Comments on: What Matt Cutts Says

By: Shell Harris

Shell Harris — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 02:45:44 +0000

We made a comic strip about the power of Matt Cutts. http://www.bigoakinc.com/rankedhard/cutt-her-some-slack/

By: Aaron

Aaron — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 14:00:08 +0000

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.

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!

By: esoos

esoos — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 09:34:35 +0000

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.

By: Michael Martinez

Michael Martinez — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 07:12:18 +0000

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.