Morning Keynote with Matt Cutts from Google

Matt Cutts was swarmed by people wanting to get a picture even more than I had anticipated. The poor guy ended up sticking around 2 hours post his keynote to pose for pictures. You would think that Miley Cyrus was in the house or something. This was Matt Cutts’ thirteenth Pubcon event. His first slide shared some pics of the very first Pubcon event all those years ago. Here are some other highlights from Matt’s keynote:

• He did a review of what Google did last year:
  • “Moonshot” changes to Knowledge Graph
  • Have gotten better at voice search
  • Conversational search (think pronouns)
  • Google Now
  • Deep learning – multiple layers of neural networks
    • Examples of word pair relationships using the best word vectors
    • Trying to teach Google to read at a grade one level
• Google is trying to figure out answers (voice search weather example)
• Hummingbird is a core quality change – which words in a query are more important Only affected queries to a small degree (90% of queries impacted)
• They are looking at softening Panda. Moving sites in “grey area” into higher rankings zone
• Detecting boosting authorities in certain topics (i.e. medical) – you need to be a resource/authority
• Working on smart phone ranking – is a site slower on smart phones
• He talked about Webspam changes
  • Penguin 2.0 and 2.1 – will keep iterating on this – target spammers
  • Algorithms for spammy queries (payday loans, car insurance)
  • Advertorials/native advertising – you need to label it as “paid advertising”
  • You should not be paying for links that pass PageRank
  • Continued action on spam networks
  • Google is trying to improve communication on items such as hacking. Trying to provide concrete examples in their quality Guidelines.
    • Types of spam categories – which ones do they take action on the most?

Matt went on to discuss the “Future of Search”:

• Machine learning – Google is trying to get smarter.
• Mobile is huge!6%, 25%, 40% – YouTube traffic from mobile phones over the past three years.
  • In some countries mobile traffic had surpassed desktop traffic.

Some of the “advice” that Matt shared included:

• Get ready for mobile (don’t use flash)
• Learn about requestAutocomplete
  • Annotate your forms – markup for forms (adds an attribute to describe an item)
  • Do you want to fill out this form in one click?
  • Ad heavy pages above the fold – future algorithm update?
  • Tightening authorship – looking for high quality authors (15% reduction?)
  • Rich snippets may depend on site quality
  • Google will get smarter on JavaScript (fetch, index JS)

The first session of the day I attended was about: Campaign Development for Content Marketing. Phillip Thune of Textbrokers was up first. He spoke about four elements of establishing a content strategy:

• Define – messaging, style, topics, legal guidelines, calendar, channels, goals
• Design – ebooks, newsletters, webinars, white papers, blogs, videos, press releases, product descriptions.
• Develop – use writers in house, rely on subject matter experts, outsource (use brainpower not manpower) – try freelancers, biding sites, repurpose content.
• Deploy – post to website, blogs, promote with easy share buttons, and make sure content contains keywords for maximum results.

Jenneva Vargas was up next with a presentation called Creating Strategic Content and Getting Outreach Success. She outlined what her three content goals are for any content strategy:

• Content goals
  • Traffic
  • Leads
  • Obtain links

Up next was a very energetic Steve Floyd with his presentation on the Bruce Lee Guide to Content Strategy. This is one of the best presentations that I’ve seen in years with all of the insight and tools that Steve included. This was a fantastic presentation by Steve. It is available on SlideShare.

The next session that I attended was: Content Marketing for a Mobile Site. One of the main takeaways from this session was that having a true SEO strategy for different devices is the way to go and that it is all about intent. Dynamic Serving is the best approach for mobile with responsive design being second.

The next session I attended is one that I always like to hit up at conferences, which was on: SEO Hot Topics and Trends. This session featured a veteran panel that featured Bruce Clay, Stephen Spencer, and Aaron Shear. Bruce had a number of great insights that were really on par with what we have been communicating here at Mediative. Some of these items included:

• Hummingbird – a verbal focus on the searcher. It is an attempt to eliminate ambiguity. More vocal commands are going to drive search.
• Not provided – avoid keyword article spinning against just popular keywords. We need to teach SEOs that it is really about traffic more than keywords. It takes out attribution.
• Penalties – 10 years of abuse creates a lot of repair needs. The Google view of traffic is that we are getting free traffic from them. Repair takes 4-8 months – sometimes longer. Google is not motivated to give us free traffic. A re-inclusion request is processed in 68 seconds or less.

Stephen Spencer made an interesting and visionary comment that in five years we are not even going to be typing on our computers – we’ll be talking to them. This may hold true with the fact that Search is undergoing a major transformation towards more conversational and voice search.

The other sessions that I attended on day two revolved around content strategy – specifically, producing high quality content. Day two, just like day one of Pubcon was incredible. A lot of great knowledge transfer and a lot of insightful commentary around content, keyword research and links. The only complaint that I had was that there were too many great sessions happening all at the same time and it was impossible for me to take them in. This is probably one of the best conferences that I have attended, possibly ever. Great job by the Pubcon team; you have produced a number of solid sessions, energetic speakers and decent presentations. Well done.



About the Author
Jody has been specializing in organic search for the better part of the past decade. Having spent seven years with Mediative (formerly Enquiro), Jody has dealt with some of the largest brands in the world reviewing sites, providing insightful analysis and mapping online strategies for our clients. Jody has contributed articles to leading industry resources such as Search Engine Guide, Web Pro News Canada, Search Engine Journal and his own blog Marketing-Jive.com. Jody has created and developed SEO for Website Redesign solutions, has prepared numerous SEO best practices and is an advocate of continuous improvement. Jody plays a key role in helping Mediative deliver cutting edge search strategies, assisting clients with adapting to the ever-changing online universe.