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In a recent webmaster Q&A session at SXSW, Googles Matt Cutts briefly discussed some changes Google is making that will level the playing field between smaller, mom and pop sites and overly optimized sites, as bigger companies have a lot more money to spend on SEO.

Former Googler Vanessa Fox, who happens to be the creator of Webmaster Central, wrote an interesting blog post about it, which we discussed in another article about how the changes sound like they fall in line with Googles greater philosophy of providing high quality sites (which is what the Panda update was all about).

We reached out to Fox for some additional insight, as hers is particularly unique given her background.

I dont think this is part of Panda, Fox tells WebProNews. Google makes hundreds of algorithm changes/introduces new signals/etc. every year. Panda is just one of many. Google just doesnt name each one (and of course, not all of them are as impactful).

She notes, as she hinted at in her own post, that Cutts may have been simplifying things for a non-search audience (SXSW isnt a search conference like SES or SMX), and says that its possible this isnt a new anything, but instead is just tweaking of existing signals that look for things like keyword stuffing and link exchanges.

Last week, Cutts pointed to the audio. Today he points to a full transcript:

If youve listened to or read what was said, youll notice that the whole thing was in response to a question about mom and pops, which might make you wonder if brand is a significant part of whats at play.

I dont think its about just mom and pop vs. big brands, Fox says. Lots of big brands dont know the first thing about SEO. I think (total guess on my part) the sites that will be negatively impacted are those that focus on algorithms and build content/sites based on the things what they think the algorithms are looking for. The kind of sites where someone didnt say I want this page to rank for query X. How can this page best answer what the searcher is asking about X but instead said I want this page to rank for query X. How many times should I repeat X in my title, heading, content on the page, internal links

I think its still useful (and not negative) to make sure the words that searchers are using are on the page, but some sites go well beyond this and get so caught up in what they think the algorithms are doing that they forget to make sure the content is useful, she adds.

As far as sites that will see a positive from this, I think it will likely be both small sites (B&B in Napa that titles their home page home vs. an affiliate site that sells wine gift baskets) and large brands (sites that use a lot of Flash), says Fox. I think foundational SEO practices (like those I describe in my article) will continue to be beneficial for sites.

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New Google Changes: Really A Matter Of Mom And Pop?

Perhaps anti-SEO is a little strong, but as previously reported, Google is working on making SEO matter less. At a recent SXSW session, Googles Matt Cutts discussed (without a lot of details) some changes Google is going to be making to level the playing field for mom and pops, in terms of how sites can gain visibility in search.

Normally, we dont sort of pre-announce changes, but there is something weve been working on in the last few months, and hopefully in the next couple months or so, or you know, in the coming weeks, we hope to release it, said Cutts. And the idea is basically to try and level the playing ground a little bit, so all those people who have sort of been doing, for lack of a better word, over-optimization or overly doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little more level.

Update: Vanessa Fox offered some additional observations to WebProNews. >>> Click here to read the article.

So thats the sort of thing where we try to make the websitethe Googlebot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive, so the people who dont do SEO, we handle that, and then we also start to look at the people who sort of abuse it, whether they throw too many keywords on the page or whether they exchange way too many links, or whatever theyre doing to sort of go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area, he continued. So that is something where we continue to pay attention, and continue to work on itwe have several engineers on my team working on that right now.

Naturally, many webmasters and SEOs are wondering just what all of this will mean for SEO going forward. Combine that, with a reported strategy of Googles to greatly expand its direct answer results, which could also slow traffic to some sites.

Vanessa Fox, the former Googler who built Webmaster Central, offers some perspective in a blog post.

A lot of people have asked me what this means for those who include search engine optimization as part of their marketing mix, says Fox in the post. Some are worried that Google will begin to penalize sites that have implemented search engine optimization techniques. My thoughts? I think that some site owners should worry. But whether or not you should depends on what you mean by search engine optimization.

Interestingly, she compares Googles approach to what the company has been doing with the Panda update, in that its about separating high-quality, useful pages from pages that were just a collection of words about a particular topic.

Matt talked about finding ways to surface smaller sites that may be poorly optimized, if, in fact, those sites have the very best content, Fox says. This is not anything new from Google. Theyve always had a goal to rank the very best content, regardless of how well optimized or not it may be. And I think thats the key. If a page is the very best result for a searcher, Google wants to rank it even if the site owner has never heard of title tags. And Google wants to rank it if the site owner has crafted the very best title tag possible. The importance there is that its the very best result.

One great point that she brought up is that Cutts was not speaking at a search conference, when he was talking about this. Its a different audience, in which he may not have gotten as specific about certain things with, as he may have at a conference like SMX Advanced.

Original post:
Google Webmaster Central Creator Talks Google’s “New” Google Changes

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A core element of mobile SEO is to determine where the mobile content will reside in relation to that of the standard desktop orientated site. This debate was even broached ayear ago.

With the large enterprise companies we work with at Covario, our position has been to recommend the one URL or same URL approach over the m. subdomain.

The one URL approach for mobile has also been recently echoed as a preferred choice by bothBingofficially andGoogleunofficially.

This approach requires user agent detection to trigger different rendering of the page based on the mobile device type which can also include the DocType and HEAD section of the code. Google specifically affirmed this is not cloaking back in theirSearch Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

The key is to change these sections for feature phones and smartphones as Google has two different mobile crawlers for these devices since the search results between feature phones and smartphones do differfrom each other, as well as from the standard desktop search engine ranking results.

To be proactive, it is best to do this as well for tablets and TV rendering, which should get specific crawlers from the search engines in the near future.

In the end, why is this single URL approach better for mobile SEO?

Using a subdomain for your mobile rendering is a close 1B option to the one URL strategy and could be the preferred direction in many circumstances.

If you are only going to have a limited mobile site thatdoesnthave a one-to-one relationship to your desktop instance, then having a subdomain for mobile would make sense.

Also, if your site already has a long established mobile subdomain the advantages of bringing it to the one URL does diminish.

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One URL To Rule Them All For Mobile SEO

Technical SEO topics such as pagination are near and dear to my heart. This article will build upon and update my previous treatment of pagination and SEO.

Ive written and presented often on pagination for SEO. Why so much attention on this subject?

The reason is simple: it can be a big, hairy deal for sites. Its right up there with faceted navigation as one of the most problematic crawling and indexing issues for large-scale SEO. Its a tactic (actually a set of tactics) that our teams are continually evolving, testing, and refining.

So it was double prizes when Google announced the HTML 5 element rel next/prev for pagination.

There are three primary tactics that we use for SEO pagination:

Each of these is detailed below.

Ive already detailed this technique in full, so Ill skip the nitty gritty. The important thing to realize is that using this method does not directly transfer any equity from a series of component pages to the primary, canonical page. Rather, as component pages get crawled and link back to the canonical page, that equity is (hopefully) transferred as a second-order effect.

We would generally not recommend using this method for pagination today, except for fringe cases. Its perfectly fine and will not hurt a site; on the contrary, it will greatly help a site that has SEO pagination problems. But, there are now even better methods as well discover.

The classic SEO pagination method uses noindex but does not directly consolidate equity.

The most elegant method is to utilize a View All page. In this approach, all component pages rel canonical back to the View All.

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The Latest & Greatest On SEO Pagination