One of Google’s software engineers, Matt Cutts, has a blog up and running. The latest post has a great personal reply to someone questioning him on why their site wasn’t showing up on the engine. Cutts gives a lengthy reply as to why that was, and it didn’t look good for the site operator.
The blog is entitled “Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO,” and may be a nice one to keep up with as it develops. Matt’s detailed answer about duplicate content and other problems with the trouble website can provide great insight into what Google penalizes and what it rewards.
An excerpt from his email to the unwitting interrogator:
“Hi, I saw that you wrote to user support asking about www.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.com. We recently launched some technology that looks for duplicate or scraped content. In this case, our algorithms calculated that there were some strange pages on this domain.
“Without know which pages the algorithm detected, I looked around a bit. I’m guessing http://www.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.com/debt-consolidation.html probably kicked things off. This appears to be a scraped copy of www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/alerts/bankrupt.htm In fact, the page on XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.com appears to have not one, but two copies (one right after the other) of the original page from the FTC?
“Also, http://www.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.com/free-credit-report.html appears to be a copy of http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/credit/freereports.htm as well. It also looked like there were some pages such as http://www.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.com/legal-forms/item.php?item=75 http://www.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.com/legal-forms/cat.php?cat=8 that were selling legal forms?
“It’s good that these pages have been removed; it didn’t seem like legal agreements such as “Contract Employing Real Estate Broker for Lease of Property” were really relevant to XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.com.”
Ouch. It goes on a bit more, but thought that was a good enough example. It should be an interesting blog to follow.
Let’s hope he doesn’t give away too much and follow the same fate as a certain Mark Jen, who got the axe from Google for the secretive missives posted on his blog.