Last Wednesday at the SMX Advanced show, Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, shared some news and announcements with us during his keynote session. Here are some of the highlights from Matt’s talk:
Payday Loan 3.0 Launches
Matt Cutts announced Wednesday night that Google would launch version 3.0 of the Payday loan algorithm. 3.0 actually began rolling out the following day and specifically was aimed at spammy queries, whereas 2.0, which launched a couple weeks earlier, targeted more spammy sites.
Payday 3.0 specifically targets spammy queries, versus spammy sites. What exactly that means is not 100% clear. But the types of queries this targets includes terms like [payday loans], [casinos], [viagra] and other forms of highly spammy queries.
For more details see this blog post.
Google Confirms Metafilter Was Not Hit By Panda Or Penguin Algorithms
Google’s Matt Cutts also confirmed with us that Metafilter was not hit by the Panda or Penguin algorithms, but rather some other unconfirmed and unnamed algorithm that Google won’t tell us about.
So despite the fact that I reported about an algorithmic update on November 17th and Google wouldn’t confirm or deny it, Google is now confirming it. Over a year and a half later, the update we saw on November 17, 2012 is confirmed by Google.
For more on this topic, see our post on Metafilter.
More Feedback On Google Reconsideration Requests
Matt Cutts also said we should expect more detailed responses on some reconsideration request rejection notices in the future. In fact, we posted a screen shot showing the new option where these rejection notices add a box for “a note from your reviewer.” This section gives Googlers the ability to give more specific feedback when rejecting a Google reconsideration request.
Google’s Matt Cutts said it won’t necessarily be used on all rejections but now they have an option to add more details when they deem it necessary.
Of course, the image we used on this post is when Matt Cutts launched hummingbirds at SMX attendees.
To see our live blog coverage of the session see our sister site, Search Engine Land.
Image credit to @GillianMeier
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