Google's Matt Cutts: It Was Much Worse because We Tested Dropping Backlinks From Algorithm

Google's Matt Cutts, the head of spam team of Google release latest video has Google admitting they do and did indeed test their search results by turning off linkage data as a part of their algorithm. According to video results would be "much much worse" if they did really do that in real life.

It really make sense because Google's core algorithm was almost based on Page Rank and links and and in these years they worked improving on it. They worked hard and spent so much time in using links to rank sites that were dropping it now would make for a mess.

It was interesting to see, because couple a weeks ago, we asked you what will be your strategy if Google dropped backlinks from their algorithm. We still have over 300 responses and 32% said they'd be curious, 34% said they would be very excited and 17% said they'd be very concerned.

Here is Matt's video on this topic:

Here is the transcription:

Therefore, we don't have a version like which is open to the public rather than we have our personal experiments like that internally and the quality looks much much worse. It turns out backlinks, however there is certainty a lot of spam and some noise, for the most part are still a really really big win in the sense of quality of search results in search engines.

We played about with the idea of turning off backlink relevancy and at least for now backlinks relevancy still really helps in terms of making sure that we change most relevant, the best, most topical set of search results.

Forum discussion at Twitter and WebmasterWorld.

Google: Third Page Layout Algorithm Update

Yesterday, Google's Matt Cutts declared on Twitter that they have pushed out a refresh to the Google Page Layout algorithm and it will be around or on February 6th. He did not clear how much this will impact the search results but based on my analysis of the SEO community, it had a very small impact on most SEOs. This is the third update to the page layout algorithm. Because it is only a refresh, it does not mean Google updated the algorithm, but rather reconstruct the algorithm and updated it's index. But there is uncertainty Google would classify it version 3.0, but rather 1.2 maybe. Previous Updates For Google's Page Layout Algorithm were:

• Google Page Layout Algorithm Launched on January 19, 2012

• Google Page Layout Algorithm Second Updated on October 9, 2012

• Google Page Layout Algorithm third Update on 6, 2014

how does it look like when a site gets hit by this? Here is a screen shot from Webmaster World of someone who was hit by this:

Again, very few seem to have been impacted by it but there are some who are complaining in the forum threads I link to below. Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Google Webmaster Help, Black Hat World and Twitter.