Full article: http://www.webpronews.com/google-will-soon-ignore-links-you-tell-it-to-2012-06 

From WebProNews: "This week, Google posted a new Webmaster Help video featuring Matt Cutts talking about a potential duplicate content issue. This time, he even broke out the whiteboard to illustrate his points.

Specifically, Cutts addressed the user-submitted question:

"Many sites have a press release section, or a news section that re-posts relevant articles. Since it’s all duplicate content, would they be better off removing these sections even with plenty of other unique content?

“The answer is probably yes, but let me give you a little bit of color about the reasoning for that,” Cutts says in the video.

“So a lot of the times at Google, we’re thinking about a continuum of content, and the quality of that content, and what defines the value add for a user.

So let’s draw a little bit of an axis here and think a little bit about what’s the difference between high quality guys versus low quality guys...”"

Get the full Matt Cutts' answer fully transcripted here: http://www.webpronews.com/matt-cutts-addresses-duplicate-content-issue-in-new-video-2012-06 

From the original article: "Google has been working on a new penalty that targets site’s that overly optimize for search engines for the past few months.

Matt Cutts said the new over optimization penalty will be introduced into the search results in the upcoming month or next few weeks.

The purpose is to “level the playing field,” Cutts said. To give sites that have great content a better shot at ranking above sites that have content that is not as great but do a better job with SEO."

Check also out this video from Matt Cutts, dating back to 2009, and illustrating how much Google's take on this issue has profoundly changed, if not reversed altogether. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz0KQNPDUoc

Must listen-to. 8/10

Here is a full text trasncription (and the audio recording) of what Matt Cutts has exactly said: http://selnd.com/FTwher 

Check also: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-over-seo-update-14887.html  

Search Engine Land reports from SMX Advanced in Seattle: "Is it a penalty? Or is it just a change to Google’s algorithm?

That’s been one of the hot topics in search marketing in recent months thanks to the Panda and Penguin updates, and it was one of the topics of discussion tonight at our SMX Advanced conference in Seattle.

During the annual “You & A with Matt Cutts” keynote session, Google’s web spam chief told Search Engine Land Editor-In-Chief Danny Sullivan that Google’s definition of a “penalty” is when manual action is taken against a site — and that Google doesn’t use the term “penalty” as much as they say “manual action.”

Cutts went on to say that neither Panda nor Penguin are penalties; they’re both algorithm updates.

He also mentioned — and this will be good news to many search marketers — that Google is considering offering a tool that allows web masters to disavow certain links, but that may be months away if it happens.

...

Other topics included why some spam reports aren’t acted on, whether Google+ and +1 votes are a strong SEO signal right now and much more."

Read the full report blog with all of the Q&A here:

http://searchengineland.com/live-blog-you-a-with-matt-cutts-at-smx-advanced-123513 

From the WebProNews article: "Another thing on the quality guidelines list is: “Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.”

Of course, like the rest of the guidelines, this is nothing new, but in light of the Penguin update, it seems worth examining the guidelines again, if for no other reason than to provide reminders or educate those who are unfamiliar.

Duplicate content seems like one of those that could get sites into trouble, even when they aren’t intentionally trying to spam Google.

Even Google says in its help center article on the topic, “Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin.”

“However, in some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic,” Google says. “Deceptive practices like this can result in a poor user experience, when a visitor sees substantially the same content repeated within a set of search results.”

Google lists the following as steps you can take to address any duplicate content issues you may have:"

Useful. Important. 8/10

Check them all out in the original article here: http://www.webpronews.com/google-penguin-update-dont-forget-about-duplicate-content-2012-05