Does google consider seo to be spam

Does google consider seo to be spam

• 1.
  Hi. I wanted totake a minute and talk a little bit about searchengine optimization and spam, and answer the question doesGoogle consider SEO to be spam?And the answer is no.We don't consider SEO to be spam.Now a few really tech savvy people mightget angry at that.So let me explain in a little more detail.SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.And essentially it just means trying to make sure that your pages are well represented within search engines. And there's plenty an enormous amount-- of white hat, great quality stuff thatyou can do as a search engine optimizer.You can do things like making sure thatyour pages are crawlable. So you want them to be accessible.You want people to be able to find them justby clicking on links.And in the same way, search engines can find them just byclicking on links.You want to make sure that people use the right key words.If you're using industry jargon or lingo that noteverybody else uses, then a good SEO can help you findout, oh, these are key words that you should have beenthinking about. You can think about usability, and trying to make sure thatthe design of the site is good.That's good for users and for search engines.You can think about how to make your site faster.Not only does Google use site speed in our rankings as one of the many factors that we use in our search rankings.But if you can make your site run faster, that can also makeit a much better experience.So there are an enormous number of things that SEOs do,everything from helping out with the initial sitearchitecture and deciding what your site should look like,and the url structure, and the templates, and all that sort of stuff, making sure that your site is crawlable, allthe way down to helping optimize for your return on investment.So trying to figure out what are the ways that you aregoing to get the best bang for the buck, doing AB testing,trying to find out, OK, what is the copy that converts, allthose kinds of things.There is nothing at all wrong with all ofthose white hat methods.Now, are there some SEOs who go further than we would like?Sure.And are there some SEOs who actually try to employ blackhat techniques, people that hack sites or that key wordstuff and just repeat things or that dosneaky things with redirects?Yeah, absolutely.But our goal is to make sure that we return the bestpossible search results we can.And a very wonderful way that search engine optimizers canhelp is by cooperating and trying to help search enginesfind pages better.So SEO is not spam.SEO can be enormously useful.SEO can also be abused.And it can be overdone.But it's important to realize that we believe, in an idealworld, people wouldn't have to worry about these issues.But search engines are not as smart as people yet.We're working on it.We're trying to figure out what people mean.We're trying to figure out synonyms, and vocabulary, andstemming so that you don't have to know exactly the rightword to search for what you wanted to find.But until we get to that day, search engine optimization canbe a valid way to help people find what they're looking forvia search engines.We provide webmaster guidelines ongoogle.comwebmasters.There's a free webmaster forum.There are free webmaster tools.There's a ton of HTML documentation.So if you search for SEO starter guide, we've written abeginner guide where people can learn more about searchengine optimization.But just to be very
• 2.
  clear, there aremany, many validways that people can make the world better with SEO. It's not the case that sometimes you'll hear SEOs are criminals.SEOs are snake oil salesmen.If you find a good person, someone that you can trust,someone that will tell you exactly what they're doing,the sort of person where you get good references, or you'veseen their work and it's very helpful, and they'll explainexactly what they're doing, they canabsolutely help your website.So I just wanted to dispel that misconception.Some people think Google thinks all SEO is spam.And that's definitely not the case.There are a lot of great SEOs out there.And I hope you find a good one to help with your website. Mar Cutt Maile Ohye: Hi, I'm Maile Ohye. I'm a developer programs tech lead at Google. I've been at Google since 2005 working with our search and our webmaster tools teams. But if I were a consultant for your startup, here's all the advice I would give in under 10 minutes. This talk is aimed for companies who have their main content below about 50 pages. For those sites that are looking to rank for thousands of unrelated keywords, like an ecommerce site or a news agency, you might wanna invest more time with SEO. My objective for this talk is to provide you the basics in the most efficient manner possible and to help you feel assured that you're not doing something totally wrong related to search, and last, to provide pointers for more information. The first thing to do with your domain is to decide whether you want visitors to see the dub, dub, dub version or the non dub, dub, dub version. At which point your 301 redirect users from your non preferred to your preferred version. Now, many large corporations, like Google and Facebook, actually keep the dub, dub, dub version, but you're free to do whichever you want. The reason why we use a 301 and not a 302 is because a 301 is a permanent redirect and that way it signals to applications like search engines, to actually transfer all those indexing properties from the source to the target. The next step is to verify ownership of your site in Webmaster tools. And I don't just say this because I work with the team, but I think this is really valuable. I encourage you to sign up for email forwarding. Email forwarding allows Google, when we have any message for you, like when we think you might have been hacked or we think your site is hosting malware, or we're having trouble crawling your site and we found a high number of unreachable URLs. So any of those messages can be forwarded to Google Webmaster Tools and if you have email forwarding enabled, it can be forwarded directly to the inbox that you check every day. One more research tip is to perform a background check on your domain. For example, if it was previouslyowned by spammers then you're not going to rank very well now. So, one good way to check is to look at the keywords listed in Webmaster tools for your site and see if you see any unwanted words there. Also, you can see if you're indexed by performing a site colon search with your domain. And if you see any problems the Webmaster guidelines can be found at this URL. And if you have questions about penalties or reconsideration requests and that entire process, my friend Tiffany Oberoi has a great interview listed here. I'd like to highlight the fetch as Googlebot feature in Webmaster tools. It's a great feature cause you give us a URL and then we'll perform a crawl as Googlebot, and you can see exactly whether we've been redirected appropriately and exactly what content we download. An additional part of this feature, and I think this is really useful, is that you can
• 3.
  actually tell usto not just crawl but to submit to index for that URL. And this way, any time you update a page or you create an entirely new page, you can trigger that entire process to happen by Google and have it available to searchers even faster. My next advice is to include analytics code whether it's Google analytics or another provider. Now you wanna start collecting this data even if you're not ready to use it because once you hire someone it's better to have some historical information about your site. The next part is the strategy in your site design. You'll want to create a great experience for all your visitors and their different personas. So, consider your customers. Also your investors and what content will they see? Or even the press. Some questions to ask when it comes to site strategy are utility. Does our site design meet the needs of each persona and does each persona have a great experience? Navigation, if a searcher lands on a child page, and that's common with search results they don't funnel directly through your homepage all the time, can they figure out where they are? And can they easily navigate to where they want to be? Another question is about whether or not your site is focused. Does each page contain one logical topic that's obvious to visitors? It's common with startups that because you're tight on time and resources, that as you collect more and more information, you just add that to existing pages and make those extremely long forcing users to scroll. But, instead, think about your site design and if that should be broken up into separate pages. The next step, and this is especially helpful for Startups, is to define your conversion whether that means for "group foo" visitors to sign up for the newsletter or to contact bizdev lead or to try your product, you want to have a relevant conversion possible on every page. Like a call to action. And not force users to make extra clicks. When it comes to your copy or the actual information that you have on each page, it's great to include relevant keywords naturally in your text. These keywords are like query terms that normal people would use to find your product or your business. So, for example, companies might call themselves as selling athletic footwear but in your actual copy it's better to include terms like running shoes which is what people actually search for. One more thing I wanted to mention about the copy on your pages is to answer your visitors or the personas questions that they might have. For example, is the product reputable? Perhaps show reviews or let other users review. Or if a user might ask, "What if this product doesn't work" then explain the customer satisfaction policy. Every page should include a unique topic, a unique title as that can be displayed in search results, a unique meta description which might be displayed as the snippet and then for non-dynamic sites, this is just a best practice, but it's good to have keywords in the filename, lowercase and hyphen separated. And then, of course, descriptive anchor text for every link whether you're linking internally or externally to another site. So here's anchor text that could use some improvement. For more information on our product specifications, click here. Click here is not that descriptive. Better way to have it would be, for more information please read our product specifications. So that's what you wanna aim for. A good example of a site that has a unique topic on each page as well as a unique title and descriptive anchor text, can be showing with this search result for NASA. Now, NASA doesn't only have their homepage shown, but also has generated site links. These site links algorithmically by Google but they can influenced by great site design, having a unique title as well as great anchor text. I'll quickly cover some potential pitfalls. Please do not hire a rogue or shady SEO. If they guarantee any rankings it is too good to be true. Please don't participate in link schemes or buying links for the purpose of passing PageRank. And last, I know it's great to have a fancy site but try not to focus so much on site fanciness that you don't actually have indexable and searchable text. Another thing to consider about your site is the page low time. I've noticed a lot of Startups don't necessarily have time to focus on this. But, it's good to know that
• 4.
  Akamai actually dida study of ecommerce sites and found that 2 seconds is the threshold for ecommerce sites acceptability. At Google, we aim for under a half second. In general, the longer your page takes to load, the more likely it is that users can click away. Now, let's talk about ranking. Check that you rank for your company name. Hopefully number once was site links. If you want to rank for other terms, you can use Webmaster tools' search queries. And, I put this link earlier, but here's the link to a video on using Webmaster tools. Then, get involved. For Startups it might be the case that no one searches for your new kind of product or service, so you have very low query volume. At that point, you could prioritize, finding a potential audience or community through existing forums, blogs or social media sites. Know that, to rank well and to stay on top, provide an awesome product or service. And then, generate buzz. Startups often ask me about social media marketing and whether they should invest their time. Well, I think that social media is terrific and one big reason is that rather than just having an avenue of users coming through search, this really diversifies your approach and you can get visitors from different sources. But here are a few tips. First of all, think holistically. So, you might create an identity on key sites, and then participate. But, remember, you eventually wanna connect users to an entry point of conversion. So think about that entire user experience from a social media site directly to conversion on your site. Also, and this is fairly obvious, but focus your energy where your audience hangs out. And last, play to your authentic strengths, it's likely that your company has limited resources. So, if your CEO likes to tweet, then go ahead and let them, or if you have a salesperson who really enjoys Facebook then that's terrific, or if you have a developer who's already on Google Plus or Stack Overflow then have them represent your company and interact with the community there. My last takeaway is this, even with great advertising and terrific marketing, valuable conversion still happens on your site. So please, stay focused and make sure you're ready. Thanks so much for your time. MATT CUTTS: Hi, everybody. We got a really interesting and very expansive question from RobertvH in Munich.RobertvH wants to know--Hi Matt, could you please explain how Google's ranking and website evaluation process works starting with the crawling and analysis of a site, crawling time lines, frequencies, priorities, indexing and filtering processes within the databases, et cetera? OK. So that's basically just like, tell me everything about Google. Right? That's a really expansive question. It covers a lot of different ground. And in fact, I have given orientation lectures to engineers when they come in. And I can talk for an hour about all those different topics, and even talk for an hour about a very small subset of those pics. So let me talk for a while and see how much of a feel I can give you for how the Google infrastructure works, how it all fits together, how our crawling and indexing and serving pipeline works. Let's dive right in. So there's three things that you really want to do well if you want to be the world's best search engine. You want to crawl the web comprehensively and deeply. You want to index those pages. And then you want to rank or serve those pages and return
• 5.
  the most relevantones first. Crawling is actually more difficult than you might think. Whenever Google started, whenever I joined back in 2000, we didn't manage to crawl the web for something like three or four months. And we had to have a war room. But a good way to think about the mental model is we basically take page rank as the primary determinant. And the more page rank you have-- that is, the more people who link to you and the more reputable those people are-- the more likely it is we're going to discover your page relatively early in the crawl. In fact, you could imagine crawling in strict page rank order, and you'd get the CNNs of the world and The New York Times of the world and really very high page rank sites. And if you think about how things used to be, we used to crawl for 30 days. So we'd crawl for several weeks. And then we would index for about a week. And then we would push that data out. And that would take about a week. And so that was what the Google dance was. Sometimes you'd hit one data center that had old data. And sometimes you'd hit a data center that had new data. Now there's various interesting tricks
• 6.
  that you cando. For example, after you've crawled for 30 days, you can imagine recrawling the high page rank guys so you can see if there's anything new or important that's hit on the CNN home page. But for the most part, this is not fantastic. Right? Because if you're trying to crawl the web and it takes you 30 days, you're going to be out-of-date. So eventually, in 2003, I believe, we switched as part of an update called Update Fritz to crawling a fairly interesting significant chunk of the web every day. And so if you imagine breaking the web into a certain number of segments, you could imagine crawling that part of the web and refreshing it every night. And so at any given point, your main base index would only be so out of date. Because then you'd loop back around and you'd refresh that. And that works very, very well. Instead of waiting for everything to finish, you're incrementally updating your index. And we've gotten even better over time. So at this point, we can get very, very fresh. Any time we see updates, we can usually find them very quickly. And in the old days, you would have not just a main or a base
• 7.
  index, but youcould have what were called supplemental results, or the supplemental index. And that was something that we wouldn't crawl and refresh quite as often. But it was a lot more documents. And so you could almost imagine having really fresh content, a layer of our main index, and then more documents that are not refreshed quite as often, but there's a lot more of them. So that's just a little bit about the crawl and how to crawl comprehensively. What you do then is you pass things around. And you basically say, OK, I have crawled a large fraction of the web. And within that web you have, for example, one document. And indexing is basically taking things in word order. Well, let's just work through an example. Suppose you say Katy Perry. In a document, Katy Perry appears right next to each other. But what you want in an index is which documents does the word Katy appear in, and which documents does the word Perry appear in? So you might say Katy appears in documents 1, and 2, and 89, and 555, and 789. And Perry might appear in documents number 2, and 8, and
• 8.
  73, and 555,and 1,000. And so the whole process of doing the index is reversing, so that instead of having the documents in word order, you have the words, and they have it in document order. So it's, OK, these are all the documents that a word appears in. Now when someone comes to Google and they type in Katy Perry, you want to say, OK, what documents might match Katy Perry? Well, document one has Katy, but it doesn't have Perry. So it's out. Document number two has both Katy and Perry, so that's a possibility. Document eight has Perry but not Katy. 89 and 73 are out because they don't have the right combination of words. 555 has both Katy and Perry. And then these two are also out. And so when someone comes to Google and they type in Chicken Little, Britney Spears, Matt Cutts, Katy Perry, whatever it is, we find the documents that we believe have those words, either on the page or maybe in back links, in anchor text pointing to that document. Once you've done what's called document selection, you try to figure out, how should you rank those? And that's really tricky.
• 9.
  We use pagerank as well as over 200 other factors in our rankings to try to say, OK, maybe this document is really authoritative. It has a lot of reputation because it has a lot of page rank. But it only has the word Perry once. And it just happens to have the word Katy somewhere else on the page. Whereas here is a document that has the word Katy and Perry right next to each other, so there's proximity. And it's got a lot of reputation. It's got a lot of links pointing to it. So we try to balance that off. You want to find reputable documents that are also about what the user typed in. And that's kind of the secret sauce, trying to figure out a way to combine those 200 different ranking signals in order to find the most relevant document. So at any given time, hundreds of millions of times a day, someone comes to Google. We try to find the closest data center to them. They type in something like Katy Perry. We send that query out to hundreds of different machines all at once, which look through their little tiny fraction of the web that we've indexed. And we find, OK, these are the documents that
• 10.
  we think bestmatch. All those machines return their matches. And we say, OK, what's the creme de la creme? What's the needle in the haystack? What's the best page that matches this query across our entire index? And then we take that page and we try to show it with a useful snippet. So you show the key words in the context of the document. And you get it all back in under half a second. So that's probably about as long as we can go on without straining YouTube. But that just gives you a little bit of a feel about how the crawling system works, how we index documents, how things get returned in under half a second through that massive parallelization. I hope that helps. And if you want to know more, there's a whole bunch of articles and academic papers about Google, and page rank, and how Google works. But you can also apply to-there's [email protected], I think, or google.com/jobs, if you're interested in learning a lot more about how search engines work. OK. Thanks very much.