The Secret to Google’s Mind – EX-Member of Matt Cutts’s Search Quality Team Interview
Have you always wanted to know what Google is looking for?
Then why not ask someone who used to work for them!
After reading an interview from JamesNorquay.com with Andre Weyher who worked for Matt Cutts in his search quality team I thought it was worth sharing the knowledge or any “secret information” with the rest of the SEO industry.
What are common trends you looked for to determine a spammy site?
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Keyword Stuffing, hiding things under the CSS.
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Making keyword rich text in the same colour as the background of the site.
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Google does not judge the nature of your content, only it’s authenticity.
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Any type of scraped, synonymised or obviously poorly written text would be a clear spam signal.
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Backlink profile.
What are common trends you looked for to determine a spammy link profile?
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What is the quality of the pages they come in from? Do the pages look “real” or are they just there to host the links? What anchors are used? The commercial vs. non commercial ratio of the anchors.
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Think logically, keep in mind which keywords convert into money.
From your time in Google what are 3 on page tactics that you recommend?
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Choose your domain name wisely, having a good URL can give you a head start in the race. Good domains are still expensive and for a good reason.
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Google now also penalises for over optimisation, so don’t put more than 2 commercial keywords in your titles.
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Focus on content quality, try to work as if you were not adding SEO, make it interesting to the reader.
What are 3 off site (link building) tactics that you recommend?
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Relevance is the new PR.
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Good quality, moderated directories, or niche directories are still worth looking into.
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Stay focused on the quality of pages linking too you.
Final Thought…
“if you want to please Google with your SEO, then forget about SEO. Google wants you to create a site as if you don’t intend to manipulate their algo, but as if you are doing it because your passionate about the topic of your site. If you really are, your content will be great and your target audience will love you, this will do the best possible SEO you can imagine. Apart from this, follow Matt Cutts on Google+”
Please leave any comments below.
October 19th, 2012
Cool, thanks for the post! An interesting interview although the comment about 2 keywords per title seems a bit weird..dont know what to think of it.
Also had a look at http://www.netcomber.com as well, his site, interesting projects, still a few false positives though…
October 25th, 2012
Hi, Thanks for the comment it was a really interesting read. I especially liked the part where he said we all needed to follow Matt Cutts on Google+