Live Q&A September 21, 2011 Matt Cutts

[Donna]

Its pretty interesting , he holds on some thoughts but he gives some valuable info. He did state that "block this site" do rise a flag and demotion in the serps(so much about not being sabotaged by competition) ..... Check it out there are more stuff to hear too.

[tedster]

Here's a link to the recording: [youtube.com...]

[Donna]

Thanks I forgot to post it :(

[tedster]

Matt can be quite frank in live Q&A sessions. He was at the Pubcon kickoff party tonight and I was impressed with the way he addressed various hot-button issues. He's one guy who's willing to say "If I had my way, it wouldn't have been done like that."

One thing he told a group of us about tonight was that the leaked "quality raters" document is NOT from his department. His department also uses quality raters, but their training documents have never been leaked.

He also clarified that quality rater input (whether his or Amit's) is used AFTER THE FACT - to give the algo team feedback on whatever they've already done. So even if a lot of quality raters say "this site is spam" that doesn't mean that site will get manually demoted. It does mean the team that wrote the algo will see that quality raters feel that spam crept in and how much.

So the process is literally quality control for the algorithm, not for websites.

At any rate, Matt will be handling another live Q&A at Pubcon Wednesday morning. He gave us a preview - he intends to address the SSL search results that have no keywords in the referrer.

[smithaa02]

Tedster...are you able to ask him questions? If so, can you ask how a simple 'freshness' algo tweak can affect 35% of all SERP's? When it will kick in? Perhaps ask about the vital rankings...does google hand out these vital ranks and do they affect SERPs?

BTW, I don't believe that human raters are only after the fact. We know they use raters for penalties...so why wouldn't they use the same rating system self-grading search quality? Plus the information was too specific (ctrl-a for spam test...whois lookups for redirects...very specific guidelines to see if sites get vital ranks....all sounds like stuff that goes on your permanent record...we all know how google doesn't like to throw data away...).

[indyank]

Yes, I don't believe it was after the fact. Definitely not.They did explain it the other way round ([wired.com ]) and it is also captured here -[en.wikipedia.org ] under "The Panda Process".

Google's new Panda machine-learning algorithm, made possible by and named after engineer Navneet Panda, was then used to look for similarities between websites people found to be high quality and low quality.

It was the "Blocklist data" which was used as "AFTER THE FACT".

[LostOne]

Somebody should update that Wikipedia article

"...and a drop in rankings for sites containing large amounts of advertising"

Too general