Archive for August, 2007
August 20th, 2007 - Matt Cutts Interview
Through no fault of Matt’s, it took quite some time for me to connect with him for this interview, conducted in late July, 2007. It was definitely worth the wait. Matt is a brilliant guy and for anyone who uses Google (I’m sure there’s a few), his work is quite relevant to the quality of information we receive. I used some of this material for an article that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s The Age. You can read Matt’s latest musings on his blog.
Dan Skeen: So, Matt, why don’t you tell me a little bit about your history with dealing with Web spam and how you first got involved in that?
Matt Cutts: Ah, that’s an interesting question. When I joined Google, I knew nothing about Web spam. I was a computer graphics, computer vision sort of guy. But one of the very first assignments that I got was to develop SafeSearch, which is Google’s family filter. In the process of that, I ran across at least a site or two, that appeared to be trying to cheat; and back then, this was early 2000, PageRank was thought of as nearly completely unassailable. The whole idea of spamming PageRank was a bit alien to many people around the Web. So, it was a little bit of a wake up call; and within a year, I had gone and essentially asked to work on Web spam full time, and since about April, 2001, I have essentially worked on Web spam nonstop and search quality, in general.
Matt Cutts: Sure. A lot of the early search engines used on-page factors a lot more than links, and it actually took a couple of years before very many search engine optimizers or webmasters realized just how much of a difference things like hyperlinks and anchor text would make. So, a lot of the early spam attempts we’d see would be things like keyword stuffing, completely random gibberish, people doing dictionaries of tons of words on a page. You’d also see things like cloaking, which is showing different content of search engines than you show to users; and so back in those days, it was a little more like the Wild West, and people would try to show a page to search engines about G-rated cartoons. Then, when you actually visited that page, they might try to show you porn.
So, it’s interesting to watch the evolutions of the market over time because back in the early days, you could go to a large Search Engine Optimization firm and get counseled to say okay, let’s try this Black Hat technique, this technique that violates search engine’s quality guidelines. It was not difficult to find large companies that would propose those sort of schemes. In these days, thankfully, that’s quite rare. If you go to reputable SEO firms, for the most part, they’re quite up front about what they’re doing and they’ll at least inform you about the things that will possibly involve some risk.
So, one nice thing is you see fewer scams. Of course, over time, people have tried a lot of different techniques, everything from going to a bunch of guestbooks and signing them and saying hey, great site, check out my site, to all sorts of things in between. What we’re seeing these days is more of a trend where people essentially say I might be able to make some money for a short term doing shortcuts or tricks; but if I want traffic that lasts for a long time, it’s actually easier to go ahead and follow White Hat techniques and build links in an organic way or by using some smart gimmicks or neat hooks. That sort of traffic and those sort of rankings tend to last for a much longer time.
So, we’re seeing an increase in the amount of interest that people have in search; but you’re also seeing a lot more people who are willing to use these valid White Hat techniques.
Dan Skeen: Okay. How have those Black Hat techniques evolved? What are some of the latest tricks that you’re encountering and perhaps engaged in dealing with right now?
August 20th, 2007 - Todd Malicoat Interview
This is a complete transcript of my interview with Todd Malicoat, SEO expert and mastermind behind the popular blog Stuntdubl. The interview was a valuable source for an article I wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald. The interview was conducted in early August, 2007. I caught Todd at the end of a long day and he was very gracious in lending me the remaining time in his day.
Todd Malicoat: Yeah, definitely right around the 5-6 year range, kind of a transition from doing the webmastering kind of stuff to actually focusing solely on improvements in search rankings and a little bit of a progressive transitory period there.
I kind of just started dabbling and doing Web sites and everything else and worked for a hospitality company doing their Web site and got interested in it. I was kind of the junior network admin and ran around and fixed everybody’s printers and computers and all that good stuff. The webmaster left; and so I by default became the new proud owner of the Web site, and during the downtime, just kind of stumbled across Wordtracker and ended up going to a small business meeting or something where somebody was talking about meta tags. It was like
More recently, I kind of went into just a traditional SEO agency at We Build Pages here in upstate
Todd Malicoat: It’s actually Meta4creations, but Stuntdubl is usually what I go by and certainly the site that everybody’s more familiar with, incorporated as just a different name, though.
Dan Skeen: Good stuff. Are there any clients that you would care to mention?
Todd Malicoat: I usually don’t; I don’t do a lot of ongoing stuff, and it’s always been kind of a catch 22 thing because it’s nice to list clients but at the same time I guess you get a stigma attached with them if they’re doing SEO so…I traditionally usually don’t myself.
Todd Malicoat: I think a lot of times it’s because there’s a lot of transparency in terms of competition within the SEO marketplace. So, if one of my clients mentions that they’re doing SEO with me, their competitors may see me at a conference or something and start drilling me for information or be able to catch on to what my client’s doing. I would say that’s probably the number one reason, that and fear and paranoia of the search engines having a problem or taking a closer look at what they’re doing.