Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

By the way, in case it isn’t clear from my previous post about hidden links and disclosure of paid links, I agree 100% with Matt Mullenweg’s post about sponsored themes in WordPress.

Most people understand hidden text is something like white text on a white background, and know to steer clear of it. Let me show you an example of a hidden link. Normally a hidden link could be in several forms:
- hidden text that also happens to be hyperlinked, e.g. white text on a white background, and the text is a link
- using CSS to make hyperlinks that are tiny, like 1 pixel high text
- hiding links in something like the period in the middle of a paragraph of text

Now there’s nothing bad about changing the style of a link to some degree, but let me show you an example of going overboard. Here’s a paragraph of text on a site that I recently saw:

You see the two normal hyperlinks, right? Do you see any other links in this paragraph? A user wouldn’t see any other links, even if they moused over every word in the paragraph. But if you happened to click on just the right word, you’d get whisked away to a hardcore porn site. Here, I’ll show you what you’d see in the instant after clicking on the hidden link, right before you head to the porn site:

See how the word “mission” has a little box around it? It’s a hidden link. If you view the source of the page, here’s what you’ll see. I’ve highlighted the relevant link:

Someone went to a fair amount of trouble to hide the porn site link. The status bar gets set to empty using the onMouseOver action, so when you mouse over the link, you don’t see that it goes anywhere. And the style of the link is set so that the cursor doesn’t change when you mouse over the link as well. In my opinion, this is a good example of a link that crosses over into deceptiveness and violates our quality guidelines.

As long as we’re talking about links, this seems like a pretty good opportunity to talk about a simple litmus test for paid links and how to tell if a paid link violates search engines’ quality guidelines. If you want to sell a link, you should at least provide machine-readable disclosure for paid links by making your link in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. There’s a ton of ways to do that. For example, you could make a paid link go through a redirect where the redirect url is robot’ed out using robots.txt. You could also use the rel=nofollow attribute. I’ve said as much many times before, but I wanted to give a heads-up because Google is going to be looking at paid links more closely in the future.

The other best practice I’d advise is to provide human readable disclosure that a link/review/article is paid. You could put a badge on your site to disclose that some links, posts, or reviews are paid, but including the disclosure on a per-post level would better. Even something as simple as “This is a paid review” fulfills the human-readable aspect of disclosing a paid article. Google’s quality guidelines are more concerned with the machine-readable aspect of disclosing paid links/posts, but the Federal Trade Commission has said that human-readable disclosure is important too:

“The petition to us did raise a question about compliance with the FTC act,” said Mary K. Engle, FTC associate director for advertising practices. “We wanted to make clear . . . if you’re being paid, you should disclose that.”

To make sure that you’re in good shape, go with both human-readable disclosure and machine-readable disclosure, using any of the methods I mentioned above.

My wife’s parents are visiting for the next few days, so my weather report is “light posting, with a chance of sunshine.” Me getting sunshine, that is; I get outside more often when people visit. I’ve got a big batch of email that I’d normally sift through on the weekend, but that will have to wait for a little while longer.

I’m lucky to have good in-laws. When my wife and I showed up in Nebraska late last year, everyone on her side of the family had made “Midwestern Cuttlettes” T-shirts. It was great fun.

Vanessa Fox tagged me asking 5 reasons why I blog.

1. So that I can write something once, and then I’ll have a place where I can point back to it. You try answering “I started/stopped buying AdWords and my rankings rose/dropped. Is Google boosting/penalizing me for buying ads?” for the 732nd time, and you’ll see the value in that. The answer is no, by the way.
2. I wanted to see what it was like to be a webmaster so I’d have a better idea of how to help webmasters.
3. So that I’d have a “guinea pig” site that the crawl/index/quality team could abuse, fold, mutilate, and spindle when they need to test something experimental, or to debug a problem.
4. I wanted to be able to tap the most awesome power on the internet — the lazyweb. When I don’t know something, the readers here normally do.
5. So everyone can enjoy getting to know my cats. You would not believe how many blog posts I do with Emmy sleeping on my chest. She’s napping on me right now as I write this. Here, I’ll take a picture with my cell phone:

   

   That was Emmy and me just a few minutes ago. She loves when I blog, because the tap-tap-tapping of the keys puts her to sleep. Then again, pretty much everything puts her to sleep (sunlight, food, petting, breathing, …)

I think someone should start a “Cats of SEO” blog post.

(This post about creating passionate users is dedicated to Kathy Sierra.)

I think this new initiative is an interesting success on Dell’s part. Dell will embiggen their support for Linux by offering Linux distributions on some of their desktop and laptop machines. (What, you’ve never heard of “embiggen”? It’s a perfectly cromulent word.):

Dell to Expand Linux Factory Installed Options
Since launching Dell IdeaStorm a little more than a month ago, one idea has risen to and stayed at the top: better support for Linux. We have heard you and appreciate the direct feedback. On March 13, we responded by launching a Linux survey asking for your feedback on what you need for a better Linux experience. …

Dell has heard you and we will expand our Linux support beyond our existing servers and Precision workstation line.

Cross your fingers for Ubuntu, baby! More important than the specific Linux distribution, Dell is also beefing up their support for Linux by working to ensure that all their hardware can be supported by Linux drivers.

In this tale, there’s a virtuous cycle:
- Creating a way to get feedback; some way to listen to the community
- Responding to that feedback to let users know that you’re listening
- Refining a company’s practices by acting on that feedback
- Result: the web community responds to those refinements with love, which leads to more feedback

In this particular case, Dell had some bloggy tools to help them. Dell IdeaStorm provided a way for people to give feedback and that other people could vote ideas up or down. Dell put in process a place to respond to that feedback, and then used the Dell blog to communicate the changes they made. I give Dell an A+ on this change.

But you don’t need blogs or digg-like sites in this picture to respond to feedback; those are just tools. The important thing is the process. It’s a process that many groups at Google use, and that (frankly) every team at Google should consider using. I’m not advocating that you set every goal by what the outside world wants. If you do that, you’ll miss some thunderbolt-from-above ideas that only an internal team can suggest. But for many products, paying attention to what your users are saying can really provide great feedback and ideas for how to improve, and that in turn leads to “love” and even more future feedback. In this case, I think Dell did well.