Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Google’s Matt Cutts: We Don’t Use Twitter Or Facebook Social Signals To Rank Pages

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, released a video today answering the question, “are Facebook and Twitter signals part of the ranking algorithm?” The short answer was no.
Matt said that Google does not give any special treatment to Facebook or Twitter pages. They are in fact, currently, treated like any other page, according to Matt Cutts.
Matt then answered if Google does special crawling or indexing for these sites, such as indexing the number of likes or tweets a specific page has. Matt said Google does not do that right now. Why?
They have at one point and they were blocked. I believe Matt was referring to Google’s real time search deal expiring with Twitter. Matt explained that they put a lot of engineering time into it and then they were blocked and that work and effort was no longer useful. So for Google to put more engineering time into this and then be blocked again, it just doesn’t pay.
Another reason, Google is worried about crawling identity information at one point and then that information changes but Google doesn’t see the update until much later. Having outdated information can be harmful to some people.

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Was Expedia Penalized By Google? SearchMetrics Says So.

Yesterday morning Patrick Altoft tweeted to me that SearchMetrics is reporting Expedia lost about 25% of their Google traffic overnight.
SearchMetric is indeed reporting this and I confirmed it with Marcus Tober from SearchMetrics via email. I posted the story on the traffic drop at Search Engine Land and asked if it was related to the link buying allegations Expedia was surrounded with last month.
Hacker News thread, that I've been following for the past couple weeks has more details about how Expedia may have been involved in link schemes and may have received an unnatural link penalty by Google. Google has not yet responded to my inquiries about the penalty. So I have no confirmation from Google or Expedia about it.
SEM Rush shows no drop off in traffic:
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