Mike Mcdonald did an excellent interview of Google employee Matt Cutts and former Google employee Vanessa Fox. These are two of the most notable figures in the search engine optimization world and they casually reveal important information about the current Google search algorithm.
Great takeaways from this informal conversation:
Matt explains how paid links can get you into trouble
Full pagerank update December 2007
If your rank dropped first, your pagerank was reduced for link selling
if your pagerank dropped later, inbound links that previously had high pagerank are now greatly devalued
Vanessa spills the beans on the projects she worked on while employed at Google Webmaster Central: geolocation tools and including multiple languages
Google is much better at valuing links and has a killer paid link filter
Subdomains are not what they once were. Logical subdomains are useful for good site architecture, but superfluous sub domains will not get you extra spots in the SERP’s.
Sites using sub domains likely to be devalued are shopping and e-commerce sites.
Vanessa Fox explains how to not have your blog hacked
Notable sites that were hacked: Donald Trump & Al Gore
This video set to Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire is a hilarious satire of the Silicon Valley and the current web 2.0 bubble.
The video was taken down from most video sites because Lane Hartwell, the photographer who took one of the pictures that was included in the video, complained that she wasn’t paid for her work. So all US based video sharing websites removed this seminal video, but French based dailymotion.com left it up. Dailymotion rarely removes videos, and they are a good site to checkout if you’re looking for a TV show that is no longer on YouTube.com.
Kudos to Richterscale.com for making this fantastic video parody. Companies mentioned in the video are Google, Facebook, Myspace, bebo, wikiyou, mahalo, digg, youtube, meebo and google. Bloggers mentioned are Michael Arrington, fake Steve Jobs, Federated Media, Om Malik, Valley Wag, Robert Scoble, Justin.tv, I can haz cheezburger, & MillonDollarHomepage. Tangential mentions go to Larry Page and Sergy Brin google jet, Larry Ellison mammoth sailing yacht, MiniMe, Miss Teen USA South Carolina. See all the sites that pay homage to the Web 2.0 Bubble Video with the Billy Joel soundtrack.
For those of you who are trying to post the Here Comes Another Bubble video on your site, this is the embed code you can use from DailyMotion: http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/1bN9iSkeK0japq9Pf
Rand Fishkin of Seomoz.org and Danny Sullivan of Searchengineland.com had a discussion about the next generation of search engines and how to optimize for them.
SEO’s are living in the world of search 3.0 which is a mixture of regular search results and vertical results. So for example a Google search on the term “form a business” may contain 8 results for individual websites and 2 vertical results, such as Business.com and Allbusiness.com. The vertical search results are really niche directories with a list of focused results
In general here is a breakdown of search engines
Search 1.0: on page content. this is the birth of meta tags, doorway pages and hidden keyword spamming. the 1.0 search engines are excite.com, lycos.com, infoseek.com, hotbot.com
Search 2.0 off page content which is mainly links and mentiones. The more links you get the higher your PageRank and site authority.
Search 3.0 integrating vertical, local and specific results. Google reserves the top 3 spaces on local searches for a map and local results. So if you search for “los angeles plumber” you will see a map with the business location of each plumber.
Search 4.0 personalization and further refining. My results will be based on my past query history and previous clickthroughs. Your results will look different than mine.
Search 5.0 live answers and human interaction. Yahoo answers is an excellent example of human help for information you cannot find from machine created algorithms.
See Rand Fishkin interview Danny Sullivan.
It’s really more Danny talking as Rand just sits and listens. Danny could be said to be one with the search engines, truly a Zen SEO, as once he starts talking about search he can’t stop!
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