I have been more than a year coaching this website. It was actually a test as we are having a difficulty in getting a subset dedicated for Pattaya from a pan Asian real estate website. So in a way, the main page of the website of pattayarealestate.com was identical to exotiqrealestate.com/pattaya/.

I was fully aware about the problem of duplicate content so we tweaked as the website as much as possible to make it different, including rewriting content of its important pages including the homepage. At the end, the only similar pages were detail page of each property we feature. And even at this level we tweaked layout to make it different in text-stream reading.

Unfortunately the result was far below satisfactory. So far in my record, it has never fallen into sandbox. It steadily floating but ended up somewhere between then 5th and 3rd pages. Continuous effort did not really help. I tried to stop the effort for certain period of time and quite interestingly it did not soak down. So I was loosing any reasonable explanation for the situation.

The website owners with a crowd of opinions flying around their head were blaming for potential duplicate content problem and demanded to shut it down before negatively affecting the main website. But I defended behind the fact that if there was one to get penalized, it should be the younger one, the one who copied the content, not the older and considered as the source. Secondly, if it was penalized, it should be by far lower.

So after the “diet” period I put back the effort at its original pace, and in early 2010 I saw it on the first page of Google’s search engine result page (SERP) for the main targeted keyword of Pattaya real estate. What a nice new year gift, and to me it was a lot more than just ranking, it prove that my theory and my strategy were correct. As an SEO and online marketing professional, those were even more important than just rankings. Hope it sustains.

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He was having a few guests when I came. Pak Edwin and his wife run successful furniture business in Solo in addition to education role in one of the country’s most prestigious university. Fajar worked for a Bali based travel agent focusing on the newly emerging Eastern Europe and Russian market and preparing himself to establish his own business. We had a long chat about suitable efforts to Solo to improve its tourism industry, and came to a common conclusion on a few certain things.

A few weeks after through an online chat Keke asked me to became one of keynote speakers in an Online Tourism Workshop to be held in Solo. It came to me as a surprise actually as I am definitely not a tourism expert although I run an online business on a very specific niche of tourism. When I had the discussion earlier, I have serious intention at all other than expressing my own opinions. Finally in spirit of helping people by spreading even a tiny bit of knowledge, I gave him an OK.

The event introduced me to many interesting fellows. Andika, the young brain behind the event, a number of entrepreneurs in wooden furniture who have just further their success up by leveraging online marketing, Novi, a young Solonese girl with smart eyes who runs a hotel there, and many more. During the discussion a day prior to the event, I knew that Solo has an enormous tourism potential. Unfortunately it is running into a serious mistake of taking Yogya as the pattern for tourism development. Focusing itself more into domestic market, I personally consider Yogya as a definite failure. If it follows Yogya’s pattern Solo will become just another failure. Even worse as it will remain behind the shadow of Yogya forever.

So when the d-day comes I did whatever it takes to pull audiences’ mind away from Yogya. I motivated to follow Bali as the pattern for Solo tourism development. With orientation mainly focused to international market, Bali has successfully build its tourism wealth in a much higher extent compared to any other tourist destinations in the country. At the end of my session, I handed over the audiences to the next speaker for online marketing techniques with a new paradigm deeply planted in their mind: focusing to international market through online marketing.

At the end of the day in the closing notes I urged them to take real actions. I told them that looking into commercial potentials Solo has, if the late to make their move, I will. I told them that I will even mobilize my network in Bali to develop the currently idle potentials in Solo. When I said that, I have already had a plan in my mind. I have figured out things to do to make them feel that someone from outside is coming at a massive extent, so they will get motivated to act quickly. I am seeing a serious potential there so it was not a bluff. If they do not do anything quickly I will. But of the do, I will be happier to establish a business cooperation with mutual benefit.

So today, two days after the event, I started with my first step. Establishing a Solo tourism website in English titled Solo Tour Guide. My plan is to make it a tourism information portal for foreigners planing to visit Solo. Later on I will invite local tourism players to use this website for their marketing purposes, free of charge. I have no intention to make money from this website, ever. People helps by making donation, I help by offering my brainchild.

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My experience started from the feeling that the articles we post  were not processed as quick as promised. Later when I tried to commission them the writing, I felt like posting worked significantly faster. My assumption was that they have to assess my articles manually before having them processed.

On results, I first tried to apply it to new websites. Those websites floated up on search engines of course, but not at a better pace than those without LinkVana. However I did not see any negative impact as well. I assumed that it took time for these new quality backlinks to affect the ranking. Thinking that the concept did make sense, I am not foreseeing a negative impact it cound ever result. So the worst I could think of was … no result.

Thing changes once I implemented it to websites with high search engine rankings. With intention to maintain position, I used it to a website which enjoyed top board of Google, not only the first page but first posotion. Immediate result was … disappear completely from the search result of that certain keyword. Few days later it came back to page 19th, and did not go up for at least a week until now. Another website I implemented to was a brand new site at the 3rd page for targeted keyword. With no other things have been done other than using LinkVana, it went down to 11th page.

So it is enough for now. I cancelled my PayPal subscription. The website told that the service is available for limited number of subscribers so if we terminate our subscription, we may loose the opportunity forever. But what a hell. Months after I subscribed, the service remains available for new subcription. If thing changes, i.e. the websites come back to even better position, I will regain my subscription. If at that time I could not regain my subscription … well, I will consider it as bad luck. What I have in mind now is that LinkVana sucks, and I am happy to getaway now than later.

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However there are more and more people talking about six digits income solely from blogging. I am not seeing at that record breaking hype. If by being a movie star Ronald Reagan reached the White House, would thousands of other movie stars thinking that they could as well? Still small steady income, maybe only enough to pay my hosting and domain registrar bills, sounds quite appealing, especially believing that the market of merchandise I am carrying in my commercial websites is quite competitive and sensitive at the same time.

I decided to find out more by searching Amazon and finally ordering a couple of books on blog monetizing. As always, it took 20 days approx. to get the books reach my doorsteps. Fortunately their arrival coincidentally fits my ruined holidays, so whilst my amazing business-pleasure trip was canceled, I have something to enjoy.

The books are newly published so hopefully carry the latest relevant knowhow. How to Make Money with Your Blog by Duane Forrester and Gavin Powell, ISBN 978-0-07-150857-5, published by McGraw Hill, and ProBlogger by Darren Rowse and Chris Garret, iSBN 978-0-470-24667-2, published by John Willey and Sons. Both publishers are respectful ones in business and technology.

No chance to read even a page of them, so I am not in position to throw any comments on them.

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Lately I am start seeing researches telling that some social bookmarking sites applied NO-FOLLOW policy. No-follow is a non-standard HTML directive telling search engine robots to not follow nor to index certain link. It locks functionality of social bookmarking sites to only human visitors, who see the link, find it interesting, and decide to click. It is implemented to protect search engines’ interest in providing valuable information in their SERP, against webmasters and SEO people who then to abuse social bookmarking sites.

Whilst websites are still benefiting real traffic from human visitors attracted by link placement on social bookmarking sites, impact on using social bookmarking sites as SEO agent is no longer directly beneficial. Websites are no longer getting authority boost from having numerous deep-link from social bookmarking sites which themselves considered as authority source by almost all search engines.

However there are a number of social bookmarking which – for certain reasons – are against the NO-FOLLOW approach. Following are some of them. Good thing is that they are also the most important ones.

Listible is a newer social bookmarking site, and it is very random. You can start a list about anything from TV theme songs to Firefox extensions. Users can then rate items and leave their comments.

Furl, one of the services offered by LookSmart, allows you to copy web pages and then save, search, and share them. This social bookmarking site is great for everything from job searches to research papers to shopping lists. You can access Furl from any computer, and your favorites are always accessible.

Yahoo My Web 2.0 Beta is a social search engine, meaning that people and the search engine technology work in harmony to create the optimum search experience. You can browse by keyword or search out interesting subjects. It offers you a way to bookmark and network simultaneously.

Propeller is a hybrid of social bookmarking and social news sharing, with a voting system like Digg and hot stories, but it’s also owned by AOL, uses organic links in its stories, and also includes bookmark style tagging.
Flickr gives social bookmarking a different spin – the site is all about photos. You can upload and tag your favorites, and then other users can bookmark them and share them with their friends. You can even leave comments as to why you like or do not like a particular image. Flickr lets its users place an HTML link in their photo descriptions – perfect for high rankings and relevant link juice.

Digg.com can get a little crazy and confusing, since it is open for anyone to post sites and leave comments. The users of Digg.com are not shy about telling the world how they feel about different sites (especially if your story or ‘bookmark’ makes the homepage after receiving enough votes), and most of the posts are featured around technology items.

Technorati Faves is a great place to bookmark sites on an authority social site without having the use of NoFollow cast a shadow on your links.

Slashdot is the original when it comes to social bookmarking sites. Slashdot offers both personal bookmarks and summaries of stories which may or may not be approved to make it to the homepage. Users can submit links and stories and have other users leave comments. Submissions do have to be pre-approved, which is a downside for some users.

Searchles is a social bookmarking oriented search engine with tagging, video upload, groups and voting. It’s also run by a search company, DumbFind, so they’ve made it extra search engine friendly.

Find another one? Help others by sharing it here.

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In many cases we get confused of knowing that we have achieved high Search Engine ranking for popular keywords, we found our web statistic showing a lot of coming visitors, but we do not get reasonable amount of sales. You have invested so much in expensive graphic designer for visually appealing website, SEO specialist to help you achieve Search Engine’s top board, webmaster to keep up the website, state-of-the-art server to ensure zero down time, and online marketer to keep the whole thing in the right shape. What the heck are those visitors doing in our website? Why do they just drop by and immediately walk away?

This book talks about optimizing landing pages to turbo-charge your profit by higher conversion rate, the visitors which translated themselves into actual sales. The bottom lines which needs to be improved in your landing pages to make them effective salespersons, including:

Identify mission critical parts of the website and their true economic value.
Define important visitor classes and key conversion tasks.
Gain insight on customer decision-making and make the pages friction-free.
Uncover problems with your page and decide which elements to update and test.
Understand the power and limitations of common optimization approaches.
Develop an action plan and get buy-in from all key players.
Avoid common real-world pitfalls that can sabotage pipelining sales.

The author Tim Ash is a highly respected expert in landing page optimization fields. He is the president of SiteTuners.com, the company focusing itself in in improving conversion rate of websites landing pages through sophisticated scientific testings. His high caliber clients include American Express, Sony Music, Honda America, Comp USA, Universal Studios, amd BF Goodrich. He has spoken in international industry events like Search Engine Strategies, The Affiliate Summit, and Internet World.

I have pre-ordered this book since it was listed by Amazon, a few months prior its publication. With no delay form its publication date, I got notification from Amazon that the book is shipped as ordered. What a fantastic system they have. Unfortunately after enjoying few shipment from its European warehouse in Germany allowing orders arrived in about 2-3 weeks, this time I had to wait a few days over one month. Speedy respond to my complain was because the book was just published in US and they did not have shipped it to stock their German warehouse, the book was shipped from their main warehouse in US.

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Ternyata ada orang lain yang tergerak untuk melakukan hal yang sama, membagi pengalaman dalam pemanfaatan mesin pencari untuk keperluan bisnis, bagi bangsa saya, bangsa Indoensia, yang nota bene kebanyakan kurang menguasai bahasa Inggris. Teknik SEO bukanlah sesuatu yang bisa dipelajari di kampus. Teknik SEO adalah sesuatu yang berkembang dan berubah terus. Jadi kalaupun ada orang yang mempromosikan diri sebagai ahli SEO, mungkin keahliannya tidak akan berlaku lagi besok ketika para pengelola mesin pencari mengubah logika sistem mereka.

Jadi, makin banyak yang mau membagi pengalaman dan pengetahuannya akan makin baik untuk kita semua. Mudah-mudahan lebih banyak yang dapat mengambil manfaat dari penguasan teknik SEO untuk kemajuan usahanya. Biarlah mereka yang menguasai teknologi dan dana yang besar di barat sana menciptakan sistem, cukuplah untuk saat ini kalau kita dapat mengambil manfaatnya saja.

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Running business websites with strong brand recognition, I was quite conservative in adopting his theory. However, as I am responsible for commercial success of various websites, tuning into SEO issues is part of my professional responsibility. I am seeing that journals, forums, newsgroups, started to talk about the same. Again … my role forced me to be very conservative.

Recently I think it is time to see the theory at work myself. So I decided to set up a new website for this. If it affects negatively, I won’t loose anything more than a domain, hosting, and a bit of time. I started in an obvious steps in setting up an SE-targeted website: keyword assessment and so forth. Along the way it came into my mind a kind of spirit to help people. Decided to go for a website which will give a guide for Indonesian who does not speak English. I bought seobali.com, hosted it in my own Linux server, and install the most popular blogging script: WordPress.

I picked “teknik SEO” as my main keyword target. I think it fits the content. Once it is done as my test, it will serve its real role as a kind of “educational” resource, of SEO knowhow in Indonesian language. Moderate competition, search in Google resulted in 550,000 competition. Competitive enough to prove the effectiveness of the theory, but not too competitive, so it should take reasonable time to come to a conclusion. I set a target of 1-3 months to see the real result. Quite n optimistic target for old-fashioned white-hat SEO.

Everything was set, I started to write my post in Jan 22nd 2008. I tried to push myself to write at least one post everyday, whilst implementing the theory. To ensure that the success (or failure) comes solely from the implementation of the new theory, I avoid any “old” SEO practices like directory submission, link partnership, even submission to search engine. I did nothing more than write posting and implementation of the theory. In addition, I use my existing SEO Elite tool to watch its ranking.

It came as a big surprise that this morning, Jan 27th 2008, only 5 days since I wrote my 1st post, the website came as #1 in Google for the targeted keyword of “teknik SEO”. Bigger surprise than Soeharto’s pass-away, definitely. Hiked up to the top of 550,000 competition on the most “difficult” search engine.

Well, I do not know weather it is just a “surge” – which sometime happens when a website out of a sudden shines like star but falls down in a matter of days – or permanent result. I will keep on doing exactly the same as I did. First to watch the trend, second to satisfy the site’s social mission as a learning resource for my people.

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I have pre-ordered SEO Bible as soon as it comes to publication schedule, about three months before it finally published on December 17^th 2007. So I believe I have been among the first buyers. Regular international shipment – as always – took almost 4 weeks, so it has just arrived on my desk before the weekend, January 19^th 2008. As a long awaited stuff, it immediately took my whole weekend to explore.

It basically covers everything you need to know to be successful SEO coach to your website – bring your website to the top of Search Engine Result Page (SERP). So it serves its function as a “bible” very well. For someone with years of experience in playing the game, big part of it is nothing more than a refreshment course. However, as SEO is basically a continuous sequence of “trial and error”, in so many cases we do not really know which efforts are effective, mediocre, waste, or even hurt. So having on hand a concise literature which puts everything in is a big help.

In conceptual area, I am in agreement with what the book advises – which I will surely implement immediately – is that we need to have documented plan and result log as a part of our SEO strategy. Another thing – whilst I do agree with the reason I am in disagreement to implement myself – is to be patience in doing an effort and leave it until we see the result before moving forward.

In technical side, basic stuffs in thorough and easy-to-understand explanation, which is very good. In addition – which I found very interesting myself – are methods which got their popularity in the last one or two years like leveraging social network, viral marketing, interactivity of web 2.0, and so forth.

I do highly recommend this one. One of the best SEO book I have ever read for sustainable success. Get away from e-book offered through spam-email which mostly just selling hoax for a few bucks. I always believe SEO is a do-it-yourself thing. This book will put you on a safe side and set you ready to fire your “SEO consultant”.

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I had a few posts about search engine, and when we talk about search engine, as the most prominent one, mentioning Google is inevitable. As one of the most popular Googlers – of course in addition to Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt – Matt Cutts is a name which is mentioned quite frequently. Why is he so popular? Is it only because he is a senior engineer in Google? Well, Google has at least hundreds of senior engineer. Is it because he is actively blogging? Hmmm, millions of people blog these days. It may be the combination of both … likely.

Below interview is about Matt Cutts and what he does for Google actually.

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.

Dan Skeen: Can you talk me through some of those early techniques that probably don’t work so well today?

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?

Matt Cutts: It’s kind of interesting because a lot of the techniques are gathered around trying to get links, and so the vast majority of tricks that we see people trying to do are trying to get a large quantity of links in a very short period of time or trying to find various gimmicks to try and get links. Some of those we would consider unethical. So for example, the example I gave earlier about people signing guestbooks, attempts like that still continue. People still continue to try to, for example, run programs that will go and sign a bunch of blogs. These days, it’s more likely that people will try to hit blogs instead of guestbooks. But, for the most part, Google does a pretty good job of countering those sort of techniques.

One of the newer trends that we’ve seen is for people to not worry about trying to spam so much as trying to make a catchy site and then use something that’s typically called Social Media Optimization. So, for example, somebody might write a really interesting story and try to get it up on Digg or on Slashdot or reddit, for example, which I guess Wired, you know, now owns. That’s kind of interesting because that is not necessarily considered Black Hat, at all. A good example is custom-made industrial blenders, they essentially said let’s take our blenders and just throw a whole bunch of different things into it. Let’s try a rake and an iPod; you might have seen these videos where they just throw in a cheeseburger and make a cheeseburger shake and stuff like that.

It’s really just a renaissance of creativity because people think about interesting hooks that will cause people to enjoy the site and return to the site and e-mail their friends about it and bookmark it. So, this Social Media Optimization as some people refer to it is really kind of a new area; and rather than try to trick people into getting the links, they’re looking for the creative hooks that will cause people to want to link to a site.

Dan Skeen: Are there devious techniques with automated content or scraping software tools that may still be on your hit list?

Matt Cutts: We try to stay away from thinking of it too much of an arms race and more along the lines of there’s a finite list of techniques that people can use in trying to tackle each of those techniques in turn and find scalable robust ways to tackle those techniques. I’ll give you a quick example. There are some people who might throw a bunch of keywords onto a page, and they could do that by scraping a search engine; so they might do a query, take all the results, and then use that as fodder for trying to attract search engines with those keywords. They can scrape competitors. You can also try to create gibberish by scraping different sites and stitching them together. But, in all of those cases, what we can try to do is say how natural is this language? Does it look artificial? And then if people are trying to get links, if they’re trying to get links too quickly, we can say okay, well, how exactly are they getting links? We can try to target that as an effective technique.

Another good example is some people try to do what we call deceptive redirects. For example, they might use JavaScript so that when a search engine loads a page we might not be able to process that JavaScript like a browser would and say oh, this user is going to get redirected to a different page. So, the search engine is stuck on the original page and indexes that content; whereas as soon as a user hits that page, their browser may process the JavaScript and see oh, I’m supposed to go off to a different location. So, the user ends up in a different location than what the search engine saw; and so the technique that Google has employed to try and prevent that is to actually be able to process some JavaScript. In some cases, some people can try to do a sneaky redirect, as we call it; and Google is actually able to emulate a browser, essentially, and be able to say okay, this is where a user would end up, so, let’s go over there and see what the content looks like over there.

Dan Skeen: That’s essentially a form of cloaking, isn’t it?

Matt Cutts: It’s most like a form of cloaking; it’s kind of interesting. Not that many people on a percentage basis are cloaking these days because either they’ll try to use JavaScript or sneaky redirects or they’ll just go ahead and put the content on the page directly. So, cloaking is something that’s got a lot of mindshare maybe but is not all that popular, in actuality.

Dan Skeen: This is maybe going a bit aside but I think I found an example of this the other day. Let me walk you through the scenario. This is an article of mine, which is running on a Web site, pretty popular content Web site; but it’s a subscription model, so when I search in Google and I look at Google’s cached version of my article, which indexes wonderfully, I can take a snippet of text and throw it in and it finds it, it displays the full article in Google’s cache. However, when I go to that URL, it pops a subscription; you get the abstract with the subscription fields, form fields. Sound like cloaking to you?

Matt Cutts: It can depend. Typically, when we talk about cloaking, we’re worried a lot more about deceptive techniques, so the sort of instance where somebody is advertising cartoons to the search engine but the user actually gets porn, something like that. We do have groups that look at issues like that, for example, and try to make sure that all the sources that are in Google news do follow best practices. So, for example, I’m not as familiar with that area; but I’ll try to give you a quick example. There is a policy called First Click Free, so the first click that a user does to a Web site is free and that they see the content that Googlebot saw and then any clicks from that outward to the next page, for example, then you might get a registration page or something that involves payment. So, subscription stuff is typically not quite as serious in that it doesn’t involve active deception; but we do try to make sure that we are consistent, and so we do work with companies even in those instances to try and make sure that they implement best practices.

Dan Skeen: How has that percentage changed over the years in terms of Black Hat versus White Hat?

Matt Cutts: Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t know if we break it down into percentages directly, but I would certainly say that it’s more reputable now than it was say five years ago; and we do provide a really good page. I don’t know if you’re interested, but you might want to mention it in case readers are interested on our Web site where we basically give good guidelines to vet a search engine optimizer. So, it gives advice like if they’re sending cold-call e-mails out of the blue guaranteeing top-ranking, then you might want to be a little more suspicious; and it gives good advice like looking for a reference, so talk to a search engine optimizer’s other clients. Even down into some pretty good level of detail like a Search Engine Optimizer should be able to walk you through what they’re doing. If there’s somebody where they’re waving their hands and they’re telling you there’s a secret proprietary technique that they’re not willing to educate you about, that’s where you should start to worry a little bit more. So, I think if you go to google.com/webmasters, we provide a lot of detail there, including the SEO page. We also provide something called Webmaster Central, and that is a self-service console so that you can see things like crawl errors. Whenever Googlebot was crawling your site, if we found 404s or if we found broken links or weren’t able to fetch pages, you can get a lot of good diagnostics and stuff there.

So, we do try to provide some pretty good resources like Webmaster Help Center, and even a discussion group where people can throw their sites out and get advice and help from fellow people on the group, and even some Googlers. So, that’s a pretty great starting point for a small business or someone who’s not going to be an expert on SEO but wants to dip their foot in the water.

Dan Skeen: Yes. I’m definitely familiar with those resources and my hat’s off to you guys for definitely doing the best job of communicating with Webmasters and SEO professionals, by far.

Matt Cutts: Well, thank you. We try hard. I mean, rather than having one-on-one communication, which we love, but there’s just too many Webmasters to be able to communicate with each one individually. Some of those tools are fantastic because they really give the power back to the site owner so that they can solve the problem themselves, in many cases.

Dan Skeen: I guess I’m interested now in looking at verticals or industries. How much of the problems that you deal with or challenges that you face come out of say the porn and the gambling industry relative to others.

Matt Cutts: There is a saying in the SEO industry, PPC, which normally stands for pay per click; but they refer to porn, pills, and casinos. So, it’s certainly one of the areas that’s more competitive, of course, purposely just because people can make money in some of those areas. We do keep an eye on every industry, and we do try to keep an eye on lots of different countries, as well so that we can make sure that we return the best results in all of those industries and all of those countries. The techniques do vary from country to country, which is kind of interesting as well.

Dan Skeen: Why is that? Is that language, is that the regional search engines, or just…?

Matt Cutts: It’s partially language; sometimes it’s culture, and sometimes it’s economics. For example, for a long time in China, it cost more to register a domain relative to perhaps your average daily income than in some countries; and so you’d see more people not creating their own domain but posting on forums or bulletin boards. So, it’s kind of interesting how every country has its own character; and sometimes it’s a lot of different factors relating to what the link structure looks like or the different types of communities you can find in that language.

Dan Skeen: Have you seen a big shift, say in the last five years, of where a lot of these tactics are now coming from places like India because the SEO outsourcing has really taken off?

Matt Cutts: To some degree, but the Web has always been a pretty international place; so there’s always been SEO going on in a lot of different countries. I think that one think that’s interesting is within the last year Google has been paying a lot more attention to many different international markets; and so you’re more likely to see Google take action in a country like Germany or China or India or wherever than probably a few years ago. So, to some degree, you do see more programming or other activities by different countries; but on the other hand, there’s always been some amount of activity in a lot of different countries.

Dan Skeen: Can you talk to me about the manual review process now? You mentioned spam reports which could trigger one; that’s an obvious instance. I’m sure there’s plenty of other automated mechanisms which trigger a manual review. Can you talk to me about the scope of the manual review team?

Matt Cutts: We don’t normally break out how many people we have working on specific teams or what sort of resources, but I’ll give you an example that gives a little bit of a feel for the communication and how we do use people to help improve Google’s performance on spam. We are actually able to send e-mails to webmasters whenever we find that they have things like hidden text or keywords stuffed in on their site. We can send those e-mails in 10 different languages; and what we do in those e-mails is we actually try to find the best e-mail address for the webmaster, and we e-mail the specific URL. We say oh, you might not know it but on this URL, here is some hidden text; and we would love it if you could correct that because we think you have a high-quality site and would like to have it in Google’s index. That process is driven by at least some level of manual review; we do have computers to assist us in the process, but before you send an e-mail to someone, you do want to be able to have someone check and say yes, this is the appropriate German language, for example. So, there certainly is a role to the extent that we think it can be an important process to communicate with webmasters; but we don’t give the specific numbers or breakout exactly how many people work on that aspect of things.

Dan Skeen: I’m sure for you there is a fine line between how much you can disclose that’s useful for people and maybe disclosing too much so that those devious people can game the system. How do you find that fine line and have there been any cases where maybe you said too much?

Matt Cutts: Well, I think I’m really glad that Google takes communication seriously and does work very hard to try and communicate online in general with our blog. We have many, many blogs and try to communicate to a bunch of different constituencies, including webmasters. Certainly, I’ve had instances, in fact, there was a Wired reporter who stopped by in 2000 and I remember the very first thing I said was you know, I think Wired Magazine has too many ads. You know this was back at the height of the .com boom and so Wired was 300 pages long. I got a very good talking to about journalism. Well, you know, we actually pay a lot of attention to the ratio of ads, and it’s never more than this percentage, and this is why this works; you know, as an engineer, I sort of realized okay, probably that wasn’t the most diplomatic thing to say.

I kind of…I lucked out in that I got a chance to communicate about Google very early, and so most of my mistakes happened when not as many people were paying attention. But, it has been a lot of fun. We do take communication very seriously, and we do try to give as much information as we can anytime that we’re worried that it might compromise Google search quality; then we have to be a little more careful with our words, but there are a vast number of misconceptions out there. Sometimes people say things like you know, if I had a Microsoft Web server versus an Apache Web server, does Google penalize my site? And it’s great to be able to say ‘no, absolutely, categorically, not. Whatever your Web server is we just care about your content and try to return the best search results; or if someone asks about what if my Web site ends with .asp versus .php does that make any difference? We can say no, no. Again, it just goes back to your content. Or, how long, you know, if my Web server’s a little slow, does that factor in to the scoring? We can say no, it doesn’t, as long as we’re able to fetch the page, we try to rank it just the same as one second versus a longer amount of time to fetch the page. So, there are many, many different things that we are able to communicate that are not at all confidential but that still help webmasters and site owners quite a bit. So, I’m really glad that we communicate at conferences, we talk online, we’ve got blogs, we’ve got this webmaster forum that I talked about earlier; and between all of those, we do try to communicate as much as we can to just help regular people.

Dan Skeen: Can you walk me through the penalty process for a site that you’ve found to be in violation?

Matt Cutts: Sure, let’s say, for example, that they use hidden text, white text on a white background, or something like that for this example. Next, we detect that; and we can detect it using algorithms. Or, we can detect it through, for example, someone might do a spam report. Maybe a competitor doesn’t think it’s fair that this person has white text on a white background and seems to rank okay.

That can trigger a manual review. Once the violation of our quality guidelines is detected, we’ll take action on that; and we try to take the appropriate action. If it’s a small mom and pop, we might take shorter action trying to essentially warn the site rather than trying to be too vigorous. Many times, we’ll be able to alert the webmaster; so I mentioned earlier in the interview that we can often e-mail or otherwise contact the site and let them know that they have potential problems ranking in Google because of something like hidden text.

Then webmasters, once they’re aware of the problem, either they’re not ranking where they think they should be ranking, or they’ve been definitively told by Google, and another mechanism is to go to the Google Webmaster Central. Some of the times, if we’ll e-mail you, we’ll also tell you yes, you do have a penalty on your site, which lets people know that they should be trying to cure that.

The next stage is to try to correct the problem or address it; and then finally, what they want to do is submit, we used to call it a re-inclusion request, but we’re renaming it to reconsideration request because you’re not always completely removed from Google. So, it’s not that you’re always re-included; but you do want to be reconsidered, and the criteria for that are essentially to say here is what we think was going on, this is why you might have penalized the site, if it does have a penalty. Here’s what we’ve done to correct it, and here are the steps that we’ve taken to make sure that this doesn’t happen again because essentially what Google cares about is having clean index and having a good search experience for our users.

If we think the site has changed its course to take the appropriate action and clean up whatever quality violations or spamming material might have been on their site and we have a reasonable expectation that it won’t happen again, many times we’ll reconsider that site and bring it back into Google’s index or bring it to rank where it was ranking before. So, that’s sort of the circle that typically happens. We’ll detect it, we’ll take action, many times we’ll communicate it, webmasters can make the change, then they’ll fill out a reconsideration request; and many times that will allow a site to rank back where it was before.

Dan Skeen: Using your example of say white text on a white background on the home page of a small site, if all your efforts to communicate were ignored, would you remove the page from the index or the entire domain?

Matt Cutts: It depends on the individual incident. Many times, we’ll se white text on a white background throughout the entire site; and then it would be appropriate to remove the entire site. If it’s something like through a page and the amount of text is especially egregious, we’re taking all the various reasons into account, we can remove an entire site from our index. What we try to do is find the appropriate balance so that if a site had a small amount of hidden text and corrected that relatively quickly, they could come back into our index in a relatively short period of time because our goal is primarily to have the highest quality index. So, we do want to have the content; it’s just we also want the content to be clean for our users.

Dan Skeen: I’m interested in the topic of trusted sites. Maybe you can define for me what a trusted site is; and for the typical small business webmaster, what if anything can they do to build a trustworthy property in Google’s eyes?

Matt Cutts: Absolutely. Another way to think about a trustworthy site is a site that is authoritative in some sense; and by that, it provides a lot of value to users, more than just a regular Web site might, or that it’s an expert in some sense. So for example, some people will make a site by just copying a whole bunch of data from other places and trying to flap it up and trying to monetize that in some way and don’t really put a lot of effort or time into the individual site; and that’s not a lot of value add, so that’s not as much of a trustworthy site. Some steps that a small mom and pop can do involve adding a lot of high-quality content, and that can be something like a newsletter or a blog. A blog is a great way to just force you to write regular amounts of high-quality content, and often you can attract links because you take part in the conversation throughout the blogosphere.

It can also involve putting up a forum; and so if you’re interested in diamond engagement rings, you can have people who are looking to figure out whether things are a good deal or not, can leave messages, and you can provide answers. So, user-generated content in the form of forums can actually work out relatively well.

There are a lot of different hooks that people can use; creativity of all manners typically is rewarded with links, and I’ll give you a just a simple example that illustrates that. Somebody was asking me about a translation site, the sort of thing that would translate English into Japanese or vice versa; and essentially, a site came to me and said well, we don’t rank as well as the number one site, and we don’t understand why not. So I looked at the site that was complaining; it was only about five or seven pages, and it was almost as if someone had taken a brochure and just put it up on the Web. There was an About Us page, there was a Contact page, and there was a one-page about what they did, that was about it; and then they complained about this number one site.

I went to check that out, and the number one site was actually talking about the different types of Japanese writing, hiragana, katakana, kanji, and how you could write your name and what different characters would mean. If you take a step back and look at it from the perspective of someone who had nothing to do with either site, one site looked a little like a brochure and one site, essentially, looked like a really neat interactive site where you could figure out what does this Japanese character mean or how could I write my name. It seems intuitive when you take that step back; but many people don’t get enough perspective to see the entire forest instead of just the trees, but those sort of compelling hooks or gimmicks or things to draw in users that can be as simple as games or they can be of informative as newsletters, those are the sort of things that really attract a lot of links, a lot of repeat visitors, a lot of word of mouth and buzz.

Dan Skeen: Excellent. It’s great. I appreciate your time you’ve taken today, Matt, to give me some great answers.

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