Matt Cutts is Google’s Quality Control Chief for organic or algorithmic search. He heads the team charged with maintaining and improving Google search results. Known as Google’s head spam fighter, Matt keeps strong lines of communication open between himself and the web marketing community, including the information rich personal blog he publishes.
Last Wednesday’s (Oct. 11) recap of major updates at Google since the beginning of summer shows why Matt Cutts blog is at or near the top of all search marketers’ reading lists.
There were a couple infrastructure upgrades made over the summer.
One stemmed from the massive BigDaddy Project, a massive system wide infrastructure upgrade initiated in September 2005 and completed in February 2006. According to Matt’s blog, the quality and accuracy of supplemental listings should improve with “… a completely new architecture for Supplemental Results”. The second was deployed to, “… make general results estimates more accurate, especially for shorter queries.” SEOs might have noticed these changes because of fluctuations seen when using the site: search modifier.
Search marketers who make use of the Google Toolbar’s estimate of a site’s PageRank will know by now that Google performed a “PageRank export“, around the beginning of October. While Google has updated reported PageRank values, different data centers might show different results as the infrastructure used to support various Google tools is being upgraded and is deployed at only 2/3 data centers.
Lastly, Matt’s post serves to assure SEOs and webmasters that there will be no unpleasant surprises this year after poorly scheduled Google algorithm updates gave many web marketers the Christmas goose each of three previous years. He does leave the barn door open for sudden changes however saying,
“If we’ve got something that evaluates well and that we think will improve quality, we can’t just pause for 1/4th of the year, but if anything big launches I’ll try to be available to answer questions and help get a handle on any changes.”
So, to recap the recap, supplemental results should have improved since ealry summer and strange stats resulting from the site: modifier should be clearing up. Most importanly, search marketers are likely to feel less pressure heading into the holiday season as Matt suggests (but does not promise) a peaceful season on the algo-update front.
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