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Is Matt Cutts penalized...?
I did a Blog Search today, expecting to see Matt's blog come up in the results. When it didn't, I dug a little deeper. I had to get pretty specific in order to narrow down the results enough to see this, but as it turns out Matt appears to be getting buried under the "Similar Results" filter:
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&tab=wb&ie=UTF-8&q=Google+dance+googleplex+%E2%80%9CMeet+the+Engineers%E2%80%9D
(click the "repeat the search with the omitted results included" link to see his site come up)
To the best of my knowledge, that shouldn't be happening with a site as strong as his.
9 Comments
Comments
I don't see a penalty. You searched for a specific phrase, exact match and the exact match showed up #1, that's natural.
Matt's post didn't have those words in title and it was one of the many filtered from the results. Maybe it wasn't that relevant to the rest of query, too.
I'd think that G doesn't want to show many similar stories.
Most importantly, though, what were the phrases his blog didn't show up for? That'd provide some clues.
[lolcutts] was the first one I noticed (from today), [Google Dance] was another, which was the title of the post from the 21st. It was buried there as well. [clearing out my tabs] he is nowhere to be found, add in &filter=0 and he is #6. I mean, it definitely looks like something is up to me.
I think you just checked at the wrong time. I just searched for [clearing out my tabs], and Matt's post was #1. But if I click through from there and check the cache of the page I'm on (the post itself, not the blog's default page), I get:
"Your search - cache:http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/clearing-out-my-tabs/ - did not match any documents. "
In other words, it hasn't been indexed at every data centre yet, but it's on its way.
qwerty, I'm guessing that's because you used regular Web Search, am I correct? It's happening in Blog Search, and as far as I can tell still is.
You're right that it's not coming up in the blog search. In fact, I found the post in there twice, but both were reprints on domains other than Matt's. I have a hard time calling anything "penalized" if it's #1 on the web search, though. I'd much sooner blame it on a hiccup and check back in a few days.
Well, maybe Matt's post isn't that different and special from any other blog posts on the topic. Likewise, I don't see any "References" link next to it, which is visible next to the oust from TopRank.
Initially, I thought that timing is an issue, given that most shown posts are newer, but this may be not a huge factor there.
By the way. Notice that the shown post URLs have numbers in them. Mostly, "2007" and month (the default WP structure), but some also have post numbers. MC's blog doesn't have numbers in his URLs, so I'd think this could be a factor (which plays a role in Google News, though).
Since Google Search and Blog Search are different, I'd think URLs and time factor may play a role here, indeed.
Good catch on the url structure, I totally missed that. He does come up as what I would call an authority blog though, look up here, showing at the top under "Related Blogs":
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&tab=wb&ie=UTF-8&q=google+spam
qwerty - I actually agree that it's a glitch, I have the same thing happening to a site of mine that is normally #1 on web search, small site, no changes to it in years, but 2-3 times a year G makes an algo change that buries it under that filter. It has always come back so far, so no reason to think that it won't again... I just found it interesting to see Matt's site having the same thing happen.
I dunno, I search for [matt cutts] on blogsearch and this post was #1 and I was #2. Given that I haven't posted for a day or so, that doesn't worry me.
Hey Matt...
Are you telling us that relevancy of search results and ranking on the serps of blogsearch are highly dependent on freshness of contents :-)