My Interview With Johannes Henkel, Google Search Quality Engineer

In conjunction with the upcoming SES San Jose, I was fortunate enough to be able to interview Johannes Henkel from the Google Search Quality Team. Here are his answers to my questions (love the hat, dude :.) )

1) Please give us your background and what your primary duties are at Google.
I graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder. For my thesis work I made a system that helps developers specify and document their programs. At Google I worked on the build system and other internal tools that help programmers. Currently I’m working on tools for evaluating and improving search quality, especially for reducing spam.

2) Can you discuss Google’s change in stance in regards to “No Follow”?
Our stance hasn’t changed much, but there has been a change. As always, we encourage people to spend more time writing link-worthy content and to use good site architecture. What has changed is that in the past, nofollow had a secondary but slightly positive effect on PageRank sculpting. Today, nofollow is no longer useful for PageRank sculpting. The better choice is to create a sensible site architecture.

3) Can you discuss the reasoning behind expanding visibility in local results for many search queries (e.g. lawyers)?
All types of information can be useful, including news, images, maps, and local information. We calibrate our search results to return the most useful, relevant information to our users. For some queries we show local results even if the searcher does not specify a location, but a local result is relevant. For example, for the query “pizza” the searcher is probably looking for a local place to buy pizza, even if the query lacks a zip code.

4) Map spam might be Google’s thorniest spam issue right now…how is the search quality team working to keep the local results pure?
As we show more local results, spammers increase their efforts on local and maps results. The search quality team works with the maps and local teams to reduce spam and improve our search quality. We welcome feedback and suggestions for any part of Google, including search quality and local quality.

5) Many webmasters feel that reporting spam is an exercise in futility. How would you respond to that?
Not at all. We cannot personally respond to individual spam reports, but we read them, consider them, and take action. The reports help us improve our spam detection algorithms, and we also reserve the right to take action on sites violating our webmaster guidelines that we discover through these reports. Such action may include removing such sites in their entirety from our index.

6) Many webmasters complain about an inability to get any human feedback from Google…especially when trying to work out a website penalty issue. Are there any initiatives in this area (besides the emails you all are sending to WHOIS email addresses)?
To clarify, we try to find email addresses on web pages or use well-known email addresses such as webmaster@example.com rather than using email addresses from WHOIS. After registering with Webmaster Tools, site owners can set their preferences to forward messages to an email of their choosing.

There are tens of millions of domains, billions of webpages, and almost as many site owners. Google cannot engage in a prolonged dialogue with every site owner, even if everyone in the company works on customer support. That’s why we focus on scalable communication, such as video and blog posts, which can help many people simultaneously. Our Google Webmaster Help Forums are active and helpful places, frequented by Googlers working on search quality and other experts.

We work on increasing the number of alerts we send via the Webmaster Tools Message Center, but must maintain a balance between disclosing information to well-meaning webmasters and inadvertently helping web spammers. Most of the penalized sites belong to spammers. If we provide too much information to them, they can more easily game our ranking system, thereby harming our users with bad results that may include malware and viruses.

7) Are there procedures in place to evaluate the quality of the non-web pages that appear in Search Results (e.g. Video, Images, Blog Search)?
Yes. We regularly evaluate a variety of quality signals for a wide range of Google properties. We also have teams and projects focused directly on measuring “user happiness.”

8) It looks like that SES San Jose has multiple speakers from the Google Search Quality team not named Matt Cutts. Is there an initiative to get public visibility for people besides Matt?
Absolutely. Matt loves listening to and talking to site owners, but there are many, many knowledgeable people at Google. It’s in everyone’s interests to have Googlers listening to the community and participating. That’s why for a number of years a variety of Googlers have been speaking at conferences, posting detailed messages on our Webmaster Help Forums, and writing blog posts.

Have your site receive an extreme makeover during SES San Jose. Entries must be received by Friday, July 17 and 3 winners will be notified prior to the event. Click here to enter.

Todd Mintz

Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.

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