Google's Matt Cutts: We Tested Dropping Backlinks From Algorithm, It Was Much Worse

Google's Matt Cutts latest video has Google admitting they did and do indeed test their search results by turning off linkage data as part of their algorithm. Matt Cutts said the results would be "much much worse" if they did indeed do that in real life.

That does indeed make sense since Google's core algorithm was mostly based on links and PageRank and all these years they spent improving on it and such. They invested so much time and resources in using links to rank sites that dropping it now would make for a mess.

It is funny, because a couple weeks ago, we asked you what you would do if Google dropped backlinks from the algorithm. We so far have over 300 responses and 34% said they would be very excited, 32% said they'd be curious and 17% said they'd be very concerned.

Here is Matt's video on the topic:

Business Names Google Places Quality Guidelines Updated

Google has updated their Google Places quality guidelines once again this time to clarify how you can name your business within Google Places/Google Local/Google Maps.

Jade Wang from Google pulled out the changes and posted them in the Google Places Help forums. The changes include:

• Your title should reflect your business's real-world title.
• In addition to your business's real-world title, you may include a single descriptor that helps customers locate your business or understand what your business offers.
• Marketing taglines, phone numbers, store codes, or URLs are not valid descriptors.
• Examples of acceptable titles with descriptors (in italics for demonstration purposes) are "Starbucks Downtown" or "Joe's Pizza Delivery". Examples that would not be accepted would be "#1 Seattle Plumbing", "Joe's Pizza Best Delivery", or "Joe's Pizza Restaurant Dallas".

Hopefully that clarifies things a bit better, because these guidelines are updated relatively frequently.