Dear Matt Cutts, I Want To Know About...

[dannysullivan]

Next week, I'm doing a special edition of the Daily SearchCast with Matt Cutts when I'm at the Googleplex. More about when and how to listen is here: Next Week's Special Edition Daily SearchCast With Matt Cutts, Live From The Googleplex. Matt's also got a post about this here: Danny in town next week.

Got things you'd like to see us discuss? Drop your suggestions here.

[GaryTheScubaDiver]

Is all the muck with the DC's completed? I've got clients from UK to Costa Rica flipping out.

[joeblstrn]

sure... talk about pages being dropped, and then appear suddenly. Many of my sites are ranking one day, gone the next and then back again. I am not talking change in postion. I am saying ranking in the SERPS one day and poof gone the next. Then, hey back again.

[sulamith]

That would be my number #1 question to. Why is my site there, prominently listed one day and then the next day, not to be found AT all, in 70 plus pages of returned results?

Secondly I guess I'd like to know why the quality of the results is just garbage now?

[JEC]

Those are good questions. Here's one of my own.

Matt, I'd like to ask you what benefit (if any) you have seen the "sandbox" have on the filtering of sites that are purely setup as spamming sites for link farms and such and removing them from the Google index? And, since there are plenty of sites like these out there that pre-date the "sandbox", how does Google foresee filtering those pre-existing sites from relevant searches in the future? Many of our collective search results still continue to list these types of sites. We all know it's an enormous task, but shy of us reporting each and every spammy site, what is Google doing to naturally filter these sites out, remove them from the index and improve the overall quality of the end user search results?

Thanks,

JEC

[sulamith]

Excellent question! I can't wait to hear good answers!

[sulamith]

Two more questions I've thought of:

1) Why does Google apparently put so much weight on the links to a given site, knowing that black hats use and abuse this to get their sites ranked higher? Given that any blogger can set up multiple webpages with outbound links to their site--why would they place so much weight on links in terms of ranking webpages?

and that leads me to this question, something I alluded to earlier, and which is also mentioned elsewhere in another thread on this board:

2) I'm really disturbed by the quality of the returned results on Google in recent weeks. It seems as if non-relevant pages for a particular search are being ranked far higher than pages that are much more relevant to that particular search term. Here's what I mean: Why is a page which merely mentions a thing or person ONCE showing up ranked far, far ahead of a high-quality website totally devoted to a person or subject? The assigned page rankings just seem very "wrong" to me on a number of different searches I've tried. Has Google lost the forest while looking for the trees? Is Big Daddy really an "improvement" or is it in fact dragging the quality of Google down for the average user?

[richardb]

Hi Danny

Would like to hear the long term approach to take 12 – 24 months, I’m assuming that G does plan long term.

The do’s and don’ts. Stuff like “burns those blogs and include the copy as part of your main sites FAQ’s and news items…” and then I’d like to see DS, Greg, Todd, DaveN et al’s theory of what was said. Hey but that will happen anyway

Thanks

Rich

[Gurtie]

I know that they try and do things algorythmically but if they really want rid of spam why don't they manually ban sites which are so obviously spamming dead blogs in the meantime? there are even google employees abandoned blogs with hundreds of comment spams hanging off them.... (and not all recent and viagra, user experience surely does matter for mobile phones, mortgages ad other stuff 'real users' search on? - some sites which were comment spamming 12 months ago are still in the index)

and actually, why cant the algo deal with that anyway? Just processing power? It doesn't look like they care very much to be honest

I have another couple but he won't answer them

[scrubs]

richardb hit the nail on the head I feel, I am interested in knowing what Googles plan for the future of search is?

There have been many problems and discussions in these forums about the last shake up, but that is part and parcel of our industry and dealing with these changes.

It would be nice to hear what emphasis they are going to put on producing the best results for the end user in the next 12 months?

[sootledir]

At the Orlando PubCon in 2004, he spoke about Google and how they dominated search because of four factors. Two of the factors were freshness and comprehensiveness. It appears they're falling behind in both categories. Is this some sort of strategic shift?

[traian]

Is Google going to rely(at least 1%) on the information provided by the users of google Co-op?

[richardb]

OK Danny to bump the thread...

I’d love to hear how G being a better search engine will not affect their revenue in terms of advertising! The bottom line is they are now in the biggest dichotomy of all time…

…how do we keep our market share (in terms of search) and yet still hit effective revenue re. advertising…

In the UK we call this conflict of interest.

Hi ya Mat, bet this one doesn’t even make the b list!!!


Rich

[Brian M]

There are still a lot of really old supplemental results showing up for pages that have not existed in more than a year. When will these finally be cleared out?

[Nacho]

Back from previous thread, but never got to any conclusions since only search engines hold the answers. We know link popularity follows to the new destination on 301s.

What I would like to learn from a gudeliness point of view, is if Google will consider the URL's age as part of the time factors and it has any value in the algorithms, and will that transfer over to the new URL after doing a 301?

EXAMPLE

In the case it's not the domain that is being 301ed but an actual set of URLs, such as:

domain.com/old-category1-name.html

gets 301 to

domain.com/new-category1-name.html

By this we know it's giving the search engines the instuction to notify that a page was permanently moved to a new destination, as well as link popularity will follow. The question is, will the age recorded or any other time-sensitive factors in the search engine's records for "old-category1-name.html" follow down to the "new-category1-name.html"?

Thanks Danny!

[Chris_D]

Don’t use “&id=” as a parameter in your URLs, as we don’t include these pages in our index.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmas...uidelines.html

I haven’t ever understood under what circumstances pages with urls which include &id= in the URL string are actually excluded from the index.

Clearly - pages with URLS which include the parameter “&id=” in the URL string ARE included in the index. Look at some of the URLs returned from these searches:
http://www.google.com/search?num=100...A+ id+%26+%3D
http://www.google.com/search?num=100...o rg+%26id%3D
http://www.google.com/search?num=100...&btnG=Sea rch

Could Matt please clarify under what circumstances pages whose URL string includes “&id=” are excluded from the index? More than two occurances of ‘&id=” in one URL?; more than three occurances?; or some other criteria?

Either way, the guideline as written is currently misleading, as some pages which include “&id=” in their URL are in fact included in the index.

I would like to know if there is a quicker way to get sites that have been blacklisted back into the search engine. We have 2 clients whose sites did not meet Google's guidelines. We fixed them about 8 months ago. They are still not listed. I got an e-mail from someone at Google stating that the robots will get to them in a couple of months and then they will be listed again. They still are not in there. Why can't Google just have them be listed again rather than depending on the robots to find them?

Is there something I can do to get this to happen?

Thanks!

[kleenex]

What level of on hands work do you have in regards to the “data refreshes” that affect SERPS and when can we expect to see more from the crawl team with regards to discussing it more in-depth to a broader audience? (i.e. like you do with us)

Why is it taking so long to have the constant and consistent indexing issues resolved? Since Big Daddy was unleashed the same types of web sites pop up that never used to be there before. I am referring to large scale shopping sites, major news articles, and irrelevant and sites that are circa 1995. In some Niche’s it really does seem like the little guy is getting pushed out of page one.

I can understand that issues may arise, but to say nothing is wrong is only adding fuel to a growing trend among Webmasters. Why not simply say, we are having an issue with some things? It would come across much better than showing pages that really are the webmasters issue. I think that they are justifiable, but I also think that recently there are more Webmasters that are not spamming or making mistakes on their end than the ones that are.

Thank you.

[Brian M]

Originally Posted by Chris_D

Could Matt please clarify under what circumstances pages whose URL string includes “&id=” are excluded from the index? More than two occurances of ‘&id=” in one URL?; more than three occurances?; or some other criteria?

Is there a query string that webmasters can use that will NOT be indexed so we can track both internal and external click traffic without creating duplicate content?

Thanks,

Brian M

[Robert_Charlton]

nofollow: Seems nofollow has evolved on Google from a link attribute for blogs, signaling that the link was to a site we "could not vouch for," to an attribute signaling that the link should not pass PageRank. To me there's a subtle change in this that's not clear....

- Does the use of nofollow confer any stigma on the destination site?
- Would it be appropriate to use nofollow, eg, to allow safe cross-linking of friendly sites, to allow navigation between the sites without giving Google the impression of linking to gain PageRank?
- If "cannot vouch for" is no longer the appropriate language to describe the intent of nofollow, how would Matt currently summarize what the purpose of nofollow is?

Scraper sites: How concerned should we be about seeing our content duped on scraper sites or being recipients of hidden links from these sites? Are we wasting Google's time and our energies reporting or worrying about this stuff?

sandbox: In relation to the non-existent sandbox, are there any guidelines Matt can discuss about making large content additions and/or structural changes on existing sites? No change in subject matter area here... just a site rebuild.

canonical question: Can Google currently sort out the difference between domain.com/ vrs domain.com/index.html, or should we be cleaning this up, perhaps using absolute urls, on sites we work on?

Thanks.