As part of our ongoing deeper thoughts on the video Matt Cutts made about ten Google SEO changes happening this summer - I wanted to discuss the points about going upstream to devalue link spammers and Google rethinking their link analysis techniques.
This all starts at about 3 minutes and 13 seconds into the video where Matt Cutts talks for less than a minute about the topics. They are two different topics, one about devaluing links "upstream" from link spammers and the second about building out a new link analysis system.
Devaluing Link Spammers Up Stream
Matt Cutts said they are looking for ways to deny link spammers more at the top of the chain. It seems like Google is looking for those networks to be squashed not just manually but algorithmically. Matt said:
We're also looking at some ways to go upstream to deny the value to link spammers-some people who spam links in various ways. We've got some nice ideas on trying to make sure that that becomes less effective and so we expect that that will roll out over the next few months as well.
Very interesting but that is all he said, so hard to know exactly what will change.
More Sophisticated Link Analysis System
This seems very exciting, in that Matt Cutts said that they are building out a new system to do a more detailed and "sophisticated link analysis." He didn't say what it will do, but it does seem that this may allow Google to better understand the quality of links to a site, if they should be trusted, how much they should matter and better determine which sites should rank for a specific query.
Here is what Matt said:
And in fact, we’re working on a completely different system that does more sophisticated link analysis. We’re still in the early days for that, but it’s pretty exciting. We’ve got some data now that we’re ready to start munging and see how good it looks and we’ll see whether that bears fruit or not.
Again, not much here to chew on and very early on in the development but should be interesting. Maybe a Penguin cousin?
Forum discussion continued at WebmasterWorld & Hacker News.
This story was scheduled to be posted today and was not written today, as I am offline today.
Transcript by siegemedia.com.
Image credit to BigStockPhoto for analysis graphic
