Tuesday, 4 March 2014

Google's Matt Cutts On What Is A Paid Link

Yesterday, Google's Matt Cutts posted a detailed video trying to define how Google's manual spam fighters determines what is a paid link versus what is not.

Now, 99% of the time, Matt Cutts said it is clear if a link is paid or not. It is a clear transaction that the link on a site was paid $X for. But sometimes it is not clear. Matt summarized it on Google+ these are the other criteria Google uses to determine if a link is considered paid or not. Google asks these questions when looking at a suspicious link:


What is the value of the gift, product, or service?
How close is the gift, product, or service to actual money?
Is it an outright gift or a loan?
Who is the intended audience?
Is the intent of the gift to get links?
Would the gift be a surprise to third party?

Here is the video:

I strongly recommend you listen to it once today and once again shortly after.
Now, of course, folks at Webmaster World ask:
I never got this, how will they know if someone is giving another money for a link. I know Google is big brother but I don't think the spam team as access to that happy!
I guess it depends on how clear it is. Like if the link is from a paid link network or from a site known to sell links.
Matt said they reserve the right to change or adapt the "criteria" they use for determining what is a paid link. But he also suggests you review the FTC guidelines as well.
Yesterday, Google's Matt Cutts posted a detailed videotrying to define how Google's manual spam fighters determines what is a paid link versus what is not.

Now, 99% of the time, Matt Cutts said it is clear if a link is paid or not. It is a clear transaction that the link on a site was paid $X for. But sometimes it is not clear. Matt summarized it on Google+ these are the other criteria Google uses to determine if a link is considered paid or not. Google asks these questions when looking at a suspicious link:


What is the value of the gift, product, or service?
How close is the gift, product, or service to actual money?
Is it an outright gift or a loan?
Who is the intended audience?
Is the intent of the gift to get links?
Would the gift be a surprise to third party?



Here is the video:

Got A Google Penalty? Should You Start A New Site?

As more and more Google penalties become more transparent, recovering from them seems to get harder. Even when you do recover, the rankings don't always return.

In a recent column by Eric Ward named When The Best SEO Move Is To Kill The Site where he concluded that "in almost two-thirds of the cases I advised that the best move was to kill the site." This is when it comes to unnatural link penalties or Penguin related issues.

The question is, is that true? Is it often easier to kill off the site?

Matt Cutts has said time and time again that digging yourself out of a spam hole is often harder then starting fresh.

Also, now that we know penalties may follow you to your new domain, if you don't start a fresh new web site, then making the decision to kill off a site is even more costly and timely.

If it was as simple as copying your site to a new domain name, switching might make sense more of the time. But if you need to rewrite your content, redo your CMS and design, then it can take a long long time.

Google's John Mueller posted on Google+ a comment about Eric Ward's article saying:


It's never a decision to make lightly, but there can be situations where a website has built up so many problems, that it may appear easier or faster to start over with a fresh & new website, rather than to try to fix all of those problems individually. This isn't an easy way to get past problems that have been built up over the years, it's a lot of work to create a new website, even if you already know the business area.



If you feel you're in this situation, make sure to get advice from friends & other people that you trust (including webmaster communities where you trust their opinions) before doing anything drastic!



In a Google Webmaster Help thread, John Mueller gave advice to someone in a hole that if he will go the new site route, he should start fresh. John wrote:


If you're creating a new website, and don't want to be associated with the old one, I'd strongly recommend really making a *new* website and not just moving the content to a different domain. You don't need to wait for anything in a case like this -- it's fine to remove (or block) the old website, and to create a really new one elsewhere at the same time.



So making the decision to start new is not easy. If it was me, I'd go in this order:

(1) Try removing the bad links (2) Submit a reconsideration request (3) Repeat this a few times until it is successful (4) Wait two months for traffic to change (5) If no traffic change then start a new site

Of course, it is not always this black and white and the specific situation might change the solution. Like if you put a ton of money into your brand name and you can't go elsewhere. Or if there are investors you need to worry about. Or if you simply can't make a new site.

It is a shame to have to deal with this stuff.

Monday, 3 March 2014

Google: You Don't Have To Disavow Off Topic Links

A Google Webmaster Help
 thread has Google's John Mueller responding to webmaster concern over off topic links.
Off topic links are when sites that are unrelated to you are linking to your site. In the link craze these days, Webmasters are afraid of getting link penalties and thus, they are concerned with off topic links.
Google's John Mueller went on record saying:
Just to be completely clear on this: you do not need to disavow links that are from sites on other topics. This tool is really only meant for situations where there are problematic, unnatural, PageRank-passing links that you can't have removed.
So not all off-topic links are problematic or unnatural.

Doing it right vs. doing it over

Cap Watkins in Just Ship*:
We work in a world now where fast isn’t good enough. Where quantity is fairly regularly getting edged out by quality. You shipped twelve just-good-enough things this year? You’re about to get smoked by folks who shipped three of those things thoughtfully and holistically. Where you cut corners on twelve projects to get them out the door, someone else crafted three focused experiences and left themselves little-to-no design or technical debt.
This also describes why arbitrary release dates are poison to good quality products. It forces teams to cut corners to hit a date, which puts them in a more vulnerable position than if they just took the time to do things right.

WorldFloat, India Home Grown Social Network Grown Faster

Worldfloat, India's home grown social networking site with over 45 million users, has introduced a new feature called "viralx" that provide realtime access to videos mostly shared on Twitter, Facebook and other social media.

"Worldfloat viralx are like trending news of Twitter except in a video news version only and not like Twitter which is mostly text based or video links based. We play videos directly upfront on the viralx page," said Worldfloat founder Pushkar Mahatta.

He said viralx offers access to latest real-time video news from all over the world and internet. "These viral videos are the ones which are getting mostly shared on Twitter, Facebook and other social media channels of internet and TV channels like BBC, CNN and Fox News."

Drawing a comparision between Worldfloat's new feature with those of leading social networking sites, Mahatta said: "Twitter's main focus is to broadcast public views of trending celebrities and their conversations via text and video and photo links and the main focus of Worldfloat viralx is to broadcast upfront trending video news of celebrities directly via videos, not via links of videos or text."

In Worldfloat viralx you can not only watch the videos of trending topics from around the world but also type in a celebrity name and see their latest viral videos and their life happenings and events and movies and music.

Viralx is a direct video broadcast of viral celebrities and their trending life and events.

We see many celebrity news channels publish text news and photos of celebrities along with videos of celebrities but latest viral videos only of all celebrities and their lives are a special feature of Worldfloat viralx.

"From top to bottom in celebrities viralx we show videos from the latest videos to the older videos based on time events of the celebrities and their life and happening. We are featuring in viralx all kinds of celebrities like movie celebrities, political celebrities, music and cricket celebrities," Mahatta said.

Viralx videos get updated every hour and shows only the latest one. It shows high trending videos from various topics like latest music videos, latest funny videos, latest technology videos, latest movie trailers, Bollywood and Hollywood news.

Mahatta said viralx is the first viral video news broadcast channel for the online internet world in India.

"We imagine viralx to be like the TV for the Internet showing latest news from mixed channels and extreme high trends of the social networking worlds of the internet. Worldfloat viralx is a new feature from Worldfloat among its other features like free online movies, news and social networking," he said.

Sunday, 2 March 2014

Anonymous social apps provide forum for gripes, gossip



"I admit that I secretly crave attention so I lie that I have ulcers and that I have gotten surgery on my knees."

"I'm quitting in May and will drive across the country."

"Sometimes I secretly wish I would catch my bf cheating just so I'd have a legit reason to break up with him."

These are just a few of the confidential posts on a growing number of social apps that encourage nameless users to post anonymous confessions, gripes and gossip. These networks, which includeWhisper, Secret, Confide and the forthcoming Rumr, make it possible to share thoughts anonymously with strangers, friends or friends of friends.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, there's no need to worry about offending your friends, harming your career or tarnishing your online persona.

"Anonymity can help people be themselves and share what they really feel or think," said David Byttow, co-founder of Secret, which launched in January.

Unburdened by the consequences that come with posting under real identities, posters on these apps can be brutally honest. For many people, anonymity can mean a freedom from maintaining their personal brand, the "self" they carefully edit for their friends and family on Facebook and Twitter.

If Facebook is sipping champagne during an après-ski selfie, Secret is letting it all hang out with a cheap beer and no makeup in your parents' basement.

Secrets among friends

These startups have taken cues from the original secret sharing service, PostSecret. That blog anonymously publishes select postcards, decorated with images and words, that people mail to founder Frank Warren. The twin barriers of needing a stamp and having to make it past a human curator has kept its confessions interesting without being cruel.

But when PostSecret tried branching out in 2011 with an iPhone app that let anyone publish their own secrets, it had to be shut down less than three months later due to abusive and malicious content.

Fast forward a few years, and social apps are trying again -- this time with a few variations on the formula.

Two-year-old Whisper is a popular service for posting anonymous messages that anyone can read. They can be sorted by most recent or nearby, which will display Whispers from anyone within a certain number of miles.

Of course, as with all these apps, there's no way to tell what posts are true. Many are about sex or love, and some are offensive. Most Whisper users are young, between 17 and 28.

Secret also lets people post a sentence or two on top of an image or colored background. But in an interesting twist, Secret only shares your posts -- anonymously, of course -- within your circle of friends. The app combs through your contacts to determine which of your friends are also on the service. It won't tell you who it finds, so you can only guess who in your circle is posting to the app or commenting on your confession.

When people click a heart indicating that they "love" a post, it is shared with their circle, and so on. Only people within two degrees of separation can comment on posts. Because Secret has drawn many of its early users from the Silicon Valley and New York tech scenes, many posts so far are tech-industry rumors and jokes.

Secret has already had its first viral falsehood. In early February a user claimed that Evernote, the popular note-taking app, was about to be acquired. The post gained some traction in social media, forcing Evernote CEO Phil Libin to deny the report.

Fighting the trolls

One big challenge for these services, which mix social networks with Internet commenting, is to strike a balance between juicy gossip and cruel, abusive posts. Anyone who has glanced at an Internet commenting section knows that anonymous chatter can turn nasty, fast.

To combat this, the official Secret Twitter feed re-posts many of positive Secret messages about friendship, heartbreak and overcoming adversity, but ignores mean-spirited ones.

Because Secret posts are shared with people in the same networks, there's always the tantalizing -- or frightening -- possibility that other users could puzzle out who you are based on your writing style, image choice or subject matter.

"Secret users always have the benefit of plausible deniability," said Byttow. "Sometimes guessing who a secret is from is part of the fun. It certainly sparks a lot of entertaining offline conversations."

To fight trolls, these apps typically include features that let users report bullying or flag posts as inappropriate. On Whisper, a team of employees scans posts for offensive content. Whisper has also launched Your Voice, a nonprofit resource for college students struggling with mental health problems.

Secret's first incarnation was as a web app for sending anonymous messages directly to people over text or e-mail.

"It was fun, but proved to be something that could be used for evil in the wrong hands," said Byttow. "We didn't want to give that to the world.We set out to help people convey thoughts and feelings with their friends."

These anonymous apps seem to be popular for now. But only time will tell if they flame out, like the much-hyped "social discovery" apps from two years ago, or gain traction like Snapchat, the popular app that lets users exchange self-destructing photos and messages.

Secret isn't sharing any user numbers yet, but Whisper has reported some impressive statistics. In December, the company said it was nearing 3 billion page views a month. In September, it raised $21 million in funding.

Nasty LinkedIn rejection goes viral



When you're a city's "Communicator of the Year" and have hailed yourself as a "passionate advocate" for job-seekers, you probably ought not blast one of those job-seekers in a snide, dismissive e-mail.

Because the Internet hates that sort of thing.

But that's what's happened to Kelly Blazek, who runs a popular online job bank for marketing professionals in Cleveland.

Blazek's response to an e-mail and LinkedIn request from Diana Mekota, a 26-year-old planning to move to Cleveland this summer, has made the rounds on Reddit, Buzzfeed and other viral hotspots after Mekota posted it to her Imgur account.

And the resulting backlash is yet another cautionary tale about how posting something mean-spirited online can come back to haunt you in the social media age.

"Your invite to connect is inappropriate, beneficial only to you, and tacky," Blazek wrote, according to Mekota's post. "Wow, I cannot wait to let every 26-year-old jobseeker mine my top-tier marketing connections to help them land a job."

And she was just getting warmed up.

"I love the sense of entitlement in your generation," she wrote, then continued. "You're welcome for your humility lesson for the year. Don't ever reach out to senior practitioners again and assume their carefully curated list of connections is available to you, just because you want to build your network."

She wrapped up with: "Don't ever write me again."

How social media can affect your job search

Mekota's original e-mail, sent February 19, was a short message detailing her education, professional and volunteer activities and asking to join the 7,300-member jobs list. She said she got Blazek's response shortly afterward and, after composing herself, wrote a response.

"I realize you told me to never write you again, but wanted to reach out as there has been a large miscommunication and I merely wanted to explain myself," she wrote.

She said she sent a LinkedIn request so Blazek could see her credentials because a friend told her not to send a resume.

"I apologize if this came off as arrogant or invasive as that was never my intention," she wrote. "I was again, hoping to join your very impressive job board but I understand you(r) reservations."

After the posts went viral (spawning, for one, the obligatory Twitter parody account), Blazek on Wednesday e-mailed an apology to the Cleveland Plain-Dealer.

She repeated the statement in an email response to CNN, saying she has apologized to "everyone involved."

"I am very sorry to the people I have hurt," she wrote. "Creating and updating the Cleveland Job Bank listings has been my hobby for more than ten years. It started as a labor of love for the marketing industry, but somehow it also became a labor, and I vented my frustrations on the very people I set out to help."

Blazek was named 2013's "Communicator of the Year" by Cleveland's branch of the International Association of Business Communicators.

"I've always been a passionate advocate for keeping talent in NE Ohio, and we have so much of it in the region," she said in her acceptance speech. "I want my subscribers to feel like everyone is my little sister or brother, and I'm looking out for them."

On Thursday, she appeared to have deleted her Twitter account and Wordpress blog.

"The note I sent to Diana was rude, unwelcoming, unprofessional and wrong ...," she said in her e-mail. "Diana and her generation are the future of this city. I wish her all the best in landing a job in this great town."

Playing it safe in the social media world

On Twitter, Mekota confirmed having received an apology.

"Would like to let you know Kelly Blazek has sent a very nice apology email, for which I thank her," she wrote.

But this may not have been the first time Blazek has had a nasty exchange with a potential job-bank member.

Rick Uldricks told CNN affiliate WJW-TV in Cleveland that he received a similar response in December when he messaged Blazek saying he'd been deleted from the jobs list and would like to be added again.

"I suggest you join the other Job Bank in town. Oh -- guess what. There isn't one," Blazek wrote, according to an e-mail he provided the station. "Done with this conversation, and you."



According to the Plain Dealer, she has also apologized to Uldricks.

Boston College student's Facebook brag costs family $80,000


It might be the costliest status update in Facebook history.
According to a Miami Herald report, an $80,000 settlement in an age-discrimination case was thrown out after Dana Snay, identified by Yahoo! as a Boston College student, bragged about the settlement on Facebook.
Yahoo! reports that Snay's father, Patrick Snay, sued Gulliver Preparatory School in Miami after his contract was not renewed. One provision of the settlement, however, was that Patrick Snay was forbidden from discussing the case.
According to the Herald report, Snay told his daughter about the settlement and she then bragged to her Facebook followers: “Gulliver is now officially paying for my vacation to Europe this summer. SUCK IT.”
When the school found out about the Facebook post, its lawyers appealed the settlement -- and it was tossed out, according to the report.

Google Bug Fix Returns Traffic To SlashFilm & Other Movie Blogs

Monday we reported how SlashFilm.com & movie blogs saw a huge decline in traffic around February 14th and how Google's Matt Cutts said he will look into it.
Well he did and their traffic is back, for the most part. Peter Sciretta the owner of Slashfilm.com told me on Twitter that as of yesterday, almost all his traffic from Google has returned. Peter added that he was told it was an "error on google's side" and Google fixed the issue and now Slashfilm.com and other movie blog's Google traffic is back.
SEMRush.com graphs confirm the traffic has returned:
semrush slashfilm
Here are the relevant tweets from Slashfilm:


Glenn Gabe also shared how another movie blog saw a fix in their traffic. ScreenRant.com according to SEM Rush has the same pattern:
screenrant-semrush
Glenn Gabe thinks it has to do with a Panda monthly refresh but I am not too sure to be honest. Yes, there was some sort of update but that was closer to the 12th and not the 14th. This seems more of a weird Google bug than a Panda related issue but what do I know.
All Matt Cutts told me was "this was a transient issue that affected a small number of sites, and the issue is now fixed."
If I was Slashflim.com or another movie blog impacted by two weeks of lost traffic, I'd be pretty upset about this bug. What recourse does one have? Not much. Just make sure you have a loyal readership and try not to depend on Google so much. Easier said than done, I know.

Ex-Googlers Explain Why They Won't Give Up The Secrets To Ranking In Google

I spotted a thread at Black Hat World asking why have we not seen a case where a former Google employee who worked in search quality sell their knowledge or publish the secret sauce on what it would take to rank well quickly and get rich fast. Or why haven't these former Googlers done it for themselves, exploit their knowledge to rank well in Google and make a quick buck?
I decided to ask some former Google'rs who worked in the search quality team at Google but now no longer work at Google. What they have said may be interesting to you. This is all captured in a Google+ thread.
Pedro Dias, someone at the higher levels of the Search Quality Analyst team, who worked at Google for about five years and then leaving to move closer to home, I believe. He gave several reasons why he has personally not given up the secret sauce.
  • Because SQ Google'rs hate spam and anything related to cheating or manipulation... We have seen the darkest of the web... Really;
  • Because this would undermine the trust between all my current and ex-colleagues;
  • Because we prefer to have it long term, than to work for the "get rich quick";
  • Because we don't see SEO as "gaming the system"... Despite what many SEO's say. We have our own vision, we prefer to think like Search Engineers and help businesses understand Search rather than selling magic formulas and torching them.
  • Because we signed an NDA, although it doesn't count as much as the points above.
  • And sometimes because we like to know stuff that others don't and keep it like that :P
I grilled him a bit more, because I really wonder if they do know the secret sauce. I asked Pedro, " do you have deep dark secrets that you can use to exploit the algo and rank #1 for [viagra] or something that competitive." He responded:
Again, I would prefer not to go into such details mentioning that I know X, Y or Z... I feel fortunate to have been part of a select group and touched some very important and exclusive areas, that's all I can say...
I guess once a Googler, always a Googler.
Kaspar Szymanski, who worked in the Search Quality Strategist and was at Google for about seven years, chimed in also. He told me:
Just like my clients value expertise, they equally value integrity.
Fili Wiese, who worked at Google for about seven years also but not just in the search quality team, also the ad quality team, said it short also, "I agree with Pedro Dias and Kaspar Szymanski."
Again, I still wonder, if Google has anything that one of these former Googlers can truely exploit and get rich quickly with. Yea, I am sure there are some things that will work in the short term and Googlers and non-Googlers can figure those out. But long term - you still need to know the fundamentals.
It just happens that all of these Googlers quoted here act in somewhat of an SEO and search consultant role now.

How teens use Facebook and Twitter

Evie Nagy did a fascinating interview with danah boyd about her new book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. On how teens use Facebook and Twitter:
They’re also more likely to have protected accounts, and use it to talk to a small group of their actual friends. To them Facebook is everyone they ever knew, and Twitter is something they’ve locked down to just a handful of people they care about — which is often the opposite of how adults use them.
A lot of the teens I talk to, they’ll have like 30 followers. It’s a small world for them, as opposed to trying to grow large followings. There are teens who are themselves microcelebrities, which is a different game. There are also a lot of teens who use Twitter around interests. An obsession with One Direction, and just talking to other One Direction people. That becomes Twitter, and then they’ll use Instagram with another group of friends. This one girl I talked to said, ‘Yeah, if you’re not into the things that I’m into, don’t follow me on Twitter.’
I’ve long been a fan of danah’s work, so I just bought the book and can’t wait to read it.
Related, Kayleigh Roberts wrote a very interesting article on how teens try to get celebrities to follow them on Twitter. From The Psychology of Begging to Be Followed on Twitter:
It’s not rare for a teen who is spamming to reach what is known as the tweet limit, something that the average user of the site might not even know exists. The tweet limit is 1,000 tweets per day, and many teens reach it regularly, especially when seeking the attention of a celebrity. It may seem excessive, but celebrities with millions of followers receive so many tweets, that it’s easy for even 1,000 to go unnoticed. Reaching the tweet limit can happen by accident, but it’s often a premeditated decision.
This is a world I didn’t even knew existed. I feel pretty old right now.

GOOGLE’S MOBILE ORDERING AHEAD PATENT

Will Google be transforming the way that we order from restaurants and other merchants such as pharmacists? A patent application published by Google this past week points to the possibility.
Google has been experimenting with showing menus from restaurants in its search results recently, and added them as reported in Search Engine Land on Friday – Now Official: Google Adds Restaurant Menus To Search Results.
The article seems more filled with questions than answers, such as where Google is getting the menu information, and even why they are publishing menu information. I suspect that a lot of restaurants will be be begging Google for ways to submit their latest menus in the near future.
Knowing what the menu might look like at a restaurant might make the difference between whether you will dine there, or drive past. For example, if I didn’t know better based on word of mouth, I wouldn’t begin to suspect that the Inn at Little Washington, in the middle of nowhere rural Virginia, might be one of the best restaurants in the United States. Here’s part of their menu:

The main course choices at the Inn at Little Washington

The patent application is:
Ordering Ahead with a Mobile Device
Invented by Robert Kim, and Ray Reddy
US Patent Application 20140058901
Published February 27, 2014
Filed August 24, 2012
Abstract
The present invention provides a computer-implemented method to order ahead with a mobile device.
A user network device:
  • Receives an input of an order from a user;
  • Communicates the order to a merchant network device;
  • Receives a preparation time for one or more components of the order;
  • Determines a location of the user device;
  • Monitors a projected time of arrival at the merchant based on the location of the user device;
  • Compares the projected time of arrival with the component preparation time; and
  • Notifies the merchant to begin preparation of at least one of the components in response to a determination that the projected time of arrival equals the preparation time of one or more components.
There are others in this space, including some that have recently made announcements about how their mobile payment system might work. Square announced a beta program on February 27th where people could order online ahead of arrival at a restaurant and pay beforehand, which they are testing at a number of restaurants in San Francisco.
On Friday, a company named Dash announced a new IOS 7 app update to a mobile app that allows for mobile payments to restaurants before ordering and location-based sensing of the location of orderers, including when they enter a restaurant they ordered at.
The Google patent application covers ordering online before you make a pickup, a way to time the preparation of an order (whether for food, or for places such as a pharmacy), and a way for a merchant to find and track the location of someone who ordered and adjust preparation times based upon estimated arrival times of the person who ordered.
The patent doesn’t tell us that the first step Google might use to introduce a service such as this one would be by making menus available to searchers. But it’s definitely a way to have people think of Google when they want to see menus and are considering where to dine.

TWEET SHOWING HOW GOOGLE ITSELF IS A “SCRAPER SITE” GOES MASSIVELY VIRAL

Perhaps it’s SEO’s “Oreo moment,” a tweet relating to search engine optimization that’s gained nearly as much attention as Oreo’s famous Super Bowl blackout tweet. But the subject was a perfect storm of goodness — a real-life example of Google doing the type of thing in search it seems to be telling others not to do.
Yesterday, the head of Google’s web spam team Matt Cutts announced a new Google Scraper Report for publishers to use if they see a site that has copied or “scraped” its content and which outranks the publisher in Google searches.
That quickly brought up a number of people joking in various places about how Google itself borrows content from other sites to make the direct answers it displays in its own search results. But, no joke hit it as right as that from digital marketer Dan Barker on Twitter, who tweeted back to Cutts:
what_is_a_scraper_site_-_Google_Search-9
It was super clever. Barker did a search for what is a scraper site, which brought up Google’s own web definition at the top of the results. And that definition technically outranks the original source of the content, Wikipedia, which comes right below.
Google does link to Wikipedia in its excerpt, which is in keeping with how its other search results work and generally on the right side of the law, when these things have been challenged in various places. And by scraper site, Google’s really talking about sites that wholescale copy all of someone’s content, rather than aiming for a fair use excerpt.
But still, as Google has increased the amount of web definitions, direct answers andKnowledge Graph box answers that are drawn from the content of other sites, the tensions have been rising.
With regular search listings, Google typically showed enough information for a searcher to decide if they want to visit a website and, if so, they’d click through. But the changes over the past few years (which Bing also does) have been to provide actual answers drawn from sites, so that there’s no need to click through.
It’s a difficult balancing act, because there are good reasons why it makes more sense for Google (or Bing) to just show the direct answer of something, rather than having dozens of sites all fight to be number one for “What time is the Super Bowl,” as they do.
But, it’s also a fundamental change to the unwritten contract between search engines and publishers — that yes, search engines can build their “content” on the back of publisher content, but only if there’s a fair exchange of traffic.
Barker’s tweet is perhaps the biggest sign ever that publishers are feeling like the balancing act is tipping too much into Google’s side. I’ve never, in 18 years writing about search, seen such a response like this. Last year’s Oreo tweet, when the Super Bowl had a blackout, was a darling example of huge engagement.
That tweet, associated with a prime time event, has about 16,000 re tweets as of today, over a year later. Barker’s tweet, not associated with any major sporting event and about an issue that’s usually only of concern to SEOs, is over 14,000 tweets as I write this — and over 12,000 favorites.
Wow.

GOOGLE'S MATT CUTTS WANTS YOU TO SEND HIM EXAMPLES SCRAPER SITES

Matt Cutts, Google’s head spam guy, posted on Twitter that he wants you to submit reports and examples of scraper sites or URLs that are outranking the original source.
He made a Google Doc form where you can submit the report over here. The form asks you the source URL, i.e. the original source of the content, the URL of the page stealing the content, the search results page where it is being outranked, and just an agree link.
You should keep in mind, in January 2011, Google came out with an algorithm specifically designed to prevent scrapers from ranking well, i.e. the scraper algorithm.
The best example thus far was posted by +JonDunn with a tip from Dan Barker:
google scraper example
Classic!
Anyway, I assume this means Google is going to use this data to improve or create a new algorithm in the future.