The usual smoke-and-mirrors we are used to from Google were put away for a brief period this week during an interview Udi Manber, VP of Google Search had with Popular Mechanics. Manber mentioned that Google had tweaked its’ algorithm 450 times last year. This explains some of the really weird disappearances and resurrections of many websites and directories.
He also made an revealing statement about on-page SEO, saying: “I wish people would put more effort into thinking about how other people will find them and putting the right keywords onto their pages,” – It makes you wonder where the line is drawn between proper white-hat SEO and gaming the search results.
Something else that was said that effects directories and other penalized websites is a statement that: “Google doesn’t adjust search results by hand. “If we find, for a particular query, that result No. 4 should be result No. 1, we do not have the capability to manually change it,” “We have to find what weakness in the algorithm caused that result and find a general solution to that, evaluate whether a general solution really works and if it’s better, and then launch a general solution.” That sounds like BS to me and it is quite obvious that there has been many ‘hand-adjusted’ visible tool bar ranking for directories and blogs. I suppose Matt Cutts will be busy fielding much of the follow up to the answers from this interview.