On Nov 10th at Pubcon, the famous Internet Marketing Conference, Matt Cutts of Google talked about the direction Google will take in the coming months. He touched upon many interesting and new things that I’d like to share with you all:

•    In Google’s spam list, spam reports get four times more preference.

•    It is in Google’s knowledge that there has been a lot of web spam in the search results; the primary reason of this is due to the transfer of web spam resources to other projects. As they are getting those resources back, it is anticipated that Google will find a solution to resolve the matter.

•    It is expected that Google will be using Webmaster Tools in the near future to offer notifications in order to let the webmasters know about spam on their sites. It has been planned in such a way that webmasters will receive warnings regarding doorway pages, parked domains and 3 other issues relating to spam.

•    The amount of hacked sites that were formerly displayed in Google’s search results have been decreased by 90%.

•    Matt also advised SEOs not to go after algorithms, but rather predict the upcoming steps that Google will take in the future. Hence, they should forecast the change instead of reacting to it.

•    Another important suggestion to the SEOs was to place all their important links in the beginning of any article as it is the psyche of the users that they tend to click on the top links rather than the ones given at the end of the article.

•    If Google determines that the canonical tag used on one of your site's pages can harm your site, Google disregards it. This happens specially when you canonical link to a page that does not exist (404 page).

•    Google primarily uses 200 ranking factors but those may have around 50 sub-variations, each.

•    It was also mentioned that Google Places and Android App Market are expected to undergo modifications.

•    Google will also be concerned as to why precise domain matches rank so accurately. For instance if there is a site at www.blue-widgets.com, it is likely to get a very good rank for the keyword phrase of ‘blue widgets’.

•    Google is also working on making a new paid link tool that will block the paid links on a specific page only and it will allow the unpaid links to pass link juice.

Posted: 25/11/10 16:01