Matt Cutts At PubCon

Thanks to Barry Schwartz at SearchEngineLand for his, Key Takeaways From Google’s Matt Cutts Talk At PubCon. Here is my take on some of these issues:

• Google knows there has been more web spam in the search results and it is due to moving web spam resources to other projects. Those resources are coming back and Google will be working on patching up that issue. - I have noticed a ton of spam in the results relating to legal services. While having multiple practice specific sites can be a good strategy, spamming the results with literally 50 different sites targeting a specific keyword is not. There is one particular firm spamming heavily for michigan bankruptcy lawyer related terms. Can you see it?
• Google will soon be offering specific notifications via Webmaster Tools informing webmasters of spam on their site. Specifically, Google will warn of doorway pages, parked domains and 3 other spam issues to start. - This is good news. Informing webmasters of what Google is finding in terms of web spam provides them the necessary insight to fight the spam on their domains.
• Matt recommends SEOs do not “chase the algorithm” and instead try to predict where Google will be going in the future. - Well said. We have recently been getting more and more inquiries from legal professionals about why their "seo efforts" haven't been producing the results that they hoped. Most of the time, it's because they are executing strategies that were successful several years ago. Shoot ahead of the algorithm. Reading old information about getting found is likely to be primarily ineffective.
• Matt made a point to mention that users are more likely to click on the first link in an article as opposed to a link at the bottom of the article. He said put your most important links at the top of the article. I believe it was Matt hinting to SEOs about this. - This validates the suspicions of many search professionals regarding the impact of link location and user interaction on search position.
• Google has 200 ranking factors but those ranking factors may have 50 or more variations within a single factor. - While there are a lot of ranking factors, their are far fewer worth obsessing over. From a technical aspect, build on a quality site architecture with fast page load speeds. After that, concentrate on content and publicizing that content to acquire additional publicity and links.
• Google will be looking at why exact domain matches rank so well. For example, if you have a site at www.blue-widgets.com it may rank a bit too well for the keyword phrase [blue widgets]. - We ourselves have been surprised by the degree of success exact match domains have. We will be monitoring whether there are any major changes with regard to exact match domains.
• Google will be building a new paid link tool to block only the paid links on a page and let the other links, that are not paid, pass link juice. - Interesting. I will be curious to see if this tool catches on. Paid links are a difficult problem for Google. Especially those experienced in paid linking campaigns.