The Silverback Marketing Round-up for June 4-June 8, 2012

Published in Thoughts

Tuesday, June 5 was the day of the 2012 “You & A with Matt Cutts” at the SMX Advanced Conference in Seattle. The conference is hosted by Search Engine Land and the discussion that takes place between Matt Cutts and the head of Search Engine Land Danny Sullivan has become an annual event at the conference. The 2012 discussion was highly informative as always but featured a high degree of humor at the beginning.

The session commenced with a video that was created back on May 12, 2012 entitled “How to Rank #1 on Google”. The video featured Matt Cutts, who is head of the web spam team for Google, providing “advice” on the most effective methods to ensure your site will rank #1 on Google. If after watching this video you truly believe that stuffing your content with as many keywords as possible (the optimal amount is 77%), linking to porn sites and annoying the users visiting your website will produce positive results, you may need to consider a new profession. The same rule applies if you believe you will receive a boost for running AdSense and believe his theory that Bing and other search engines are simply hackers engaging in illegal activity.

It was nice to see that Google’s web spam team director has a sense of humor. That video was shown before Danny Sullivan and Matt Cutts strode onstage to join a team of penguins, an obvious reference to one of the most-talked about online topics at this time, Google’s Penguin algorithm released this year.

SMX Advanced Conference attendees were treated to another round of outstanding and relevant information from Cutts. One of the more important pieces of information he delivered was that Google’s definition of “penalty” is when the search engine takes manual action against a website. The Panda and Penguin algorithm updates are not designed to be penalties against a website, contrary to the theory many webmasters believe in regards to the two algorithms.

Click the picture below to watch the video shown at the event and take the time to read the articles provided below, several of which were written by individuals that attended the event. Have a great weekend!