Published: July 7, 2008

Priyank Garg is the director of product management for Yahoo! Search Technology (YST), the team responsible for the functionality of Yahoo!'s Web search engine including crawling, indexing, ranking, summarizing and spelling Web search functions along with products for webmasters, such as Site Explorer. During his three years at Yahoo!, Priyank has led many highly-visible product launches for Yahoo! Search and championed the cause of webmasters with Yahoo! Site Explorer and Yahoo! Sitemaps.

Prior to Yahoo!, Priyank worked at Ensim Corporation managing and evangelizing the company's flagship hosted service automation platform, Unify. Earlier, Priyank worked as a Systems Consultant with Deloitte Consulting working alongside top-tier U.S. organizations to address their information systems needs.

Priyank earned a bachelor of technology in computer science from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, where he also led student extra-curriculars and governance. He also holds a master of science in computer science from Stanford University.

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Can you talk a little bit about the role that links play in Yahoo's ranking algorithms?

Priyank Garg: Sure. There's a lot of mythology in the industry sometimes around how links work. Links are a way for us to understand how Web sites and other people on the Web are recognizing other content that they have come across. The anchor text from that indicates context for the content that it's linking to, and we have used this information in our algorithms for many, many years to better address search queries as they come into the search engine.

So links are important, but anchor text is just as important. What we look for are links that would be naturally useful to users in context, and that add to their experience browsing on the Web. And links of that nature, which are organic, will survive when the user comes across them and interests him. Those are the kinds of links that we are trying to recognize, identify, and attribute to the target content.

Eric Enge: Right. So part of what you are pointing at there is that relevance matters a lot. So getting a link from the bottom of a WordPress template that you create and distribute is completely irrelevant.

Priyank Garg: Exactly, that's the kind of thing that we are trying to do all the time. The irrelevant links at the bottom of a page, which will not be as valuable for a user, don't add to the quality of the user experience, so we don't account for those in our ranking. All of those links might still be useful for crawl discovery, but they won't support the ranking. That's what we are constantly looking at in algorithms. I can tell you one thing, that over the last few years as we have been building out our search engine and incorporating lots of data, the absolute percentage contribution of links and anchor text to the natural ranking of algorithms or to the importance in our ranking algorithms has gone down somewhat.

New sources of data and new features that Yahoo! has built and developed have made our ranking algorithm better. Consequently, as a percentage contribution to our ranking algorithm, links have been going down over time. I believe that is somewhat attributable to people abusing links on the Web. As that happens, the net quality of links goes down, and the net contribution directly goes down too. However, we're still working hard to make sure all the high-quality links are effective in providing us information we need to search on queries.

Eric Enge: So from a mind-set point of view it sounds like you are much more focused on the high-quality links, because they are less noisy as a ranking signal?

Priyank Garg: Exactly, that's right. If we take all the links together including the noise, the percentage contribution to our ranking system goes down, because we are discounting the noise more effectively over time.

Eric Enge: Right. I understand, but the links are still a very significant factor even now.

Priyank Garg: Yes. They continue to be a very significant factor.

I‘m saying that people and site owners should think about the site in all aspects of the user experience, and not obsess about links as the only thing that drives traffic to them. Links are critical factors, good organic links are earned through great content and great value that will add to the users' visibility on search engines. But they can do a lot of things in parallel that will also make the search engine visibility better and beyond the search.

Eric Enge: Yes, indeed. So do you picture the role of links that will continue to decrease as new rankings do?

Priyank Garg: We are not focused on doing that. This is a developmental process and you might have anything happen, right? It somewhat depends on how the Web evolves. For example, if tomorrow there is a whole turnaround and all spammy links are shutdown, we might suddenly have a link signal noise quality go up so much that they might increase in importance. I don't want to make predictions about what will happen in the future. All I can say is that we have seen that as we enhance our algorithms with a lot of other features, which we have been building, they have been contributing a lot of information to supplement the links. As a percentage contribution to the ranking function, links are relatively less than they were in the past.

Eric Enge: So it sounds like the process in which you are evaluating the noisiness of the signal is used to attenuate its impact on the results.

Priyank Garg: That's right.

Eric Enge: That's a very interesting concept. If link prices were going up at the same rate that gas prices are going up and people just stopped doing it, then the signal quality would improve and its importance would improve.

Priyank Garg: Yes. Our algorithms are evolving constantly; we are making changes to our systems multiple times a week. Some of the changes are minor. Most of them are so minor that we don't even need to talk about it, but we are constantly evolving our system to keep up with the data on the Web that is also evolving. In search engines, the data is the key part of the output.

The data and the algorithm constantly evolve. The Web evolves, new tools come into play, new ways of interacting with users comes into play. It is a constant evolution all the time, and we adapt our algorithms to what we are seeing on the Web to make sure that our end goal of user relevance is optimized.

Eric Enge: Sure. Ultimately, that's what it is all about. So, what kind of non-link based signals do you use?

Priyank Garg: Well, we have lots of data sources that we are recognizing all the time. We build understandings of how a site lays out its contents; what's the distribution of the quality of the content; what's the spamminess of the content on the site; what is the spamminess of an individual page; what is the spamminess of a site in aggregate; what's the emphasis on words on the page; what's the context of anchor text of the page? There are so many factors in there, hundreds and hundreds of elements.

Eric Enge: Right. As for off page factors, one example of something is the level of adoption on social media sites, like del.icio.us for example.

Priyank Garg: All of those factors are a part of it. To give you a general answer, the elements of the locations that provide the most signals are the ones where users are taking active steps to recognize the value of content, whether it be through links they have created on their clean Web pages, or through social media sites like del.icio.us.

So every location where the incentive is aligned for user value is the place where it matters most. If there's a good Web site with reviews for a product and it's generated by users, which have no incentive except to help other users, then those links would be valued more.

That would come out through the algorithm because of the quality of that site itself. If that site is used by users and they value it, that will represent itself on the rest of the Web, and the quality of the site will propagate down to the sources that it links as well.

Eric Enge: An incredibly important thing to consider is the type of relationships you are trying to develop in your market. It becomes really important to focus on the truly authoritative type of sites in your space, and I can make the argument without even bringing search engines into it, but it sounds like it is a very smart way for a SEO to think about promoting his/her site.

Priyank Garg: That's right.

Eric Enge: Very interesting. Now, as you have already alluded to, there are, unfortunately, a lot of people out there generating spam type tactics, ranging from old-fashioned things like hidden text to purchasing links and these kinds of things.

Priyank Garg: Yes.

Eric Enge: So, what are the kinds of things that Yahoo typically does to fight spam?

Priyank Garg: We use algorithmic and editorial means to fight spam. What we have found is algorithms are very effective at fighting spam at the large scale, and our human editors are very effective at recognizing new techniques and providing us that early signal, which we can use to scale-up the detection processes. This two step approach helps us to be recognized as one of the best in the industry.

We show the least spam among the search engines, because both of our techniques are in action. Our spam detection techniques run on every page, every time we crawl it. Those detection algorithms are fed directly into our ranking function, where the spam detection is actually pretty high in importance.

Eric Enge: Yes, I guess the editorial function, which isn't quite scalable, probably gets directed by the algorithmic detection of things that just smell bad, and by where people are reporting problems.

Priyank Garg: Yes it is. Yahoo! specialists who are doing all the editorial efforts are people who are great experts in this and they sometimes are ahead of our algorithms in detecting these things. Some times, the algorithms point out suspicious things, which they look at. There is a knowledge that builds up over time about what looks suspicious, which only humans can detect in the beginning.

Then, we use that to go to the next level of quality in our spam detection. Both of those mechanisms of algorithmic detection - followed by editorial follow-up or editorial detection followed by algorithmic follow-up - are in action all the time. Ultimately, the way to scale up the response is to build algorithmic ways to detect things on every page and every crawl. So everything that our editors do is constantly being mirrored by our spam team as quickly as possible in the algorithms.

Eric Enge: Yes, I understand. Do you have a situation where editors have the ability to take manual action if they see something extreme?

Priyank Garg: Our editors are authorized to take action for various kinds of situations like DMCA or legal deletes, such as for markets like France, where there is a restriction of certain types of content, such as Nazi memorabilia, which other markets don't have. Consequently, there are various tools that are available to them. They are not focused on saying, I need to find a million pages of spam and remove them in this month.

We can use it to have our algorithms learn, we can use it to address it directly, we can use it to reach out to the webmaster and warn them that it might not be meeting our guidelines, so we do what is right for the users as best we can.

Eric Enge: Right. And sometimes, you are going to spot something which looks like a mistake. That's the kind of the scenario where you might reach out to someone and ask if they know that they have hidden text that is kind of objectionable.

Priyank Garg: Yes, exactly. The point is that we don't want to hurt people who may be doing things innocuously or starting to cross the line without being aware. And our clear intent is not to explicitly remove spam from our index. Our goal is to affect the ranking and reflect the relevance appropriately.

There is a query out there for which each page is relevant, and so the completion of our goal requires our algorithm to keep all the content we can, even the spammy ones. Of course, that's something that becomes egregious on resources, and then sometimes, we have to make other choices. However, if there is a page that is generally okay but has some spamming techniques, someone might search for that URL, and as a search engine we want to make sure we have the most comprehensive experience we can.

But if someone goes out there and creates a hundred million spam DNS hosts, that's just a waste of resources and we may not choose to take that approach. In principle, our desire is to keep as much of the Web available to users on our search engine, to rank it appropriately.

Eric Enge: Right. So, if you saw a page that has some good content, but there are some spammy practices on it, it affects ranking as opposed to indexing? When it crosses a certain line of resource consumption, we may change the approach. But that is the intent, yes?

Eric Enge: Of course, another way you can end up with pages that are not high quality is if you have large sites, which perhaps have enormous reams of really good content, but because of their size, you may end up with pages that are thin in unique content.

You might also have a database of some addresses, so when you look at it it's relatively thin in content, but then again, someone might actually be searching for the address of a particular business that's on that page.

Priyank Garg: Yes. Again, as we work we've tried to make sure that our algorithms are constantly trying to optimize experience for the largest number of queries that we get from users. The net information content that's available to users and ranks for queries is what we are looking at. If the page has unique content, whether it is from a large site or small site, it may mean that it's less useful for most of the queries.

Eric Enge: Right. Yes, indeed. So, what about just paid links in general? What's your policy on that?

Priyank Garg: There's no black and white policy that makes sense in our mind for paid links. The principle remains value to the users. If a paid link is not valuable to the users, we will not want to give it value. Our algorithms are being organized for detecting value to users. We feel most of the time that paid links are less valuable to users than organic links.

But that's not black and white, it is always a continuum. Yahoo! continues to focus on the element of recognizing links that are valuable to users, building mechanisms in our algorithms that attenuate the signal and capture as much value from that link in context, rather than worrying about it being paid or unpaid. As I said before, paid links are found to be generally less useful to users. That's how we try to capture that aspect of it.

Eric Enge: Right. So now I would like to talk a little bit about some of the common meta tags that have emerged in the past couple of years: NoIndex, NoFollow meta tags, and NoFollow attributes, and robots.txt. In particular, the context I'd like to talk about is limiting the flow of what I will call link juice, or stopping a page from being crawled, or stopping it from being an indexed.

Let's take them one at a time and talk about how you handle NoIndex?

Priyank Garg: NoIndex on the page essentially means that none of the content on that page will be searched or will be indexed in our search engines. If there is a page with a meta NoIndex on it, that page will not be recalled for any of the terms in its HTML.

Eric Enge: Right. Now let us say lots of people link to this page, which is NoIndexed and those are good relevant links, and then the NoIndexed page turns around and links to some other pages with good relevant content; is that NoIndexed page passing link value to those other pages?

Priyank Garg: We do index a page and we will show its URL in search results if it is very heavily linked to the Web, even if it has a NoIndex tag on it.

That is something that is a behavior that we follow. That's been essentially applicable to situations where the page itself is high value, and it has many links that are very relevant to a particular query as indicated by anchor text.

Eric Enge: Right. I guess there is sort of a threshold in which the links indicate a high enough demand for that page's content that it's hard to not have it in the index.

Priyank Garg: Exactly. So in that particular case, we will have the URLs show up in the search results, but there will be no abstract. And the URL would show up only because of the anchor text; it will not show up because of any terms on that page.

Eric Enge: Right.

Priyank Garg: We do currently show pages which have a NoIndex if anchor text recommends that. We also discover links from a NoIndex page and pass the link weights and anchors to destination documents.

Eric Enge: So can we talk a little bit about NoFollow meta tags and NoFollow attributes?

Priyank Garg: Yes, so NoFollow meta tags mean that we will not use the links on a page as a attribution, but you may use them for discovery. The same thing applies for the NoFollow attribute on a link.

Eric Enge: Right. So the anchor text and the vote represented by the link for a given page are ignored if it's NoFollowed or it's on a page that has the NoFollow meta tag, but you will still look through the page and use it for discovery and potentially indexing if there are other reasons to index it.

Priyank Garg: Yes. Exactly.

Eric Enge: Yes, that makes sense. And then lastly, robots.txt? Say somebody uses robots.txt who don't crawl a page, is it still possible for that page to get into the index?

Priyank Garg: Yes. If robots.txt files says don't crawl, we will not crawl, we will not even try to retrieve that page at all from our crawling. But if the anchor text to that URL, as discovered on the Web, indicates a strong preference for it to show up for certain queries, it might show up.

One example in the past was the library of congress had a robots.txt denying crawling, but we still had that page show up because it was what users wanted for that query. So it will only show up when lots of anchor text on the Web suggest that this page on this particular query is relevant to that query.

Eric Enge: Right, okay so that makes perfect sense. So if you can't crawl the page because it said don't crawl it, then it's hard to show a search snippet, for example, right?

Priyank Garg: Yes, we won't have a search snippet for that page. We won't even be showing the title of the page; the title we show will be generated by other information sources.

Eric Enge: Right. So all that makes sense and what it ranks for is really driven by the source of the links?

Priyank Garg: Exactly.

Eric Enge: That same phenomena could be ascribed to other technologies which just aren't in practice crawled, like Flash files for example.

Priyank Garg: Adobe Flash files are somewhat different, because that's not always what happens there. We do have an ability to crawl the HTML of the page, and they might give us an HTML title with the description of that page. There might be a version of content that might be available for crawlers for Flash. So there is another thing playing into it, but if there is nothing on the page except a link to a Flash files, then the other off-page factors will be what drive the visibility of that URL in the search results.

Eric Enge: Right, and then perhaps a PDF file?

Priyank Garg: We are actually able to convert PDF files to HTML.

Eric Enge: So you can actually look at the text inside the PDF file, and process that, and use that for context and everything else?

Priyank Garg: That's right. We can also do that with Word files, Excel files, and many other formats.

Eric Enge: That's, of course, something that has evolved pretty significantly over the past few years, because not so long ago nobody was looking inside PDFs.

Priyank Garg: Yes we continued to evolve our quality of tools to look into PDF files, and there are efforts that have been going on over the last few years, so that has been an evolving area as well.

Eric Enge: Is there any reason for a publisher to fear that issuing content in the form of a PDF file wouldn't rank as well or get exposed to as many terms as the same content rendered in HTML?

Priyank Garg: That's a tough one to say, and the reason is that my sense is users link less to PDF content or non-HTML content, just because it's somewhat slower to view.

Consequently, what effects are playing into the visibility of this could be multi-variant. I wouldn't make a blanket statement about HTML being equivalent to PDF because user attribution and other factors do play out to be different on the Web for different formats of context. So that is something that the publishers will need to think about.

Eric Enge: Right, I understand. So just to step back a second to the NoIndex, NoFollow and robots type stuff. The notion has been discussed in many circles on the Web of what people call link juice sculpting. Using tools like the NoFollow attribute a little more explicitly to show what you think is important versus which ones you don't think are important. And so a classic example is, you have a Web site and you have your contact us, about us page, and legal disclaimer page linked to from every page of the site. What your thoughts on that kind of sculpting?

Priyank Garg: It's interesting that this discussion is described in that context. A NoFollow tag creates an alternative state of attribution, but if you think about it, it's not very different from not linking to those pages. When you link to a page, you are saying something about it. When you don't link, that's also an implicit comment, either you didn't know about the page, or you didn't think it was useful.

So if you think about link juice sculpting, this targeting of link attribution existed even before the NoFollow tag, where you could link and you could not link to something. Now you have an intermediate stage such that:

1. you can link without NoFollow
2. you can link with NoFollow
3. you can not link.

So, it's not something that is entirely out of the blue, it's just an intermediate stage that's created; and it's not anything terribly new. You should always make sure you link to content that's useful to users and if you link to the right content, that will work best.

One of the things Yahoo! has done is look for template structures inside sites so that we can recognize the boiler plate pages and understand what they are doing. And as you can expect, a boiler plate page like a contact us or an about us is not going to be getting a lot of anchor text from the Web and outside of your site. So there is natural targeting of links to your useful content.

We are also performing detection of templates within your site and the feeling is that that information can help us better recognize valuable links to users. We do that algorithmically, but one of the things we did last year around this time is we launched the robots-NoContent tag, which is a tool that webmasters can use to identify parts of their site that are actually not unique content for that page or that may not be relevant for the indexing of the page.

If you have ads on a page, or if you have navigation that's common to the whole site, you could take more control over our efforts to recognize templates by marking those sections with the robots-NoContent tag. That will be a clear indicator to us that as the webmaster who knows this content, you are telling us this part of the page is not the unique main content of this page and don't recall this page for those terms.

That kind of mechanism is something that we provide as a control for site owners to be more explicit about what parts of the page are boiler plate. But the NoFollow links are very different from not putting the link, and so I don't see this to be very different in terms of the tools available to webmasters.

Eric Enge: Yes, indeed. So you have a NoContent that is interesting too, because I am sure when people use that it just removes potential ambiguities in the interpretation of the page and allows them to focus the attention on all the things that are most important.

Priyank Garg: Exactly right.

Eric Enge: Yes, so that's a good tool. Have any of the other search engines moved toward supporting that?

Priyank Garg: We've actually brought this up in our conversations. You might recall earlier this month we all blogged about the support we have for robots exclusion protocols.

Eric Enge: Yes.

Priyank Garg: And we resolved a bunch of the small variations among us. So it has been brought up. I don't believe any of the others are supporting it yet, but we will find out in time.

Eric Enge: What is it that Yahoo does when you discover duplicate content across two different sites and how does it deal with that in terms of the quality of the search experience?

Priyank Garg: Our goal is to surface good, unique content for users and provide the maximum amount of relevant information for every query the user makes. So, our efforts are constantly to detect duplicate content sources, recognize the parent source as much as possible, and attribute content as much as possible to the parent or the original author for duplicate content. Then we try and surface that for every query that we receive that it's relevant for. Say site-A has content which is duplicated on site-B, and we recognize that A is the parent, then for a query related to that content will likely surface A higher. But if a query says I want content from side B on those terms, we will obviously try to surface that.

Eric Enge: But it's not always that easy to know who the parent is.

Priyank Garg: That's true, that's something that it is not always easy to know the best page, but its part of our algorithmic efforts to detect that intent, and we continue to do that. So there are lots of signals that can often work, and in most cases works when the duplication is not egregious or intentional. It is entirely a function of how the Web is operating. Usually we do a reasonable job, but sometimes it's not always possible.

Eric Enge: Right. And then of course is the extreme version where it's a copyright violation and sometime that escalates itself to you in the form of DMCA requests.

Priyank Garg: That's right, we have a well-documented process for DMCA complaints. Those complaints, when they come in, are investigated directly by our support and editorial teams and can be acted upon in a very targeted manner. So if you or any site owner has any content that you believe has been plagiarized or taken without your consent and you file a DMCA complaint with us, we will investigate that and take down the content that is found to be in violation of the copyright rules.

Eric Enge: Right, although I think it's probably fair to say that if you file a DMCA request that you best be the owner of the content.

Priyank Garg: That's of course true. You better know what you are pointing out.

Eric Enge: Yes, indeed. Are there situations in which extreme amounts of duplicate content can be flagged?

Priyank Garg: The essential policy on duplicate content is not to treat it as negative; it's essentially to treat it as an optimization on our systems. But there is a point where that no longer holds true. A common example could be a spammer, who has hundreds of millions of posts up on the same content.

That's a clear example where you can say that it's not really duplicate content, it is just an egregious practice that can affect the entire site. So, there is a point at which it does become a violation of our editorial guidelines.

Eric Enge: Yes, indeed. To finish I would like to see if you have some general advice that you would like to offer to publishers and SEOs in terms of what Yahoo views as best practices.

Priyank Garg: Yes. The basic principle remains the same as you said; be aware of users and that's what we will be continued to gear ourselves toward. But be search engine smart so that we can discover your content. The robots NoContent and other tools that we have provided are means that give you control and if you use them, they can work for you. We don't expect everyone to have to use those controls, and we continue to build algorithms to do much of that work.

Yahoo Site Explorer continues to be a great avenue to learn about what we are doing. We have been doing some work learning from the last feature we launched, which was well-appreciated, the Dynamic URL Rewriting. That is a tool that we have seen in multiple examples as having really significantly increased the quality of the experience of site owners.

I talked about this feature again at SMX Advanced in June 2008, and while speaking on the panel, someone from Disneyworld was in the audience. Within five minutes, while I was still describing it, he went to Site Explorer and set it up, and he is already seeing the benefits of what he had implemented.

Eric Enge: Right. I really appreciate you are taking the time to speak with me today.

Priyank Garg: Thank you Eric!

Have comments or want to discuss? You can comment on the Priyank Garg interview here.

Other Yahoo Interviews

• Yahoo's Andrew Tomkins - May 12, 2008
• Yahoo's Tim Mayer - October 1, 2007
• Yahoo's Tomi Poutanen - May 14, 2007
• Yahoo's Tim Mayer - December 4, 2006

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more information on Web Marketing Services, contact us at:

Stone Temple Consulting
(508) 485-7751 (phone)
(603) 676-0378 (fax)
info@stonetemple.com

Published: June 30, 2008

A serial entrepreneur, Edward "Ted" Murphy has founded six companies since 1994. Murphy's latest venture, IZEA operates a variety of social media properties including PayPerPost, the world's largest Consumer Generated Advertising Network. Founded in June of 2006, IZEA has raised over $10 million in venture funding from leading venture capitalists including Draper Fischer Jurvetson. The network has attracted over 140,000 bloggers and 16,000 advertisers and continues to grow.

Murphy's creative prowess and passion for the unconventional has earned him the ear of some of the world's largest marketing organizations including FOX, Bombardier, General Motors and Disney. His efforts have received national recognition, including A/V Multimedia Producer Magazine's "Top 100 Multimedia Producers" for two consecutive years. In 2006 Murphy's viral campaign created for the launch of PayPerPost was inducted into Marketing Sherpa's Viral Marketing Hall of Fame. Murphy is a prominent visionary, speaking and presenting to marketing and Internet professionals around the world.

Murphy is the Executive Producer and star of RockStartup, an online docu/reality television show about running a startup. The show can be downloaded via iTunes or on the web site at RockStartup.com.

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge:Can you start with a brief overview of IZEA?

Ted Murphy:IZEA is a company that's focused on social media marketing, so we operate a variety of properties, but the team's most well known properties are PayPerPost and SocialSpark.

Eric Enge:What was your original vision when you launched PayPerPost?

Ted Murphy:PayPerPost was actually spun out of my previous company, where we were doing a lot of outreach programs and we had some really great results for our clients. We discovered that the relationships with the bloggers were difficult to create for each individual advertiser, and that each blogger had different expectations in terms of what they wanted. Some of them wanted to be compensated, some of them didn't and some people were asking for different things.

What I really recognized was that there was an opportunity to create a market place that connected the advertisers and bloggers and allowed them to easily pair up with each other. And so that was the real idea behind PayPerPost, to provide a way for advertisers to get the word out in the blogosphere and really drive traffic to their websites.

Eric Enge:Right. Ultimately the process of contacting one advertiser at a time if you are a blogger, or one blogger at a time if you are an advertiser just isn't scalable.

Ted Murphy:Yes, very time consuming and with mixed results. So we wanted to really create something to allow that to be a repetitive process. The other component there is that while we were servicing larger clients we saw an opportunity for smaller clients and for self-serve clients to use this tool. So people that couldn't afford an agency or a PR firm now have a tool so they are able to reach out to the blogosphere.

Eric Enge:Right, it creates some efficiencies in the market. Did you anticipate that the people would use this as a method for essentially buying and selling a link?

Ted Murphy:You know it's interesting, because links are almost like the currency of the web, right? That's how people get from one place to another.

I certainly didn't recognize the impact that it would have on SEO results; after you have had a couple of advertisers that had really great results using the platform they started beating the SEO drum and really touting that the platform as an SEO tool.

The original vision was more of a viral marketing tool and a traffic generation tool. I think that that was something that we weren't really prepared for and we didn't really understand the impact that it would have on both bloggers and advertisers, to be honest,. And this is something that we really had to step back from and take a look at and see how we wanted to address it long term.

Eric Enge:And then of course, other people like ReviewMe, for example, came into the picture.

Ted Murphy:There have been a number of competitive services that have launched, that don't talk about SEO. Some of the other platforms that are out there are really focused very heavily on the SEO value, and that's not really, our vision for this form of marketing.

Eric Enge:Indeed, but that whole situation led to your thinking in terms of launching SocialSpark.

Ted Murphy:Yes, I think a lot of the discussions and controversy that resulted were very healthy things; I wouldn't change anything. I think the controversy helped us really get our name out there; good, bad, or otherwise and I think that the feedback that we got really helped us lay out a solid game plan for the future.

So we were able to listen to the bloggers, the readers and the advertisers and ask, what did you really want from this and what is the right way to do this? Because nobody had ever sponsored posts on that scale before, and so really what it really helped us to do was to establish a strong code of ethics and rethink the entire platform from the ground up.

Eric Enge:Right, and I think this is driven by a certain audience, people who are not willing to engage in PayPerPost?

Ted Murphy:Yes, I think that there was certainly outspoken bloggers and outspoken advertisers that took a stance against sponsored posts. That was really because we hadn't really set a standardized code of ethics and operations. That's really what we are focused on now, in order for this entire concept of sponsored post to really grow, we have got to get all the different platforms onboard and operating by the same set of by rules and ethics.

Eric Enge:So are all outbound links in a paid-post NoFollowed on SocialSpark?

Ted Murphy:They are.

Eric Enge:The impact then is to really focus advertisers on whether there is a traffic and branding value from being in this location and on this blog for the advertiser?

Ted Murphy:Yes, and I think that it comes down to the content that is being created on the individual blogger's sphere of influence. It's important that we do have a standardized way that we are operating and agree on a set of rules that all these companies can agree on. Do I think that's going to happen any time soon? I am not so sure. But I think that we are definitely perceived as the leaders in this space and I think we are really stepping out on a limb here and saying, hey this is the way we are going to operate and we hope the rest you guys follow.

Eric Enge:I mean, if you had a say on a consumer rights group viewing your advertising, this is the thing that they would just absolutely demand.

Ted Murphy:Yes, and I think that that's a good thing. I think that those groups are going to see more activity for them over time whether it's sponsored posts or the affiliate programs. You know affiliates, it's a multi-billion dollar industry and there is no clear code of the ethics for the discloser of affiliate links, and so I see that as another area where there is a lot of room for improvement and growth.

Eric Enge:Right, like the maturing of the industry overall.

Ted Murphy:Yes, exactly. I think that it's very similar to what we saw in the search engines themselves when you first had less clarity between paid links and organic links, and then now you have the clear identification of those sponsored links. And now that's really a standard that everybody abides by, and I hope that we will see the same type of thing in blogging and sponsored content that eventually everybody will get together and say this is the way that we are going to do it.

Eric Enge:Right, although it's still misleading to some users when they perform a search. You see this little blue box with three links at the top. And it does say, sponsored results, but it is over in the right where the eye doesn't go so quickly. It's labeled and anybody who spends 15 seconds on the page will see it or notice it, but no one does that.

Ted Murphy:Yeah, and I don't know if you will get down to the point of the right-hand side, or the left-hand side, or the top, or the bottom; but I do like that those companies were able to come to the same consensus that they are going to at least label this, and they are going to label them in this particular fashion.

Eric Enge:Yeah, I think that's absolutely a great first step, no question. As you are differentiating a little bit between taking that first step and doing something versus people actually understanding it because of the way they use the web. So what about just paid links in general, don't we have the same issue with the old links market place?

Ted Murphy:I think that Google has kind of created this value around links as they affect search engine rankings, and so naturally people are trying to get links in whatever way they can. Whether that's paying for links directly or through business relationships, it becomes very hard for Google, I believe to determine what is a paid link. Is it paid only if I pay cash for it? Is it paid if I receive services for it? Is it paid if we are doing business together in some way?

I think that it's a big flaw in the algorithm and the way that they are ranking sites that ultimately they've got to find a replacement for because there is no way to really judge how a link is created or why a link is created.

Eric Enge:Right, it's very much like the rat in the maze hunting for the cheese whose behavior changes dramatically the moment they realize they are being observed.

Ted Murphy:Yes.

Eric Enge:The original algorithm was based on the assumption that people don't care what the search engine is doing with it, it's just when the search engine became a primary source of traffic that they suddenly started to care a lot. So that's what makes the whole thing complicated.

But I would also suggest that replacing the algorithm is a very, very difficult thing do. It actually is still the best technique for helping the site when you are dealing with a large number of sites. I mean, if it was easy to replace, they would have replaced it by now.

Ted Murphy:Yeah. Oh, I don't think that it is. I am happy I am not the guy who would need to try to figure that out. But I do ultimately think that whether it's bloggers or whether it's corporate marketers, people clearly understand the value of the link. And the behavior that the original algorithm was based on, the premise that links should determine the ultimate ranking of an individual site, is flawed because there are so many different ways to gain that system.

Eric Enge:Indeed. So I am just going back to target audience for a moment. You talked about a variety of people who wanted something like a SocialSpark. A lot of those would be major brands, right?

Ted Murphy:Yeah, I think that SocialSpark is particularly attractive for larger brands because they get to handpick the people that they associate their brand with, and at the same time it provides a way for advocates of that brand to reach out and contact the advertiser.

SocialSpark is really based on the premise that the relationship can be formed by either party. Either I am an advertiser looking for bloggers that are currently talking about me or I am a blogger who is a fan of a brand who can reach out to that brand.

Eric Enge:Indeed. So this distinction is important to major brands?

Ted Murphy:Well, I think there are honestly two things. I think that one is the platform and the level of detail that we provide, both on the demographics and traffic of the blog, and also on the effectiveness of their campaign. I think the second component really comes down to that code of the ethics.

Advertisers that are engaging in sponsored content want to make sure that they are not going to receive a lot of blow back for participating in a campaign like that. And the way that that would happen is by not having these clear guidelines in place. I think that setting that high level of accountability for the bloggers and the advertisers is really what has attracted a lot of the major brands to using the platform.

Eric Enge:A number of them that really don't even think about it in terms of being associated with paid links, but they are just concerned about disclosure principles, things like that.

Ted Murphy:Yeah, disclosure is definitely a huge part of that. You know, I think that you've seen a lot of companies been called out on the so called viral marketing campaigns where there is a lot of deception in the last couple of years. And as soon as people find out that it's a paid campaigns there is a lot of backlash. So our approach is to be totally transparent from the beginning.

Eric Enge:Right, because when you get into a broad platform like the Internet has become, there really is a lot of deception. Yet the community is like the news media was for us and developed into in the eighties and nineties, they were the watchdogs in finding all these things that were wrong with anything.

Major news media is still doing that, but now individual people can do it themselves in social media environments.

Ted Murphy:Yes, and it's more public in many ways because it's searchable.

Eric Enge:Right, you can reach very large audiences as happened with the video of the Comcast technicians sleeping on the couch.

That was not a positive branding exercise. But you also said something about the way these kinds of entities think about their business. You are an entrepreneur and I am an entrepreneur and we have a certain way of thinking about our business. Even among entrepreneurs there is probably some variance, but when you get into the larger companies they just have so many assets to protect.

Ted Murphy:Yes.

Eric Enge:I mean just to talk loosely about brands. They are things that take tens of millions or even billions of dollars to build.

Ted Murphy:Yeah, and then they become tens of millions or billions of dollars, and so obviously you want to be able to protect that asset the best you possibly could.

Eric Enge:Indeed, so are there other aspects of SocialSpark that you want to highlight for the readers?

Ted Murphy:I think that the biggest positive aspects of the system are that it's completely open and transparent so as a blogger you can come in, browse all the advertiser offers that are out there without having to login or create an account. Also, you can see what the whole system is about and the other posts that people have done and it really makes it a transparent marketplace on both sides. So, our goal here is to really help quality advertisers and quality bloggers create quality relationships with each other.

Eric Enge:Right, and why did you decide to create a new property instead of morphing PayPerPost?

Ted Murphy:Well, I think that a lot of people, this is a big adjustment for a lot of people. A lot of people that are using PayPerPost both on the advertisers' side and the bloggers' side; are moving to the system where everything is out in the open and people can comment on your opportunities, and they can comment on you profile, and there is certain expectation of being active and participating with a blogger or an advertiser; it's not something that everybody is quite ready for.

The PayPerPost market place is much more passive than the SocialSpark market place and some people like that and some people don't. We like that, and so we wanted to really have a solution that kind of served both markets.

Eric Enge:Right, so you will continue to run PayPerPost for the foreseeable future?

Ted Murphy:Yes, I think that you will see more and more elements and concepts of SocialSpark showing up in PayPerPost, but we didn't want to really flip a switch and say alright guys you guys have been using this for the past two years and now it's completely different.

We probably would have lost a lot of customers that way. We want to be able to get people used to these new concepts and give them an opportunity to adjust and embrace it.

Eric Enge:Right, and of course there are a lot of people out there who are not at all brand conscious and just scrambling for traffic.

Ted Murphy:Yes, absolutely.

Eric Enge:Indeed, so what's the initial reception for SocialSpark been like?

Ted Murphy:We have had tremendous reception, some great brands that have joined on as advertisers.

Eric Enge:Can you name any of those brands?

Ted Murphy:Yeah, there are a couple that you can actually see running now. Campaigns for VO5 hair products, Dirt Devil products, Reader's Digest, Dockers, and USA Network are already in place.

Eric Enge:It is in beta now, right?

Ted Murphy:It is in beta, right now we are just iterating on the platform. We've got a lot of feedback from people who like this feature and don't like that feature, and they would like to see things work in a different way. So we are really taking all that feedback and working as quickly as we can to iterate and provide a better user experience.

Eric Enge:Thanks Ted!

Ted Murphy:Thank you I appreciate the opportunity.

Have comments or want to discuss? You can comment on the Ted Murphy interview here.

Other Recent Interviews

• Vanessa Fox - June 23, 2008
• Matt Cutts - June 16, 2008
• Hitwise's Marc Johnson - June 2, 2008
• Bob Massa - May 26, 2008
• Yahoo's Andrew Tomkins - May 12, 2008
• Google's Dick Costolo - April 28, 2008
• Market Motive's John Marshall - April 21, 2008
• TV Guide's Kirsten Rasanen - April 7, 2008
• Did-It's Kevin Lee - March 31, 2008

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more information on Web Marketing Services, contact us at:

Stone Temple Consulting
(508) 485-7751 (phone)
(603) 676-0378 (fax)
info@stonetemple.com

Published: June 23, 2008

Vanessa Fox's latest projects are Jane and Robot (search-friendly design patterns for web developers) and Nine by Blue (thoughts on holistic online marketing, customer relationships, and measuring search as an acquisition channel).

Vanessa is also working with Ignition Partners as an Entrepreneur in Residence and is Features Editor at Search Engine Land.

Before this, Vanessa spent a lot of time building web sites, being a user advocate, developing products, and writing. When she was at Google, she built Webmaster Central.

Vanessa does quite a bit of writing, and have a popular blog. She is also a frequent speaker at industry conferences. Vanessa also consults with different companies, particularly on building online communities and customer engagement, a holistic approach to online marketing, search metrics and improvements, and product strategy.

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: A lot of people think of SEO as the practice of manipulating search engines. It's really interesting because sometimes outsiders write these inflammatory pieces about how SEO is comprised mostly of crooks. For that matter, some people who are in SEO are in fact spending their time trying to do just that. They are trying to manipulate search engines, and that's the way they view their job.

But, I'd like to back up to a more strategic level and talk about some of the issues of customer experiences. And, we'll get into this more later, but also figuring out the types of people that come to your site, how they interact with it, and how that affects website design. So, this is stepping aside a bit from SEO and into a broader look at online marketing.

So, any thoughts on that that you'd like to start us with, and how you design a site from a customer experience perspective?

Vanessa Fox: Absolutely. That's where the name for Jane and Robot originated. When you build a website, you shouldn't just think about SEO, you can think of users and SEO at the same time. And so, Jane obviously is the user, and then the robot would be the search engines. You should really take a holistic view when you are building your website, because you can do things that will work well for all the different important aspects, and they don't have to contradict each other.

Some think that if you are doing SEO, that means you are ignoring your user. I think if you focus on the user, it's the other way around. You focus on your user, and that's going to cause SEO, usability, and all types of other things to fall into place. Some people in SEO try to chase the algorithms. The algorithms always change from the search engines, and there are all of these little factors, hundreds of different little things, that affect it.

Some people still will jump up and go after them. If you do that, you are spending a lot of time and a lot of effort on things that are just fluctuating all the time. Whereas, if you really think about what the search engines are looking for, which is the best possible result for users, then all of the fluctuations aren't really going to impact you as much and your website is ultimately going to align really, really well with what the search engine is looking for.

The other thing that's positive is that if you really think about your user and what the user experience should be, then when you do get the traffic from search, you are going to hang on to those users. Because that's really ultimately what your goal is, to add to the customer base and engage with people. So, if you really think about engaging users when you build the site, then all the traffic is really going to get you somewhere.

Eric Enge: Right. From a link building perspective, a very good customer experience should make it more likely that people will link to your site.

Vanessa Fox: Oh, absolutely.

Eric Enge: The other thing I have noticed from the sites we've worked on when these algorithm changes come through, is that there a raging reaction on the forums of everybody who has been setback by the algorithm changes. The sites that we work on keep going up.

Vanessa Fox: Yes

Eric Enge: Because, the search engines are striving towards an ideal. And, if you strive towards that same ideal, they get closer and closer to it, and you end up winning as a result.

Vanessa Fox: That's absolutely the case.

Eric Enge: Indeed. So, you and I talked a little bit about the customer coming back, and just having their goodwill. Reputation has a lot of levels of impact, doesn't it?

Vanessa Fox: Yes, absolutely. I think the idea has always been, offline and online, that if a brand really builds up a relationship with customers and builds up their reputation and credibility, it's only going to help them overall. A customer is likely to come back or likely to tell other people about it and recommend it; bringing that from the offline world into the online world.

Look at Zappos for instance. They are a shoe company, but really they tell people that they are a customer service company, not a shoe store. You know that if you've ordered shoes from them, you can return any of them that you want, and they will pay the shipping.

If you ever have a problem, they are super responsive. So they build themselves up to be more than a place to buy shoes, but as this credible, reputable source that people end up having a relationship with. I think that really starts to just build on itself.

Eric Enge: Right. Zappos is purely online. As you say they do have a very friendly return policy, which is good thing, because a lot of times with clothing, people want to see and touch it.

Vanessa Fox: Well, exactly. It was hard for a lot of apparel type of companies to move into the online space. Zappos started out online and they were able to overcome that by being very customer friendly. If you talk to their CEO they expect that they are going to get lots and lots of returns. That's just how their business works, they want you to order as many shoes as you want and experiment with them all just like you were in a store and then send back the ones that you don't want. That's one way they've been able to build the sales that they have.

Eric Enge: Right. So, it often seems to me that people that already have an established brand have a major advantage. A big name company is going to get lots of links and lots of visibility no matter what they do; but what's the recourse for somebody who doesn't have the advantage of leveraging a major brand?

Vanessa Fox: You are right that a major brand has already built up their brand in other ways before they came online. So, it's just like anything else -- if someone is starting a company new now, whether it's offline or online, you have to go through that; the period of building up your brand. I think that somebody's smaller or newer company in a way is having advantage on the other hand, because they don't have all of the legacy offline type of marketing to start with.

They are starting new; and I find that a lot of these brands that have been around a while, when they try to move online, they try to use the same paradigms and many things that they've used offline into online. I find that it can be really helpful when you look at your online marketing with new eyes versus looking at how the old ways worked offline.

Looking at the Zappos example again, they started out online, but they rank higher and get more of sales than other well-known shoe companies, because they have been able to take advantage of some of this new online world. If you look at some of these older brands, they are used to printing brochures or magazine ads, that type of thing. So, they might build a site entirely in Flash, and they might be less open to the idea of doing a lot of social networking. They might think they don't want to have a blog or a discussion area, because they want to have control over the way the brand is discussed.

They may miss the point that now that we are in an online world, they don't have control over their brand anyway. People are going to talk about them, so they may as well be involved one way or the other. So, I think a lot of times it's harder for the older brands to come around to that, and maybe some other newer brands are a little more nimble and flexible.

Eric Enge: Right. That creates an opportunity to build a new brand, because just understanding the interaction and expectations on the internet is the idea. Like you said, you don't own your brand on the internet.

You may think you do, but you don't. And, if one of your people who is supposed to be installing cable falls asleep on your couch and gets it videotaped and pasted on You-Tube, your brand is going to take a hit.

Vanessa Fox: I think in the offline world these things still happened, and people still talked about them. But, the brands just didn't hear about it, because the conversations were happening at peoples' houses or over the phone or whatever. Now with the Internet it's just much more visible and can spread. And so the brands may as well take advantage of that by being able to more immediately see what's going on, and get the feedback and be seen as really responsive. Turn it into a positive, because these things are happening anyway.

We've certainly seen some really good examples of companies that have been able to take really negative situations and turn them into a positive. If you can be responsive and really make the changes and have it not just to be something that you say, but something you actually take action on, people really appreciate that.

Eric Enge: Yes indeed. There was an article that we were involved in creating recently that we managed to get to the homepage of Digg, and the comment stream was really interesting. There was a really negative comment made by someone; and it turns out that they were questioning the opinion of an expert medical doctor on a medical topic.

Nut jobs saying nasty things are part of what the brands fear on the Internet. But what happened in fact is a common event in social media. People don't like nut jobs, so the person got shouted down by other members of the community.

Vanessa Fox: Yes.

Eric Enge: The comment stream is not quite as bad as you might fear it would be. People were afraid their brands would just be constantly shot down no matter what they do on a social network, but that's not the case.

Vanessa Fox: I think that's absolutely true. I saw some numbers the other day; something like there are four times to five times more positive reviews on the web than negative ones. Whereas, people are always worried that no one is going to post anything but a negative review. But that's not the case. I think people are motivated just to post online, because they want to help other people.

Part of that helping is talking about positive experiences. And when someone posts something negative that's just completely out of line, you have a lot of support as a brand. You may not even have to be the one who responds; you may be able to get your customers who like you to respond, which is better anyway, right? It's certainly more of a credible thing to have your customers standup for you than for you to do it yourself; so you can really harness that really well I think.

Eric Enge: Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean it's the heart of all this; here we are, we are thinking about launching a new website to do something. And, you gave a great customer experience, but a couple of things still have to have a real deep level of value.

It has to be distinctive as well. You can't be the fifteenth version of something else that's been put out there. Like the Jane and Robot site, you are clearly striving to bring something new and help a different group of people in a different and distinct way that really adds value to their day.

Vanessa Fox: Right. That's certainly one thing that you should look at which is what do you have that's going to cause users to come to you versus the choices that are already out there. Because, if there is already something that's serving them well; they need a reason to switch. People just don't switch for no reason. What can you bring that is different and new from what they have?

Eric Enge: Right, absolutely. So, one thing too is once you've that you are an expert in something, you can turn around and use that as an outbound marketing vehicle and start approaching other sites and writing the content as a way of getting exposure for your new awesome resource.

Vanessa Fox: Sure. In terms of syndication specifically I wrote a blog post recently. From a search engine perspective, you have to keep in mind what they want, which is that they want to provide the best results for the search. They are not going to serve multiple versions of the same content. So, if you're intent with syndication is to get the traffic and get awareness out there then absolutely you could look into that, but don't necessarily expect that your version of the content on your own site will rank.

Eric Enge: Right. But, you need to understand how to deliver something different than what's on your page, so that you are sharing something that brings value in a somewhat different way.

Vanessa Fox: Yes. And, there are some other suggestions that I talked about in my post; and one was exactly what you are saying; have a version for your own site, and then write something that's different for the syndication. I think that that's a really good strategy to employ, because then you could provide a lot of details about something on your own site, and then write something that's more of a high level overview that points back to it . If you have the exact same information, that's when you run into problems.

Eric Enge: Right. Another aspect of this is to get a link back from the article to the original source of the content.

Vanessa Fox: Yeah. And, it's interesting how many syndicated articles don't do that. I think it's helpful even for the audience of the site that's syndicating, or for whoever is receiving the content. I It's really important to have an absolute link back into your own site just in case your stuff gets scraped. But, if you output in RSS feed, the likelihood is that your stuff is going to get scraped, right? So, just put some absolute links in that.

Eric Enge: RSS could mean really simple scraping.

Vanessa Fox: Really simple scraping; that's exactly right.

Eric Enge: Yes, indeed. Ultimately, we are just trying to give the search engine as many clues as possible as to who the original author of the content at the end of the day basically?

Vanessa Fox: Absolutely.

Eric Enge: Switching gears a little bit; if you produce this awesome resource and you are trying to figure out how to deal with your customers, what are some other tools you can recommend? Tools that help you get to know your customers and potential customers better, and therefore be in a better position to deliver them the value they are looking for?

Vanessa Fox: There are lots of things out there obviously, lots of tools and lots of data. Certainly you want to do a bit of keyword research, and that not only helps you with search engine optimization, but it helps you understand the language of your customers. And, you certainly want to relate to them with the type of language that they use already.

Eric Enge: Yes. I like to point out to people that even if you didn't have search engines; if you had access to keyword tool, a traditional marketer should want to use that.

Vanessa Fox: Yeah, that's absolutely the case. Even if you don't do anything with search engine optimization, the keyword stuff is just great to see what people are talking about. So, you can use it in a number of ways. In particular you can use it to see how they talk about things, so what types of words that they use. But, you can also use it to see what kinds of things they are interested in that are related to what you do.

I was doing research to see whether plastic bags or paper bags were more environmentally sound, because that's a big debate. So, I did all this research, and I found lots and lots of information, but one of the best places I found information was on the site called ReusableBags.com. Basically, it's a site that you can go to, to buy those grocery bags that are made out of cloth to reuse them.

Eric Enge: Right.

Vanessa Fox: But, they had done this whole article that talked about the pros and cons of paper and plastic, and it went into some of the data. And so, I thought that they had done a really good job of not just optimizing for reusable bags, and all the variations of the term reusable bags, but they also took a look to see what other related kinds of topics this audience will be interested in.

Well, they are probably interested in paper versus plastic; so being able to use other keyword research to see what topics your audience might care about is really useful.

The other tool that I think just about everyone has, but maybe people don't use as effectively as they could is their web analytics package. For instance, a lot of people now look at visitors.But, if you ask a lot of people what their bounce rate is, they have no idea. So, you may think you have a certain number of visitors, but maybe quite a bit less than you are expecting, once you take into account the number of people that are abandoning as soon as they land on your site. There is so much that you can do with your web analytics in terms of understanding your customers, like what page did they tend to abandon your site on? How far along did they go in the conversion process?

Maybe you have your site set up in a convoluted way that causes people to abandon before they achieve their goal or the goals that you have for them. Take a look at search in particular; what are the terms that people use to find your site, and what is the abandonment rate for each of those. So, like you may find that people really like your site for some things, but they really hate your site for other things.

So, you might not really have the content in your site that you think, but if you are just looking at the overall visitors and the overall bounce rate, you are not actually looking at the terms themselves; then you don't really get a complete picture of how your customers are interacting with your site.

Eric Enge: Right. The other thing you can do is look at the paths they tend to travel.

Vanessa Fox: Yes absolutely. It may be completely different than what you think. The entrance points may be different. But also, I think you can understand a lot by seeing how people navigate your site. You may find that they are not taking a direct path, that they are going back and forth, and back and forth, and so it may not be as obvious as you think. And, of course there are lots of other tools out there besides your standard web analytics packages.

There is the CrazyEgg software, which shows you heat maps based on the click behavior. There is lots of stuff out there like that that can help you see how people are really using your site.

The other big thing that everyone should do that no one seems to do is AB testing and multivariate testing. I talk to a lot of people who think they are about to overhaul their site and make it so much better. And so, I ask them if they have done any testing for the new site, and they haven't . And, it's like well, how do you know really if this is going to be such a huge improvement; it may make your site even worse? Especially these days when there are so many inexpensive or no-cost ways out there to do the testing it's certainly worthwhile to do.

Eric Enge: Sure. Google Website Optimizer does it, and it's free.

Vanessa Fox: And, it's easy to use.

Eric Enge: When I explain to people why they should do landing page or site optimization, I point out that the chances that you guessed the perfect solution based on sitting around a table with a few people and making some decisions are essentially zero.

Vanessa Fox: Right.

Eric Enge: So, with a disciplined test philosophy gains are inevitable. That doesn't mean that your first test is going to offer you gains, your first test may be worse than what you are currently doing.

Vanessa Fox: Right.

Eric Enge: But even that would be information, and you can fuss around with these kinds of things, and get to a point where you are in fact doing better.

Vanessa Fox: Yes. And, as much as you might know about usability, or your customers, I know when I approach a project and I think I know exactly what is going to happen that I am never right 100% of time. There are always things that you don't think about, or you wouldn't normally get involved in.

Eric Enge: And, here I thought you were the exception.

Vanessa Fox: You get so involved in a project that it's difficult or impossible to look at it objectively as a person who has never seen it. I always suggest any amount of testing that you could do before launching. I mean it's somewhat less expensive to do the testing and make the changes than it is to change later. But, even if you have stuff that's launched; add some testing and just incrementally iterate.

Eric Enge: Yes, indeed. The other thing to remember is you are not the target audience for your website.

Vanessa Fox: Right. Even, if you think you are, you are not. You can't possibly be, because you are too involved with it.

Eric Enge: What about the upfront usability testing?

Vanessa Fox: Yes, absolutely. That's the same thing, right? I did a lot of that when I was doing offline product stuff; just client based software. The way someone approaches the task is not necessarily what you envision, and the way they think about things is not always what you expect.

I always think it's a great idea to get a usability person; someone who really knows what they are doing with usability and set that up. You could even get in the lab. There are lots of things that you can do; but even if you can't do something, get someone in whose skill set is in usability and it helps a lot. It's amazing. They really understand the fact that human mind works.

Eric Enge: Exactly. If we backup again to the broader topic of holistic online marketing, I may think everything we have been talking about has been oriented around broader, purest views of online marketing divorced from SEO, and building customer relationships and these sorts of things. But, at the end of the day, isn't this potentially a brilliant SEO strategy?

Vanessa Fox: Oh, of course. Going back to what we were talking about at the beginning. Everyone is looking to understand the search engine algorithms. But, really we do know the intent of the search engine algorithms, which is to give the searcher the best result. And so a lot of people spend their time really trying to breakdown what algorithms are.

But, even if you could breakdown the algorithms, it would all point to that one thing, which are the best results for the searcher. So, just building your site that way aligns you really, really well. It's as if you knew all the secrets of the algorithm, and implemented them in your own site without all the work; and without all the math, right?

Eric Enge: Right.

Vanessa Fox: So, it certainly helps you from an SEO perspective. If you just look at usability alone, and you look at all the ways to make sure that your site is usable, that alone from a technical perspective helps you with SEO. What do you do about AJAX, Flash images, and JavaScript navigation? Even if you are looking at it from a technical perspective, usability is helpful for SEO.

But then, once you start looking at content, and you start looking at talking in the language of your customers being the most useful resource for information, it's going to cause people to link to you. It's going to cause people to return again and again. It's really a cycle that just keeps going. Each thing helps the other and it just goes up and up I think.

Eric Enge: Yes. Another thing I think about here too is the way people who have been operating in this holistic way, and have gotten to a point where they have an authoritative site of their own. The way they think about the asset they've built is quite different than a lot of other sites; isn't it?

Vanessa Fox: Yes that's certainly, right. You are going to get quality sites linking to you if they have reason to link to you, right? If the content you offer is useful for their visitors.

Eric Enge: Right. The sites you get links from are ones that actually care about their visitors.

Vanessa Fox: Right. And so, those types of sites are the ones that search engines are probably going to think of as the most authoritative, because they have already been evaluated as being a useful site. And so, those are obviously the sites you want links from, and you are only going to be able to achieve those links if you have a useful site. So, there is certainly no manipulation involved or any tricks, it's pretty straightforward.

Eric Enge: Right. The search engines are going to constantly try to better identify those sites that have that methodology, because they fit the original intent of the page rank algorithm the best.

Vanessa Fox: Right, yes. Well, and not just the original PageRank algorithm, but the intent behind that original PageRank algorithm, right?

Eric Enge: Right.

Vanessa Fox: So, that PageRank algorithm itself may change over time, but it's always going to be for that original purpose.

Eric Enge: Alright, great. Do you have some other things that you think would be good to add to the conversation?

Vanessa Fox: Well, I just think that it's really useful when you are doing any online marketing to think about how what you are doing is going to impact the other silos of online marketing, and think about how the things that they are doing can help you out. I find often that you've got a company where someone is doing SEO on the site, and someone else is doing paid stuff.

Then you've got the product people who are interested in marketing and their products. And, a lot of times those divisions work on isolation, whereas if they shared their information they have on their customers, they'd all have a more complete picture of their customers. If you had email marketing, and you are sending people to a page, you want that page to be as useful as possible.

That also may be the same page that comes up in a search result, and it maybe the same page that is linked to a PPC ad, but maybe you have a different page for each one. Certainly if those people talked more and had a really good and comprehensive strategy, it makes for a more seamless experience for the customer. I think just the data alone can really help you out.

A lot of times each of those divisions feel that the other may overrun them and that the impact would hurt them if they were to work with the other. But, I think the opposite can be the case, where they can actually help each other and the whole can be greater than the parts.

Eric Enge: Right. It can be very difficult to maintain multiple versions of the content.

Vanessa Fox: Right. But, that ends up happening in a sense; no one wants to give up control of what they have. But, I do think that there are really good ways that people can work together on that stuff.

Eric Enge: An integrated approach to online marketing.

Vanessa Fox: Crazy, yeah. So, that's what I am working on with Nine By Blue. This is a new project which is designed to look at all those things. The Nine By Blue site is all about taking data from all different marketing areas and turning that into something more. Making it a better experience overall for your users; understanding who your customers are, and how you can best build relationships with them.

Eric Enge: Excellent! Well, thank you very much.

Vanessa Fox: Yes, thank you!

Have comments or want to discuss? You can comment on the Vanessa Fox interview here.

Other Recent Interviews

• Matt Cutts - June 16, 2008
• Hitwise's Marc Johnson - June 2, 2008
• Bob Massa - May 26, 2008
• Yahoo's Andrew Tomkins - May 12, 2008
• Google's Dick Costolo - April 28, 2008
• Market Motive's John Marshall - April 21, 2008
• TV Guide's Kirsten Rasanen - April 7, 2008
• Did-It's Kevin Lee - March 31, 2008

About the Author

Eric Enge is the President of Stone Temple Consulting. Eric is also a founder in Moving Traffic Incorporated, the publisher of Custom Search Guide, a directory of Google Custom Search Engines, and City Town Info, a site that provides information on 20,000 US Cities and Towns.

Stone Temple Consulting (STC) offers search engine optimization and search engine marketing services, and its web site can be found at: http://www.stonetemple.com.

For more information on Web Marketing Services, contact us at:

Stone Temple Consulting
(508) 485-7751 (phone)
(603) 676-0378 (fax)
info@stonetemple.com

Published: June 16, 2008

Matt Cutts joined Google as a Software Engineer in January 2000. Before Google, he was working on his Ph.D. in computer graphics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has an M.S. from UNC-Chapel Hill, and B.S. degrees in both mathematics and computer science from the University of Kentucky.

Matt wrote SafeSearch, which is Google's family filter. In addition to his experience at Google, Matt held a top-secret clearance while working for the Department of Defense, and he's also worked at a game engine company. He claims that Google is the most fun by far.

Matt currently heads up the Webspam team for Google. Matt talks about webmaster-related issues on his blog.

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Okay, so we are here in Search Marketing Expo Advanced with Matt Cutts, the head of Web Spam (and not the head of Search Quality!) at Google. Today we are going to talk about link building tips.

Matt Cutts: Sounds good.

Eric Enge: And, in particular for benefit of our reading audience, we are not going to talk about the paid links debate.

Matt Cutts: That's a tired subject anyway.

Eric Enge: There you go! We are going to focus on advice for people who want to build links that will stand the test of time.

Matt Cutts: That's a good way to put it.

Eric Enge: So, what I'd like you to start with, Matt, is just an overview of your thoughts of what the approach should be. And then, we can get into some more detailed stuff.

Matt Cutts: Yeah, totally. So, what are the links that will stand the test of time? Those links are typically given voluntarily. It is an editorial link by someone, and it's someone that's informed. They are not misinformed, they are not tricked; there is no bait and switch involved. It's because somebody thinks that something is so cool, so useful, or so helpful that they want to make little sign posts so that other people on the web can find that out.

Now, there is also the notion of link bait or things that are just cool; maybe not helpful, but really interesting. And those can stand the test of time as well. Those links are links generated because of the sheer quality of your business or the value add proposition that you have that's unique about your business. Those are the things that no one else can get, because no one else has them or offers the exact same thing that your business offers.

Eric Enge: Right. So, you could imagine a business with a very unique customer service policy in their niche might actually draw a lot of links because of that?

Matt Cutts: Yeah. Well, there was recently something where Zappos said, "we hired people; we train them for a week or two, and then we say we'll give you $1,000 to quit, and that's their policy." They want people who really are interested and really want to stay. And, they'd rather get rid of those people who are willing to take a quick $1,000 and not have them work for Zappos. And that's just a unique customer service policy, and that got them a lot of links recently.

Eric Enge: Right.

Matt Cutts: It's just something you need that's compelling.

Eric Enge: Right. So, do you have any specific tips or approaches that you would recommend? A range of ideas would be interesting to talk about.

Matt Cutts: Yeah, totally. I mean, one of my favorites is original research. So, Danny Sullivan, for example, did some sweat of the brow research about how well the different hotmail, Gmail, and yahoo email products did at detecting spam. He decided to forward all his mail to the same three accounts, including his normal email. I am going to see how much spam falls through and how much spam I catch." And, he tracked it for only a couple of weeks. And then, when he was done, he had a complete list. "Okay,Gmail killed 394; so it had a 98% success rate."

It was a lot of work that he put into it, but when he was done; he was able to definitively say Gmail is better at spam, which was cool, that got my attention, and as a result I linked to it. There is a perception that Gmail is good on spam, but how many people can back that up with numbers?

So, that sweat of the brow, original research pays off. Aaron Wall did a post a while ago, where he gathered a ton of different statistics about certain keywords together. I'd rather find out about something because where somebody has done a bunch of original research or something like that, instead of just saying something controversial. Just taking the anti side or trying to be sarcastic.

Eric Enge: Right.

Matt Cutts: And, people will link to you if you do that, but they will be more impressed. You get more credibility if it's really useful research. Something that nobody else has uncovered. Like you did a really good thing where you documented a case study of this old website.

It's like this old house except it is applied to renovating a website. And, as a case study of successful SEO, that was hugely impressive. Because, it essentially said, "Hey, here is a site; here is everything we did, completely out in the open, what was the overall ROI in terms of how many more visitors did you get?"

Eric Enge: Right.

Matt Cutts: And it takes a lot of work to document that; some of it is original research and some of it is just being willing to go on record with some of the white-hat stuff you did. But now anybody who wants to make a case that SEO can really be good for your website; they've got these two great case studies that's good for the whole industry, not just good for you personally.

So, it can be that, it can be a unique resource. It can be a glossary, it can be a service, it can be an open-source product, or Firefox extension, or anything like that. There is a lot of different ways you can do really good things without necessarily causing problems.

Eric Enge: Right. So, I think one thing we can safely say is, if you are going out in the world and you are asking people to link to you, you are not going to succeed if you go out there with a site that has the same content or same type of content that thirty other people have already published. There has to be something unique to what you are doing.

Matt Cutts: Yeah. Well, and the more unique it is, the more compelling it is. And so, you can certainly be controversial, but the long-term credibility really does come from being that source, that people are like, "Oh yeah, here is this guy, you can trust what he says. He knows what he is talking about."

Eric Enge: Right. So, you mentioned the Firefox Plugin; let's expand upon that a little bit.

You could have a guy who is running a site that sells used cars; and then they implement a Firefox Plugin that has nothing to do with these cars. This is not a great link, because it's not relevant.

I don't think that's what you are looking for here, right? You want somebody that's developing a Firefox Plugin that links to a used car site to develop a plugin that is related to used cars.

Matt Cutts: Yes. Like eBay recently came out with some Firefox extension that was an Auction Watcher. Just keep an eye on the sidebar, and all the options you are interested in.

And, that's an example of a product that's completely relevant to eBay and people who link to that are linking to it because they are really interested in these auctions.

Eric Enge: Right. It's a natural extension of their business.

Matt Cutts: Exactly. And, it's funny, because as far as linkbait goes, if you can go for on-topic useful linkbait like resources of information, it's often a lot more useful. The anchor text is often more relevant to what you are interested in anyway. Whereas we look at stuff like, how relevant is it, how off topic is it, all that stuff.

Eric Enge: Right, yeah. So, let's take another example, Digg. You can get great results by getting in the homepage of Digg.

Matt Cutts: Yeah.

Eric Enge: And, you can get hundreds or even thousands of links, right? And, it's certainly something that we have done some work on helping people accomplish. So, those links could be on topic and relevant, right?

Matt Cutts: Oh, sure. Yes.

Eric Enge: Yet, at the same time it's possible to go out there and hire people who have the relationships in the social media world, right? I remember at the past conference you went on record to say, "Yes, you did hire someone to help you get there, and you paid for the help to get to the Digg home page, but the links were still freely given."

Matt Cutts: Yes. There was an editorial choice.

Eric Enge: Right.

Matt Cutts: Whenever you pay money to a social media consultant to try to show up on Digg, you are not paying for links. You are funding some creativity; you are sponsoring your page for some creativity.

It's not like you held a gun to anyone and said "Okay, you have to link to me." The people who link to the site are linking because it's something compelling instead. So, there is still some editorial choice there.

Eric Enge: Right. And ultimately, it's like hiring an agency, or a marketing firm or a PR firm; the reality is that you get links hopefully to relevant content. So, that really drives the process.

Matt Cutts: Yeah. And, it's really funny, because David Klein had done some really interesting linkbait at a WordCamp, where he had just more or less networked with people, and did some interesting drawings of different people doing what they wanted to do with their lives. And, people looked at that, and said, "Well, isn't that off-topic?" I almost went back and revised that post and highlighted the fact that he has done a ton of really good topics. So, he is a chiropractor; he has written three different books that he puts available on the web and cartoon books about chiropractors themselves.

It's not that linkbait has to be off-topic; you can have really great on topic linkbait. And, that's just another reason for people to be interested in your site.

Eric Enge: Right. So, let's talk a little bit about widgets.

Matt Cutts: Okay.

Eric Enge: What are your thoughts on using widgets as a promotional tool, and ways of going about doing that?

Matt Cutts: Widgetbait is like linkbait in some ways. We talked about it at the You&a sessions at SMX Advanced with Danny Sullivan a little bit, but we come at it from a perspective where the first widgetbait that we saw was web counter spam.

Matt Cutts: People would sign up for a web counter, and they would have hidden links in that web counter that they didn't even know about.

Eric Enge: Right. Like in the NoScript part of a JavaScript type thing.

Matt Cutts: Exactly. Or an image that was actually clickable.

The clicks would go to mesothelioma, payday loans site, or something like that.

So, a few of the criteria to think about are, are the links hidden? Is the image clickable or are the links are buried in some NoScript or something like that? If so, that's not going to be as good for users. How relevant is a widget? A good example of a relevant widget is someone had an Ubuntu widget that counted how many days until Ubuntu was released; it was just a daily countdown, and the link went to Ubuntu.com.

The people putting the widget on their site know exactly what they are doing, and it's completely on topic, whereas something about mesothelioma has nothing to do with the web counter. It's just completely off topic.

Eric Enge: Right. So, let's take the next step. Let's imagine the link isn't hidden, but it's still off topic.

Matt Cutts: Right, off topic. We want those links just like with regular linkbait; we wanted people to be informed of what they are linking to and we want the links to be editorial. And, if we feel like somebody got tricked into making a link; like they signed up for some service and they didn't even realize that a link was going to be piggybacking along on this.

That's not as good; and it's not as much of an editorial vote for that link as we'd like. You can also look at things like what is the link target; does the link go back to wherever you got the widget from or does it go to some completely different third party? This is related to whether it's off topic or not.

Eric Enge: Well, that could imply that the spot was sold for example.

Matt Cutts: Exactly. If it's sold, that's even worse.

Eric Enge: Yeah. But, you wouldn't necessarily know that. You would know that it was a different party; that's pretty easy to detect.

Matt Cutts: Different party, yeah. Different party, often off topic; and then you could also look at the anchor text of the link itself. So, if it's just the name of the site, that's a little different than if its keyword stuffed or spamming anchor text. And then, a couple of last things is how many links are in the widget, as there are a whole ton of buried links in the widget that are more of the degree nature.

One of the things that's also interesting is how informed the publisher was whenever they put this widget on their site. Because, we have seen widgets where there was essentially no disclosure; maybe buried down in some end user license agreement.

Eric Enge: Down in section twenty-six.

Matt Cutts: And the language tells you that, by the way by embedding this widget you are linking to spam sites.

People don't realize that. So in the same way as you think about linkbait; with widgetbait you want people to know what they are doing also, you want them to be well-informed. Ideally, it's relevant, it's on topic and there is nothing hidden going on. It's all about that.

Eric Enge: Right. So, you wouldn't advise people to start going out building WordPress templates and sticking anchor text rich link at the bottom of that there?

Matt Cutts: Right. It's almost the exact same criteria; think about it. These payday loans buried at the bottom of the template have nothing to do with the blog. They are off topic; they are not at all relevant. Often, when you sign up for a template, you don't see a very clear disclosure that you are going to be embedding links in that template. So, it's still the same criteria you can use for a lot of different types of things.

Eric Enge: Right. So, I wrote a post recently on SEOmoz about getting the anchor text you want. I pointed out that there are some techniques where you can be getting editorial quality links, but still requesting certain specific types of anchor text. What's your sense about that; I don't know if you read the post or not.

Matt Cutts: I did read that post. I mean, you want people to be informed. Like, there have been people who talked about "Well, look at the people who link to you, and maybe the anchor text they used was yourdomain.com."

Maybe you could say "Hey, you might not know it, but this is also the name of my product. Would you be interested in changing this anchor text?"

That's certainly something you could do. The main thing is you want people to be informed; organic anchor text often has all that natural distribution that you want anyway. So, if you can get it organically, then you usually don't have to go back and try to negotiate with people about changing this anchor text.

Eric Enge: Right. So, the example would be that you take a widget and the widget might be about a specific product on your site. And then, you would point to the product on your site with the generic industry known name for the product as the anchor text, right? So, the widget's related; the anchor text of course is steered a little bit.

The user could change it, and, they are informed.

Matt Cutts: Yeah. It's interesting, because when we see people trying to steer anchor text, we often see that more in the context of a link exchange and they will say, "By the way, here is the snippet to exactly copy and paste."

Often, the snippet has got some pretty spamming in the anchor text and stuff like that. So, I would definitely do this in moderation. I wouldn't try to go so aggressively trying to get specific anchor text that it looks bad.

Eric Enge: Right. So, let' talk about some simpler things for a little bit: article syndication, writing a really good article, placing it in an online magazine site somewhere. I mean, that's a pretty solid strategy as well, right?

Matt Cutts: Yeah absolutely; because someone is choosing to put that article up.

If you think about it as a freelance journalist, it is exactly that situation where they are getting their article placed in a magazine and in return they get credibility. And, a journalist is actually paid as well, but getting well-known, whether it's through networking or through writing articles that you are expert about, or even doing a guest post on a blog are all important to journalists who are trying to get their name out there and have people know more about them

Eric Enge: Right. Well, the interesting thing in my case I can tell you is that I write in a few different places and they all link back to the major things I am involved in.

Matt Cutts: Yes.

Eric Enge: Some of which are completely unrelated to the place where I am writing.

Matt Cutts: Sure, yes.

Eric Enge: But, it's an attribution statement.

Matt Cutts: Yes, it's just your profile.

Eric Enge: Indeed. The one thing that the Big Daddy update was known for was flushing people with very large reciprocal links' profiles. Can you talk a little bit about that, because in principal there is nothing wrong with reciprocal links. You trade with a trusted business partner or something like that; so it's a strategy. To me, it makes sense. But only a certain amount of reciprocal linking should be in your profile, right?

Matt Cutts: Yes. And, that's another place where not so long ago improved our documentation, because at first we said avoid the reciprocal links. Really, what you need to do is avoid the excessive reciprocal links. So we added the word excessive.

Because, if you look at the Google directory, which is like the open directory in Dmoz except with PageRank and the Yahoo directory, it's almost certain that Google links to Yahoo and Yahoo links to Google on some level.

Eric Enge: Right.

Matt Cutts: Which means there is a reciprocal link in some sense between Google and Yahoo. What that demonstrates is that reciprocal links do occur naturally, and it's not a thing to be surprised about.

So, what we mean when we say avoid excessive reciprocal links is if your portfolio has a very large fraction of links where you're getting them by sending automated emails saying "Did you know that exchanging links can help your rankings in search engines?" That's not a basis for fundamental long term, solid growth of your links if that's all you are doing.

So, we tell people to avoid excessive swapping; and the nice thing is that people have a pretty good idea of what excessive is. So, you had a word like that and people are going to say "Oh, you know it's natural that reciprocal links happen in the course of being on the web at some point, but it's not that I have to chase after those too much."

Eric Enge: Right. Because part of the hard part for people is you have to get it into mindset of what they have done if they weren't worried about search engines at all; would they have taken that link or made that link arrangement?

What I usually say to people is if in your editorial judgment, you would have given them a link without getting the link back and you are in good shape.

Matt Cutts: Yes, or asking yourself what's good for your users? If it's good for your users, then go ahead and do it.

Eric Enge: Right. And, if you are smart about it, and you have your SEO hat on, and if you trade a link with a site that is a lot more authoritative than you are, then that probably has some SEO benefit to it. But it's still quite alright because it's a related link.

Matt Cutts: We do still encourage people to have interesting and helpful links for their users. And, don't focus too much on trading with the authoritative guys and never the smaller guys.

Eric Enge: I think a big component of that of course is how much greater the issue of relevance has become in evaluating link juice, right? We are far beyond the original definition of PageRank.

Matt Cutts: Maybe it was Danny that said "If a link is good, do the link out; don't worry about the Linkjuice."

Eric Enge: Right, yeah. Well, I know on our own sites and the people we talk to, we encourage outbound linking without return links for a number of reasons. Without worrying about the algorithmic underpinnings, the reality is it should establish relevance if you link to authority sites.

Matt Cutts: Exactly. And, if the user is happy, they are more likely to come back or bookmark your site or tell their friends about it. And so, if you try to hoard those users, they often somehow subconsciously sense it, and they are less likely to come back or tell their friends about it.

Eric Enge: Right. So, one more thought, and this is potentially a little bit edgy here. What about affiliate programs?

Matt Cutts: Yeah. So, if you are in affiliate program, you are trying to find out if that link has some monetary aspect to it. I wouldn't worry as much about the link benefit for search engines of affiliate links. I would just say link in such a way that you think it's good for your users, and then if you make money off an affiliate link great, but don't worry as much about whether it pulls in PageRank or whether it doesn't pull in PageRank. I think Google handles affiliate links pretty well in that case.

Eric Enge: Right, fair enough. There are related things too, such as discount offers for your products. Offer 20% off to somebody to get a link back to your site; presumably they would only give you that link if they thought it would be interesting to their audience to get that offer.

Matt Cutts: Well, and I think there are ways to make that offer without making it be required to link. So, for example John Battelle was like, "Here you can register for Web 2.0, and use a coupon code of Intel." He didn't even link; it wasn't an affiliate link. It didn't go directly to the checkout or anything like that. He just said, hey, here is the coupon code.

Eric Enge: Right.

Matt Cutts: And so, sometimes when you are using coupon codes, you are trying to say okay, I am building awareness, I am making more sales, I can take that hit on my profit margin if I want to, there is a lot of reasons about why you may want to do it.

Sometimes you are just building their awareness or trying to drive that direct response without requiring a link at all.

Eric Enge: Isn't it easier for the user if you give them a link to click through to use the coupon code?

Matt Cutts: Most people that are giving you a 20% discount on a conference or something like that are not even really thinking about search engines. They are thinking about their users, and so the vast majority of the time when you see a coupon code or something like that, somebody is trying to help their users.

The bottom line is we always have to be mindful of how people can abuse things. And if we started to see something get really abused, then we can look into it. We haven't seen a ton of people trying to do malicious things with that.

So, that's nice. It's like people that are doing it are doing it for good reasons, and because they want to help the users.

Eric Enge: Would you like to talk a little bit about IZEA?

Matt Cutts: Actually yes, I would. I meant to talk about this in the You&A, because Google has made its policies pretty clear on paid posts, about the fact that they should be disclosed not only for humans, but also for machines. We feel the same way.

And, it's interesting, because whenever I looked at the latest thing from IZEA Socialspark, I noticed that they were very good about shutting that down. I went and I checked it out, and I wouldn't say that it is one hundred percent perfect as far as completely watertight, you might see one or two advertisers, but it was still good.

Eric Enge: So, the links were all NoFollowed?

Matt Cutts: Yeah. All the links were supposed to be NoFollowed, and I saw one or two instances when they weren't. But whenever I mentioned that they took care of it very quickly. So, as far as I can tell IZEA and SocialSpark do a much better job of disclosure. It looks like that would comply with our Google webmaster guidelines.

Because, it is machine readable disclosure and you are not selling links to past PageRank. And so, whenever I see somebody who is moving forward and trying to adjust, I want to send out props. And so, I thought that was a good sign of progress and I thought they did a good job on that.

Eric Enge: Well, the other thing I wanted to know is when I spoke to him last, he told me that it was never his intent for PayPerPost to be a paid links market place.

Matt Cutts: Yeah.

Eric Enge: What he found is that major brands wouldn't go into it, because of the stigma associated with that. And, the reason for SocialSpark was to build something that brands could engage in the way they want to engage in the market. I think it's something for everybody to think about.

Matt Cutts: Yes.

Eric Enge: If you are trying to deal with major brands or become one, than you have to start thinking like them.

Matt Cutts: Yes. And, whenever I see progress I want to call it out and give props where it's deserved. And so, I think SocialSpark has definitely progressed compared to PayPerPost. Google continues its policy on paid links in general, so just yesterday we put out a new call for any paid link spam reports, and we continue to act on this. We are willing to act not only manually, but also algorithmically. So, if people know of other networks that are not disclosing, we would be interested in hearing about that. But, I thought it was good to see that SocialSpark was using NoFollow.

Eric Enge: Thanks for talking with me today, Matt.

Matt Cutts: Always a pleasure.

Have comments or want to discuss? You can comment on the Matt Cutts interview here.

Other Google Interviews

• Google's Dick Costolo - April 28, 2008
• Google's Adam Lasnik - Feb. 4, 2008
• Google's Sep Kamvar - Dec. 17, 2007
• Google's Matt Cutts - Oct. 8, 2007
• Google VP Search Quality Udi M