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What Matt Cutts Says
What Matt Cutts says is important to me because he works for Google to improve search quality, so if you want success in Google, you study his every word. Let’s look at just one website review from his post on the site review panel that he attended at Pubcon Vegas.
First Review:
Once again, I sat on the end and had my wireless and VPN working so that I could use all of my Google tools. The promotional gifts company had a couple issues. For one thing, I was immediately able to find 20+ other sites also belonged to the promotional gifts person. -Matt
SEO’s often have many of their own sites on the same IP, let’s checkout mine here and it shows you this:
seobuzzbox.com has address 216.227.217.163
Found 3 websites with the IP 216.227.217.163
1) aaronpratt.com
2) seobuzzbox.com
3) webmaster404.com
Yes those are mine, all on the same IP, who needs a top secret Google widget for that?
The other sites offered overlapping content and overlapping pages on different urls. -Matt
If you look at my three sites above they are very different and cross link very little so they are ok.
The larger issue was searching for a few words from a description quickly found dozens of other sites with the exact same descriptions. -Matt
Now that is a valuable lesson, descriptions for competitive phrases require variation. No wonder why is it hard to rank for anything descriptive for “internet marketing” phrases which are the most spammed keyword combinations around.
We discussed the difficulty of adding value to feeds when youre running lots of sites. -Matt
If you are running multiple sites all with mixed content the feeds are of little value BUT unique sites with unique feeds are great!.
One thing to do is to find ways to incorporate user feedback (forums, reviews, etc.). -Matt
Add value to a site by building it for humans and include them in the creative process.
The wrong thing to do is to try to add a few extra sentences or to scramble a few words or bullet points trying to avoid duplicate content detection. If I can spot duplicate content in a minute with a search, Google has time to do more in-depth duplicate detection in its index. -Matt
Google can now determine all of the above algorithmically so don’t even bother mixing up content to make it appear non duplicate.
Truths:
- Google can determine ownership of multiple sites.
- Descriptions for competitve phrases require variation.
- Cross linking sites and content devalues.
- Forums and reviews add the much needed human element to websites.
- All is and will be done algorithmically in the future at Google.
Yes you can say that the above is all basic stuff but it extremely relevant. There are a few more website reviews Matt Cutts did, go read them but also remember that Matt has been online for awhile now. To study Matt is to learn what makes websites succeed.
Similar Post:
November 27th, 2006 at 11:12 pm
Hi Aaron. I seriously doubt Google is using IP address information to determine who owns a group of Web sites. Even using traceroute to see where paths terminate won’t provide reliable information. For example, I occasionally other people to set up domains on my server. I don’t have anything to do with them other than that I allow them to use my server — and they get their own IP addresses, but the traceroutes still lead back to the same server as my own network uses.
Google is a domain registrar. If they are relying on more than just that one database to tell them who owns what domains, the integrity of their conclusions will be questionable.
Shared IPs and shared servers are very, very common.
Now, I can believe that domains which are tightly interlinked and share a server and/or IP address would most likely be owned by the same person unless they were registered by different entities. I’ve actually seen some hosting packages through the years where independent domains were interlinked (free hosting type arrangements).
Is it fair to the domain owners to treat them as if they are all one individual entity simply because their domains are interlinked? I don’t think so, and I hope Matt doesn’t jump to conclusions that easily when he says things like “so-and-so owns 20 other domains”.
All that said, I do agree with you that Matt’s revelations are important. I strongly disagree with the people in the SEO community who suggest that Matt is being dishonest in some way. He is under no moral obligation to disclose everything he knows, but I have never seen anyone make a convincing case that Matt was in any way trying to mislead people.
He doesn’t have to mislead anyone. None of us knows exactly what is going on with Google. It’s a guessing game for even the most meticulous and methodical analysts in the community.
November 28th, 2006 at 1:34 am
IPs alone aren’t enough, agreed, but when you combine them with similar templates, artwork, copy, contact info or copyrights you can spot those mini-nets pretty fast.
Hard to automate but very easy manually. Probably what Matt was doing.
November 28th, 2006 at 6:00 am
There is nothing wrong with mini nets if each does not spill over too much and are all different. The factors that determine if someone is spamming also can determine transparency and honesty. For instance, I use the same Google sitemaps key on all my sites. Yahoo and MSN also now will use sitemaps to determine ownership.
Michael - Don’t forget registrar info., mine is private but spammers will often do the same. Does this or any other factor make me a spammer? No!
March 4th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
We made a comic strip about the power of Matt Cutts. http://www.bigoakinc.com/rankedhard/cutt-her-some-slack/