In the latest version of Google's Search Off the Record podcast with John Mueller, Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt. They spoke about a ton of topics including rendering, indexing, SEO and developer relations, the unconference and next conference and just a lot of joking around. But they also said that Bitcoin miners cannot use Google's resources to mine Bitcoin.
Here is the audio file, it is worth listening to, because it gives you more information on how Google works:
At 7:45 into this podcast, Gary shared a "fun fact," he said "Also fun fact, you can't mine bitcoins in our infrastructure. At least I know that people tried and we are aware of this so no." He then said " That was a problem, that was one of the challenges. People are like "Oh, let's add this malicious JavaScript on to people's website." I mean, it's a fantastic money grab scheme, if you can infect lots of websites and inject malware, then why don't you inject a JavaScript- based WebGL bitcoin miner?"
Then Gary spoke about signal extraction and this is where Google pulls some signals, not all of them are used for rankings, some are and some aren't. Some of the signals looked at in this phase include canonicalization, PageRank, SafeSearch, location, and language and more. He actually dug into PageRank for a while and discussed that is still used a lot by Google.
Then they spent some time talking about the delicate nature SEOs need to talk to developers, espesially when talking about JavaScript. They ended talking about the unconference and the next Google conference and maybe in-person events one day.
It was a good one!
Forum discussion at Twitter.
