
Long-Time SEO Jill Whalen Moves On, Praises Google For Rewarding Content More - recusancy
http://searchengineland.com/long-time-seo-jill-whalen-moves-on-praises-google-for-rewarding-content-more-175522?utm_source=plus.url.google.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=pluspost
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austenallred
"The tricks to beat and spam Google, Whalen said, no longer work as well."

LOL.

I know a half dozen guys who build millions of automated links every day. They
say an easy term and they're in the top 5 results after 5 days, a hard term (a
variety of diet pills, etc.) and it takes them a month. They get manually
banned from time to time, but they just pull another URL from their pool and
start over.

It's gotten more sophisticated and therefore is more difficult, but to say
spam doesn't work is laughable to anyone who is or knows anyone in the
blackhat SEO "industry."

~~~
Matt_Cutts
Hey Austen, if you'd be interested in sharing any specifics (companies,
keywords, people, etc.) regarding people spamming by leaving millions of links
gumming up the web, my team would be happy to investigate in more detail.

~~~
Matsta
Hahaha do you seriously think he's gonna give up the keywords these guys are
making money off.

Spamming sites still worked pre-hummingbird and infact it works even better
now.

Even Negative SEO works just as well. Have a competitor you don't like? Give
him 100k blog comments with "Buy Viagra" and suddenly he will be de indexed in
3 months or less.

I think half the reason she quit is that SEO is so damn unpredictable now. You
can make a spammy site and might rank or might get de-indexed. But at the same
time you can make a 100% whitehat site and it probably won't even rank and can
get just as easily de-indexed as a blackhat spam site.

You need to read up on BlackHatWorld a bit more Mr Cutts.

~~~
Matt_Cutts
Hey Matt G, I appreciate the suggestion but I already read quite a bit of BHW.

P.S. I enjoyed reading about that Twitter stuff from 2-3 years ago.

~~~
bapbap
One of my sites was a victim of the negative SEO trick, I kept getting
warnings from Google (Site violates Google's quality guidelines) that there
were links to my site that violated their guidelines.

It didn't matter what I said in my reconsideration request to explain I had no
knowledge or control over it (I've no interest in spammy link sharing or
buying links), I kept getting similar canned responses.

I gave up in the end.

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just2n
I might be able to take comments like "rewarding content more" seriously if
w3schools wasn't still at the top of almost every HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
search query.

I realized one day that I just use Google to quickly navigate a few websites I
actually do use. This is something like the 99.9% case. At that point, I
realized my search queries where I include the website I want and keywords I
want to find in that site were me specifically doing what Google was supposed
to be doing for me: finding quality content. I know where the quality content
is. Google apparently doesn't. What's the point of it?

~~~
joshuahedlund
My experience isn't too different, but keep in mind that probably none of us
here are close to the typical Google user as far as their typical expectations
and how well those expectations are being met by their searches. (Most of us
probably never click on Google's ads either, even though they somehow continue
to earn Google millions of dollars. Not saying Google _isn 't_ becoming more
irrelevant to average users, but our experiences don't necessarily give us a
healthy perspective on that.)

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ahulak
As someone who first got into SEO about a year before panda and penguin rolled
out.. I have to admit, SEO has changed ALOT and Jill hits the nail on the
head. Easy keyword related SEO tactics no longer work, Hummingbird has made
sure of it..

It makes perfect sense if you break it down over the years...

1) Spammers found out they could manipulate rankings with the meta keywords
tag.. shortly after, google started to ignore these keyword tags..

2) Spammers found out they could manipulate ranking with the meta
description.. shortly after, google stopped using this description to rank
sites..

3) Spammers realized they could build artificial link profiles, so google had
to get smarter and started incorporated social metrics and became smarter
about how they attributed value to links..

4) etc etc etc

It goes on and one, but basically, the only way google will ever be able to
defeat spammers is to create an algorithm that is so smart it actually
understands not only what the user wants, but also all of the content in its
index.. it has to go much deeper than a simple keyword match - it has to parse
out the intent of the searcher as well as the meaning of its content.

~~~
esw
For what it's worth, Google claims that they never used the keywords tag as a
ranking factor.

~~~
mhoad
In fact for what it's worth neither was the meta description tag and the
comment about social signals is misleading at best.

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nonchalance
The first thought that came to my mind was that she was unable to game the
system anymore.

Turns out I wasn't the only one. gettheyayo (dead comment) remarked

> What's more likely to have happened: she lost her way of making money. She
> charged money and had to deliver. She no longer can thanks to Google.

~~~
badman_ting
Yes, I reckon that is what she meant by "my work here is done". It's a good
thing, assuming it's true, but I have no idea whether it is.

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bbayer
Google only works well for English content. It is broken for other languages
other than English. In my case, front page is full of spam content for a
Turkish keyword that I want to compete. Even some sites are stealing my own
unique content and somehow they are achieving better results than me. I
suspect that Google needs more semantic data about language itself. I believe
it will become more sophisticated as time goes. I understand that is not easy
job to classify billions of keywords combinations for all languages.

~~~
moultano
If you can remember some example queries I'd love to pass them on to the team.

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epoxyhockey
Google works better than it used to, yes. Though, it also seems to be moving
away from the permalink and title, keywords, description meta tags that we
would use to help Google identify and classify our content. Google taking away
keyword referrer info is the nail in the coffin for SEO services, as a
business.

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lifeisstillgood
I am still a little confused on SEO and as this is a very slow last train home
I would like to add some notes to my HN Evernote

1\. I have never ranked well for anything until last year. Then suddenly a OSS
project with about three articles got to the front page for "ORacle ODI source
control". But it got there through a comment on a LinkedIn page.

I literally went back to the comment and said "BTW this solution now has a
website here it is" and we ranked. admittedly no-one ever visits the site but
we live in hope.

I mention this because it kinda-sorta reflects the good and evil twins of even
white hat SEO.

1\. Good side: we are / were building a genuinely useful OSS product (it puts
source control into an oracle ETL product that has none). It has (yet!) no
commercial upside to it but we just want it to succeed because. I have written
a couple of articles saying what and why (odietamo.org.uk) but mostly it's
hard to persuade people who are drowning that breathing water is not a normal
state of affairs.

3\. evil side - I went comment spamming. Shoved my link into a year old
comment thread (admittedly that we had participated on a year ago but without
a site to link to then) And afaik, it worked.

Now we are an incredibly low volume keyword search (IIRC it's "ODI source
control" or "odi version control") so any good inbound link will have some big
metric but even so

I think google is doing a good job because that search turns up a minimal
amount of spam and a couple of threads and discussions - but it bothers me
that comment spam in group forums can have such an outsized effect.

good remarkable content ought to rise to the top - but I am not sure if I know
what is good content not if good content can be outweighed by other co-
incidental metrics. (NB none of this is to do with link farms and blackhat SEO
- just bumbling along white hat stuff)

PS if my site only ranks for my bubble and readers here simply cannot find it,
please let me know.

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jack81054
@ matt cutts

How bout this example
website:[http://www.seroundtable.com](http://www.seroundtable.com) All he do
is copy content from forums and paste it on his blog by adding a couple of
lines. This easily falls into following categories of Spam as mentioned by
google

1\. Thin Content 2\. Copied Content

So how bout banning this blog?

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sbashyal
Measuring the impact of introduced change is key to any optimization task.
With Google no longer sending the search terms used to discover the page, SEO
is more like a guess work - you follow the best practices and hope Google will
start sending traffic one day. This leaves spammy black-hat approach as the
only option. Not everyone is comfortable with this though.

