Dear Matt Cutts, I know you and I don’t always see eye to eye on everything, but I think we’ve got enough of a working relationship that I feel comfortable saying, that the way the brand update/ Vince change, went down could have been better. Indulge me while I make an analogy to prove a point.
Let’s assume I live in an apartment, I come home one day go to turn on my bathroom light, and nothing happens. I call up the building superintendent, and tell him my bathroom light is broken. The superintendent comes to take a look, and chances are instead of telling me “my bathroom light is broken” he’ll come back with one or more ot the following:
- broken light switch
- faulty wiring
- broken lighting fixture
- broken bulb
Now the superintendent’s definition and diagnosis is much more technical, and accurate than “my bathroom light is broken“, however he’s comfortable with the working definition of “my light is broken“, and isn’t trying to deny what I can clearly see, back to the world of SEO.
Aaron Wall spoke about a change he noticed that seem to favor brands, which for lack of a better term became known as the “brand update”. You went into the “this is not an update” or “there was no brand update” mode, to be honest it was annoying and frustrating. Finally you released a video acknowledging that yes something had happened.
First of thanks for for the video, it really helped, but let’s get onto the real problem here. Inside of google you need to be specific, I’m quite sure in your world there is huge amount of difference between an update and what you’re calling “the Vince change”. It’s the same way there’s a world of difference between a lightbulb being burned out and faulty light switch, they are completely different things with identical end results. However in our world we don’t have access to those terms, for lack of anything more granular or specific, we’re stuck with word “update“, or the equivalent of “my bathroom light is broken“.
When you go around stating there was no update (your definition), when we can clearly see there was an update (our definition), we’ve got a problem. It looks like you’re trying to perform some Jedi mind trick, if you keep repeating there was no update and waving your hand eventually we’ll all believe you. Even worse it’s like you’re trying to tell us what we’re seeing isn’t really there and this is one of those “these aren’t my pants officer” moments from cops.
Let’s try to see if we can make things work a little better going forward, here are some suggestions on how things can improve.
Use our working definition of “update”, if that doesn’t work provide us with a list of other terms we can/should use, that work for everyone. We’re human beings we need to name things to communicate about them, nature abhors a vacuum, so if you don’t tell us what works for you, we’re going to use our own labels.
De-Nile is a big river in Africa, it’s got no use here, and doesn’t help anyone. Going the Philadelphia lawyer route of truthfully answering the very specific question, while avoiding the intent of the question is very frustrating. I hoped you saw that first hand at the SMX personailzed search panel you attended.
Use “weather reports” the way yahoo does again, it just opens up the lines of communication so we all know we’re talking about the same thing.
I think I’m pretty safe saying the search community is hoping to work with you, so we can all communicate better with each other, because right now what we have is failure to communicate.
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{ 37 comments }
“these aren’t my pants officer” LOL
Not to get in the middle, but it does read clear enough to me. I like analogies.
You forgot to add in the analogy that it could be the fuse
However it could be the electricity meter has run out – my point is like your analogy there is many other outside aspects to SEO, that we as SEO experts have to deal with, and simply that’s life.
I understand your frustration and the fact Google could post “How to”and “Why” but why should they?! If that did exist, wouldn’t that put you out of a job?
Someone could read the manual and claim to be as well versed in SEO as yourself.
Isn’t the finding out that Google have done something and have changed something part of the job (fun)
Ollie
I really like that you have the balls to confront Google while everybody else is kissing its ass! Please keep up the good work!!
Sebastien
Matt Cutts: “We really don’t think about ‘brands.’”
Eric Schmidt: “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”
Something of a disconnect there, no?
@MikeTek That’s where IMHO you have to read between the lines, Eric said brands are how you know who to trust and separate the cesspool, Matt mentioned trust and authority. I’d interpret that as they tried to quantify the essence of brands algorithmically, and trust and authority metrics were how they got there.
@Michael Gray Yeah, makes sense. A “brand” is tough to quantify, but you can certainly associate trust and authority signals with the quality of a brand. Matt’s response, though, sounds like it came through the legal department. I think they’re just trying to nip this all in the bud now to avoid more negative press.
Here here! Regardless of Matt’s “no update” stance it sure feels like an update to me, as I twittered “what is an update afterall? Is a change not an update?”
Why is Google obligated to explain every detail of how and why they tweak their algo? It is supposed to improve Google Search universally and behind the scenes. When all the info is put out their publicly, the people who were “gaming” before have new information to try and “game” again.
There is definitely value in an open dialogue with Google. But I think it’s misguided frustration to assume that Google and Matt Cutts owe you an explanation every time the SERPs are tweaked/improved.
Looks like it could be a lack of internal communication. Google has a lot of employees, and maybe Matt didn’t get the memo. (or maybe not)
Will we ever know?
What Google should (and probably does) realize is that hiding stuff from us isn’t effective. Without websites and webmasters, Google is nothing.
Just my 2 cents.
” Matt Cutts: “We really don’t think about ‘brands.’”
Eric Schmidt: “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”
Something of a disconnect there, no? ”
News doesn’t always travel quickly within big operations.
Brilliant Matt! Let’s deflect this brand change by calling it Vinny. Im just curios does this mean I should throw out my business cards that say brand management and reprint them to say Vinny Management?
ps how can matt say it impacts a few queries when it clearly has impacted several generic terms. is that like saying it only impacts the 10% of queries that deliver 80% of all traffic. if that is the case i guess matt hasnt technically lied to us.
I think Matt is held to a standard where he is held responsible for decisions made that are “Above” him. I put some thoughts together on this here, and I am about to submit it to sphinn now:
Google Algorithm Brand Change aka The Vince Update.
What/Who is Vince?
@Michael Gray I totally agree with your comment about reading between the lines. I think one other consequence of the trust & authority boost here is that non-commercial “brands” of .gov appear more frequently in search results pages, even in many cases when they really don’t belong.
Damn! He tackled him onto his face.. then he kneeled on his head. The analogies between this and Matt Cutts are frightening.
This was a great post, I couldn’t of said it better myself. I’ve been a strong support of Google and the way they do things but recently I’ve been questioning our relationship. It seems theres been more EGO from Google in recent weeks.
Play nice!
Now I understand! Your bathroom light was broken because it was not a [big brand] light bulb.
Anyone think that the changes they make, are more concerned with $$$, as opposed to actual “relevance”?
the actual quote is
“what we have here is failure to communicate”
not
“a failure to communicate”
dont get it twisteted
@streko … no time for love dr jones hold onto your potatoes
Well done.
…no nothing was changed…but things were altered.
We’re hoping you dont know the difference.
Micheal, I agree with what you say however… lets put it in perspective. A few years back a SE engineer actually Said “SEOs are scum”. We’ve come a long ways from there to here. In the old days there was no dialogue, webmasters figured out these issues collectively with little or no input from SEs, and for the most part that was how we wanted it. Now… SEs introduce HTML elements and attributes that we’re suppoosed to implement. Hmm… back in the day there was a procedure called an RFC for adding elements and attributes to HTML. Hmmm… doesn’t that give webmasters a say in those things. Isn’t SEOInc a member of the W3C?
One’s gotta wonder where it stops and who minding the gate?
I did talk about vocabulary like update vs. data push in the past: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/explaining-algorithm-updates-and-data-refreshes/
I’m not trying to deny that a change happened; I’m more than happy to confirm that there was one. What I was trying to say in the video was that as changes go, this one was toward the smaller side (e.g. even smaller than Dewey, which in turn was incredibly small) and so it probably didn’t merit being called a formal “update.”
As soon as you call something an “update,” people latch on to that and think it accounts for everything. Dewey, for example, happened in March 2008 and was over within a few days. Would you believe that I got an email on January 30, 2009 from someone claiming to be affected by Dewey? Like, 10 months after Dewey was over? That’s one of the reasons why I hesitate to call some of these smaller changes an “update”–people think that update accounts for changes when they don’t.
Great post! This is the first time I’ve felt the Google response (to a genuine concern by webmasters) to be dismissive and frustrating.
Let’s go with Matt’s example. Go poll 500 people and ask what they think of when they hear “eclipse.” Will any of them respond, “Eclipse, a universal toolset for (web) development”? That’s what I get as the No. 1 result. Same with Yahoo. The larger question: Why is that entity at the top of that search. I’d suggest eclipse.org as a great candidate for long tail, not NASA.
I like the Jedi mind trick, very funny stuff. However, this is a really serious matter and I appreciate your post and plea to Matt to better communicate what is going on with Google rather than just shrouding us with a ton of excuses.
Great Michael gray, thanks for reminding us what is the difference between update and not update.
Sounds like the Bill Clinton argument to me, “I did not have sex…” Later when asked, “What’s your definition of sex…” The reality – he did have sex with that women.
Call it a change. Call it an update. Whatever it was, it affected results.
I do agree better definition would help.
Who in their right minds still reads Matt Cutts’ blog in the first place? It’s just one of many Google PR tools to fool newbies and Kool-aid drinkers. Reading his blog or reading “Google Webmaster Central” is like reading and believing ‘testimonials’ written by freelance writers, not the actual clients.
BTW. I’m surprised nobody hasn’t noticed that in the US when you type in “webmaster” the Google Webmaster page for newbies and suckers appear as the FIRST result! Google now targets the newbies webmasters and tries to teach them their false ’side of the story.’
Didn’t Geo. Bush Jr. do the same thing when he ran against Kerry? He repeated “Kerry flip-flops” so many times that it became obvious to “everyone” that Kerry changed his mind on important issues in mid-stream. However, when pollsters asked voters exactly what Kerry flip-flopped about, no one could name a specific example.
Repetition works. It’s hypnotic. It gets to the subconscious.
Personally, I really don’t care if Matt Cutts calls it an update or not. Whatever it was, we saw the effect. Of course, rankings change every day, so whether it’s a major update or a minor tweak to Google’s algorithm, the response for SEO’ers should be the same: Analyze and adjust. If you sincerely believe that brands are given some sort of preferential treatment, then add “brand building” to your toolbox.
Catfish over at the BOL blog has pointed out that Google ranks # 6 for the query “search engine” seems to me that Google is the biggest brand for that term! So SEO still plays a part in brand rankings and maybe Google needs SEO itself….lol
@igor lol
I can name some webmasters that deserve to be in that #1 spot.
@ David L.
If you already are in Google’s store they don’t care to bring you to the store anymore. That’s actually a part of their game – by this ’search engine’ term their PR department can nicely ‘oppose’ their monopolistic accusations ‘by example.’
Besides, Google was a search engine a few years ago, now it’s political, WallStreet and advertising machine.
I like your analogy. I agree that Google should not have to directly tell us how to rank high in their search results, and that’s what separates a good SEOer from the rest.
I think what Google is trying to do is produce search results with companies that are using every component of the internet to brand themselves rather than just finding something that has worked well and emphasizing on that one approach.
If Google, was to let the cat out of the bag so to speak, where would be the challenge? at the moment everyone is striving to compete with other web developers, and see who can rank highest with research and perseverance, and the reward at the end is the person who gets the highest ranking. I suppose just treat it like a game, a hobby as such, have fun with it and try to strive to beat the competition.
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