You & A With Matt Cutts - What’s a You&A? That’s where you, the audience, put your questions directly to the head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts. As an engineer in search quality, Matt’s been dealing with webmaster issues for Google since 2000 and is well known to many advanced search marketers from his blog and public speaking.

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Q&A Moderator: Alex Bennert, Director of Client Services, Beyond Ink

5:01 - Danny is getting things kicked off.  I will do my best to track.

Truthyness

Danny: There is a lot of talk going on around truthyness because of the Article that went viral about a fake news story.

Matt Cutts:  There is a difference between a fake story written for link bait written amongst the real news without any disclosure.  No correction, etc.   I didn’t view this as a harmless prank.   If we didn’t do something it would have been irresponsible. 

Some one earlier today said that their job is to get links.  If you have to lie to do it, so be it.  This puts a negative view on the whole industry.  If you are silly enough to say you lied we have to take action.

DS:  If your a small site why not pay for links?

MC:  How many people are willing to let there sites burn to the ground? 

If you are an in-house, you can’t do the kind of things that would risk your portfolio.  Someone said “do what is right for your sites now”  That is not the way to look at it.  Do what is right for your customers in the long term.   Think about Milli Vanilli…  Your Trust and your credibility is a limited commodity.

DS:  Talk about PageRank Scraping.

MC:  Somebody was scraping PageRank and we could tell that some was scraping because it had a signature.  We modified the signals so that  and the guy stopped…

MC:  I love conferences, because it is a ultimate forcing function.  Look at my blog for neat stuff: www.mattcutts.com.   Read the definition from Google on cloaking.  Here is what you need to know about cloaking.  Google corrected some language in their guidelines. 

DS: linkbait and widgetbait, can you clarify what is good or bad.

MC:  There is a spectrum.  Do users know are they informed that the links are there.  Think about webcounter spam.  Does the user know that they will be linking to spamy sites when they post a widget on their site.  Are the links hidden?  How off topic is it?    Did you get a widget from site A but it links to site B?  What is the anchor text?  When people put a widget on their page do people really know who they are linking to?

DS:  Crawling through forms:

MC:  We crawl through forms to discover more content , the hidden web that needs to be surfaced.   Rule of thumb to think about. Would users be annoyed.  That is when we take action.  

DS:  There is this search site called Mahalo, have you heard of it?  Mahalo is nothing but search results.  Why do the results show up in Google?

MC:  Jason Calacanis is really more about content like about.com versus a Microsoft, or Powerset.  

DS: Cloaking and Conditional redirects

MC:  When someone says conditional redirects you should say why is it conditional.   You should fix the site architecture. 

DS:  Penalties;  what about the -6 penalty.  

MC:  In most cases the power is in your hands to change it.   Sometimes people get together and look too hard.  We have seen a lot of spam and we are pretty nuanced view of what is going on.

DS:  What are the timelimits for being in the penalty box.

MC:  There are time limits, and people make mistakes so make the changes and make a reconsideration request. Google has to protect their users.  

DS:  Is it cloaking, is it IP delivery, is it first click free?

MC: First click free applies in the main index now not just news.  Does the user get the same content that googlebot sees.  

Michael Grey : WSJ is showing different stuff than what they show the user.

MC: I will check it out. 

DS:  What you said is significantly different then what we saw a year ago.

MC: WMW implemented First click free.

DS:  How do judge which links are good, not paid?

MC:  We can use manual and algorithmically ways to detect stuff.   There is a foot print and we can see because the person on the other end may not be that subtle.

DS:  if I have Site.com and I start a site2.com  should we have used a subdomain to transfer link equity?

MC:  If it is a good useful link it will help you.   And a useful link will attract its own links.     You need to ask yourself conceptually does it make sense to have one site or one site for each of your products.   Sphinn is a different forum from Search Engine Land.  

DS: I still want you to tell me the answer,

MC: There are a ton of smart people in the audience. Ask three people should you put these on the on one domain or multiple for your topic.   You can get a consensus.

DS: Can I knock someone out by buying links?

MC:  We try very hard to prevent that from happening.  Make a site that is compelling and you will attract links naturally.

DS: Page Rank Sculpting or Siloing.  Does it work?

MC:  If you are doing your architecture right then you don’t really need to worry about it.    Follow Michael grey’s advice that there are other fires to put out first.

People are free to experiment.

DS:  What is it like being the moral compass for SEO?

MC:  People know what the answer is.  You don’t need me in the audience as a straw man. 

DS:  Your like the law.   You say this is what is right or wrong for Google.

MC:  I try to think what is right or wrong for customers.  Have you seen Danny do a Matt Cutts impersonation?