A Smattering Of SEO News - Deep Cutts

Hey friends, welcome to another Smattering of SEO News! The big news this week is that Matt Cutts is back! Kinda! OH, we missed you Matt!

Google News

• Matt Cutts Respons To Accusations Of Clinton-Manipulated Results – In a blast of Tweets, Google’s Matt Cutts – who is still on leave, mind you – effectively debunked the conspiracy theory/accusation that Google’s search results were manipulated to give Hillary Clinton more results. He basically showed that, since a lot of folks are looking for negative facts on Secretary Clinton, that leads to a wide array of autocomplete results. It’s a good read, so check it out.
• Google Wants To Know Your Spam Reporting Habits – Google is running a form asking folks how they report web spam, in order to, “improve our process and make your reporting easier and fun.” Questions include how often you report it, what your motivations are, and so on. If you regularly report web spam, go check it out!
• Google Wrestles “Most Valuable Brand” Title Away From Apple – For over a decade, digital marketing research firm Millward Brown Digital has been compiling a list of the most valuable brands based on a variety of factors. For many years, Google held the top stop, but since 2011, that spot has been see-sawing back and forth between Apple and Google. Well, in its most recent report, Google has retaken the top spot, with its “brand value” skyrocketing 32%, while Apple’s actually dropped 8%.

• The Key To Ranking For RankBrain? Natural Language – Jennifer Slegg of The SEM Post had a great chat with Google’s Gary Illyes about Google’s machine learning algorithm, RankBrain. Whereas Illyes first handwaved trying to rank for the RB away, saying to basically not even worry about it, he then gave a key ingredient in ranking for it away: natural language. Write content that sounds human. Seems pretty…natural…to me. Heh heh heh. Head over and read all about it, it’s good stuff.
• To Algorithms, It’s A Matter Of Trust – Sure that’s a great Billy Joel song, but it’s also something to keep in mind with Google algorithms, apparently. This is less “news” and more “huh,” but it’s a neat thing to know about so I included it for y’all. This came up in a recent Google Hangout with John Mueller. When asked about how long it can take for a site to recover from an algorithm penalty, Mueller basically said that the algorithm might wanna wait a spell to see how your data and your content settle before making any kind of decision on whether your penalty should be removed. Pretty nifty.

Other News

• Microsoft Buys LinkedIn For Over $26 Billion – Microsoft recently announced they’re buying social media network LinkedIn for an all-cash deal of around $26.2 billion. While not the biggest buyout in corporate history (that’s still Dell I believe), it’s pretty huge. It looks like the biggest deal out of this for us as consumers of both company’s products will be a fairly tight integration of LinkedIn’s networking with Microsoft’s tools. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.