I had the pleasure of sitting down with Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, for over a half hour last week at Pubcon. Please read the below discussion:
Stephan Spencer: I am with Matt Cutts here. I am Stephan Spencer, Founder and President of Netconcepts. Matt is Google engineer extraordinaire, head of the Webspam team at Google.
Matt Cutts: [laughing] Having a good time at Google, absolutely.
Stephan Spencer: Yeah. I have some questions here that I would like to ask you, Matt. Let us start with the first one: When one’s articles or product info is syndicated, is it better to have the syndicated copies linked to the original article on the author’s site, or is it just as good if it links to the home page of the author?
Matt Cutts: I would recommend the linking to the original article on the author’s site. The reason is: imagine if you have written a good article and it is so nice that you have decided to syndicate it out. Well, there is a slight chance that the syndicated article could get a few links as well, and could get some PageRank. And so, whenever Google bot or Google’s crawl and indexing system see two copies of that article, a lot of the times it helps to know which one came first; which one has higher PageRank.
So if the syndicated article has a link to the original source of that article, then it is pretty much guaranteed the original home of that article will always have the higher PageRank, compared to all the syndicated copies. And that just makes it that much easier for us to do duplicate content detection and say: “You know what, this is the original article; this is the good one, so go with that.”
Stephan Spencer: OK great. Thank you.
The way of detecting supplemental pages through site:abc.com and the three asterisks minus some gobbly-gook, no longer works – that was a loophole which was closed shortly after SMX advanced and after I mentioned it in my session. Now that it no longer works, is there another way to identify supplemental pages? Is there some sort of way to gauge the health of your site in terms of: “this is main index worthy” versus “nah, this is supplemental”?
Matt Cutts: I think there are one or two sort of undocumented ways, but we do not really talk about them. We are not on a quest to close down every single one that we know of. It is more like: whenever that happens, it is a bug to have our supplemental index treated very differently from the main index.
So we took away the “Supplemental Result” label, because we did not consider it as useful for regular users – and regular users were the ones who were using it. Any feature on Google search result page has to justify itself in terms of click-through or the number of pixels that are used versus the bang for the buck.
And the feedback we were getting from users was, that they did not know what it was and did not really care. The supplemental results, which started out as sometimes being a little out of date, have gotten fresher and fresher and fresher. And at least at one data center – hopefully at more in the future, were already doing those queries on the supplemental result or the supplemental index, for every single query, 100 percent of the time.
So it used to be the case that some small percentage of the time, we would say: oh, this is an arcane query – let’s go and we will do this query even on the supplemental index. And now we are moving to a world where we are basically doing that 100 percent of the time.
As the supplemental results became more and more like the main index, we said: this tag or label is not as useful as it used to be. So, even though there are probably a few ways to do it and we are not actively working to shut those down, we are not actively encouraging people and giving them tips on how to monitor that.
Stephan Spencer: OK.
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