It is now official. The true identity of GoogleGuy has been reveal by the Guy himself. It won't come as a surprise to most people in the industry, because it was all but certain by this point. Matt Cutts is GoogleGuy.

Danny Sullivan report that the admission came at a recent Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference:

I moderated the panel, and the confession came out when a member of the audience flat out asked Matt if he was GoogleGuy. Matt hesitated just a moment, and I could swear I could almost hear the internal debate of "should I finally confess or not." And then he did, saying as Rand notes that he sort of backed into being the GoogleGuy who posts on forums and blogs. Matt then added that today, GoogleGuy might be one of many different people from Google commenting in public areas.

For the past several years, many people have strongly believed that Matt Cutts was GoogleGuy, to the point of feeling certain of it. Still, to my knowledge, it wasn't "proven", and until now, he has not made a public admission. For for what its worth, it is now official: Matt Cutts is GoogleGuy.

Or maybe its not official?

In a postscript to the Search Engine Watch article, it is mentioned that Matt Cutts has disputed the reported admission over on the seomoz blog, saying:

I didn't take the question as "Are you GoogleGuy?". I took the question as "How did you end up doing a bunch of webmaster communication duties?". Maybe I misheard the question though.

So there you go. You can decide for yourself. ;)

It has been reveal by Henk van Ess that Google has a secret search quality lab that utilizes human testers with the goal of improving search quality. More info can be found on his SearchBistro blog. According to Henk, "It's a lab of humans from all over the world (from China to The Netherlands, from Korea to Brasil) They are paid to check search results of Google every day. Most of the employees, called international agents by Google, were recruited through universities all over the world. The aim is to avoid spam, to get the right sites at the top of the listing and to test new features, not shown to the public yet."

GoogleGuy responds to ethics issues surrounding the collection and posting of this information on the web:

I have serious reservations about Henk van Ess taking information from one of his own students (who presumably signed a non-disclosure agreement when the student agreed to help rate the quality of our results) and posting that information online. I also believe these web pages said things like "Google Proprietary and Confidential," but it appears that the screenshots have been cropped to exclude that information. Those are the two things that really made me sad, not the "breaking news" the Google evaluates its own results quality. It shouldn't be a surprise that Google evaluates the quality of its results in lots of ways--the fact is that every major search engine evaluates its relevance in many ways.

Henk van Ess response can be found here.

While giving more clues about the latest Google 'Bourbon' update, GoogleGuy has also talked about a few important things that should be done or not done, when optimizing your website for Google (but not only for Google).

I've been aching for a long time to mention somewhere official that sites shouldn't use '&id=' as a parameter if they want maximal Googlebot crawlage, for example. So many sites use '&id=' with session IDs that Googlebot usually avoids urls with that parameter
And then

I've never heard the suggestion that Google would penalize for iframes before reading it in the thread. Plenty of legit sites use iframes, so it wouldn't make sense to penalize for it. Powdork gave the right response in message 337 of the first Bourbon thread. Now I can easily believe that some search engine spiders would have trouble with iframes just like some spiders have trouble with frames. But I wouldn't expect iframes to cause any penalties.
And finally

My rule of thumb is to pick a root page and be as consistent as possible. I lean toward choosing http://www.yourdomain.com/ but that's just me; http://yourdomain.com/ would work as well. Then I recommend that you make things as simple as possible for spiders. I recommend absolute links instead of relative links, because there's less chance for a spider (not just Google, but any spider) to get confused. In the same fashion, I would try to be consistent on your internal linking. Once you've picked a root page and decided on www vs. non-www, make sure that all your links follow the same convention and point to the root page that you picked. Also, I would use a 301 redirect or rewrite so that your root page doesn't appear twice. For example, if you select http://www.yourdomain.com/ as your root page, then if a spider tries to fetch http://yourdomain.com/ (without the www), your web server should do a permanent (301) redirect to your root page at http://www.yourdomain.com/

So the high-order bits to bear in mind are
- make it as easy as possible for search engines and spiders; save calculation by giving absolute instead of relative links.
- be consistent. Make a decision on www vs. non-www and follow the same convention consistently for all the links on your site. Use permanent redirects to keep spiders fetching the correct page.

Given that GoogleGuy is quite talkative, in this period, we should probably expect more revelations soon.

Google's latest updated, nicknamed 'Bourbon' is not over. Many people thought the update was completed more than a week ago, but GoogleGuy is now suggesting that the update is only 14% completed and that there may be 2 more weeks of rankings changes until things settle.

Here's the advice that I'd give now: take a break from checking ranks for several more days. Bourbon includes something like 3.5 improvements in search quality, and I believe that only a couple are out so far. The 0.5 will go out in a day or so, and the last major change should roll out over the next week or so. Then there will still be some minor changes after that as well. So my "weather report" along the lines of http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000095.html would be a recommendation that rankings may still change somewhat over the next several days.

So who knows what could be next: spam filters, sandbox releases, more algo changes?

Thanks to Threadwatch for the pointer to this quote.

Update: Traffic Power has changed there name to "1P" or "First Place". They are using the domain 1p with a .com after it (please do not link to them). Please spread the word and help others avoid getting burned by them.

GoogleGuy recently broke his silence to confirm that Google has taken action against an SEO firm and it's clients for spammy techniques. The SEO company convinced some its clients to use javascript redirects and place hidden links to doorway pages created by the firm. GoogleGuy explains:

I believe that one SEO had convinced clients either to put spammy Javascript mouseover redirects, doorway pages that link to other sites, or both on their clients' sites. That can lead to clients' sites being flagged as spam in addition to the doorway domains that the SEO set up.

GoogleGuy later reassured webmasters that those who use javascript mousover to place text in the status bar do not need to worry about beeing banned.

While the SEO company was not named in the thread, discussions in other forums reveal that the company in question was Traffic Power. I think it is important to mention the company name, so that others can learn to stay away from them. There have been numerous reports of people losing their job for hiring this firm to do their SEO, and rumors are brewing about a lawsuit in the works.

Update:I have heard that one of the efforts at a class-action lawsuit has been discontinued, but others are pending. If you are a former Traffic Power customer, you can send an email to Dave over at Traffic Power Sucks to get involved.

Thanks to Jan Willamowius for pointing me to this thread. I have been quite busy lately, without much time to scan the discussion threads looking for GoogleGuy's comments, which have been few and far between, and mostly insignificant. If you notice any significant posts by Google, please send me an email at googleguysays@markcarey.com. Thanks

A couple of people have inquired as to whether I have stopped reporting on GoogleGuy's comments altogether. I have not stopped, and I do intend to report any significant comments made by GoogleGuy.

The reason I have reported anything recently is because GoogleGuy has gone quiet. Though I may have missed some, I have only seen one comment from GoogleGuy during the month of May, and that was to tell a member that the best way to contact Google was to email support (though he did mention that he would pass the particular issue on to others internally). If anyone has seen any other GoogleGuy comments this month, let me know.

With the Google IPO annoucement, Google is now in the "Quiet Period". And it appears that GoogleGuy is also in the quiet period. Many, including myself, expected this to happen (especially after GoogleGuy asked me to be quite).

Just one year after this site was launched, GoogleGuy isn't saying anything (at least for now).

Many people believe that you can use an underscore to separate_words_in_an_url, and that Google will recognize the words and count them for ranking purposes. I have read many debates about this: some people believe that Google indeed counts underscores as word separators, while other webmasters claim that you must use a hyphen or other character for Google to recognize the words as distinct. GoogleGuy has hinted in the past that hyphens are preferred. Recently, this debate reheated when Google made a change to it's "search word highlighting" feature in the search results: suddenly, keywords separated by underscores were being displayed in bold. The question then became whether the change was part of the ranking algorithm, or just the display mechanism.

Today, GoogleGuy finally confirmed this without any shadow of a doubt: "If you use an underscore '_' character, then Google will combine the two words on either side into one word. So bla.com/kw1_kw2.html wouldn't show up by itself for kw1 or kw2. You'd have to search for kw1_kw2 as a query term to bring up that page." [Link to Quote] I think we can put that debate to bed finally, at least for now.

GoogleGuy has requested that I stop posting his comments on this site.

This site will continue (more info below).

I started this site about 11 months ago, to provide an easy and convenient way for people to hear comments made by an anonymous Google employee, known as GoogleGuy. GoogleGuy was posting useful information in a very busy discussion forum. At times, his comments were the only valuable ones to read, and I found myself scrolling endlessly trying to locate his comments. The search tool provided on the forums was extremely poor, not helpful at all for located the comments of a particular member. I thought about recording them privately for future reference, but I realized that others were likely in the same position as me. So I decided to post them publicly, so others could benefit. It turns out that I was right, as thousands of people from around the world began to use the site as resource for Google information.

The owner of the forums was not happy with this site. He made a number changes to the forum site to make it difficult for me. In doing so, he also made it even more difficult for forum members to find GoogleGuy's comments in the forums. Of course, these ill-advised tactics made this site the only reasonable way to locate GoogleGuy's comments, and the traffic to this site increased significantly (Thanks, Brett! :)) To this date, I don't understand why he view this site as a threat -- it provided links and traffic, enhancing the poor search and filtering features of the forums.

From the beginning, I said that I would stop if GoogleGuy made such a request. Though he certainly learned of this site days after it was launched, he did not make any reference to it in his comments, nor did I ever receive an communication directly from him or indirectly from any of his colleagues at Google. For 11 months and over 1,000 forum posts, GoogleGuy said nothing about this site. Based on this silence, I assumed he was okay with me providing an easy way for people to learn hear comments about Google. About a week ago, in a thread about "Google Under Siege", that changed. Suddenly, GoogleGuy requested that I stop posting his comments to this site. So I will live up to my word, and the format of this will change.

Why GoogleGuy suddenly make this request after 11 months and 1,000 posts? He didn't explain the reason. All I can offer is pure speculation, which may be "way off the mark", perhaps:

-my commentary was too critical of Google?
-the current pressure on Google (relating to privacy concerns) is a factor?
-he wants to silence me prior to the Google IPO

I really don't know, but he did sound "annoyed". Feel free to add you own speculation in the discussion for this entry.

If GoogleGuy changes his mind - and I hope that he does - I will begin to post his comments here again. Perhaps he was just frustrated when he posted his request. Perhaps he will decide that easier access to his comments is a good thing for Webmasters and Google alike. If you would like GoogleGuy to reconsider, please voice your opinion in the discussion for this entry, on your own sites, blogs, etc. You can also try posting your opinions in the WMW forums, but you are likely to be censored if you do.

New Format

As always, I appreciate any and all feedback. What direction do you think this site should take? What features would you like to see?

GoogleGuy replies in a thread about Google launching an email service. Many speculate that it is an April Fools joke. GG has his poker face on.

Google announces a number of new Google features that were launched last night. Especially interesting is the debut of personalized search in Google Labs. That one will be very interesting (perhaps the merger of Orkut and search is not that far off) :)

GG comments on the recent launch of local search on Google.com.

This is interesting. As GG continues to highlight the fact the PR updates are now just "display" updates, he uses the term "everyday occurence" with respect to PR updates. While it is well known that actual PR updates happen much more frequent than in the past, this is first time GoogleGuy has hinted that PR may actually be updated daily (or perhaps, in near-realtime?)

PageRank and backlinks have been updated on 66.102.9.104. To see the new PR values using your toolbar, add the following line to your "HOSTS" file (Windows):

66.102.9.104 toolbarqueries.google.com

In this post, GG highlights that the fact that the PR update is not an algo or data update - rather merely an updated display of of existing PR and backlinks.

In this post, GG is joking around around. But he may he hinting at 2 things 1) PR will indeed update again, and 2) it may only happen once every 3 months. If true, we would see the next update in April.

GG says to expect near-daily Google Updates this year.