Susan will be speaking about “Technical” at Searchfest 2009 which will be held March 10th in Portland, Oregon. Get your tickets now.
1) Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living .
I grew up in Madison, WI; I have a BA in Linguistics from Cornell University. After graduating I worked in Cornell’s Information Science department (https://www.infosci.cornell.edu/) for a year. In 2006 my husband (https://www.seomoz.org/team/nick) got a job at Microsoft and we moved to the Seattle area. I was hired at Google Kirkland and worked as an Internationalization Tester for 9 months on projects such as Webmaster Tools (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/), Website Optimizer (https://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer/), and AdWords’
Campaign Optimizer (https://adwords.blogspot.com/2007/07/campaign-optimizer-now-available.html). I then moved into my current role as a Webmaster Trends Analyst working primarily with Google’s Webmaster Tools and Search Quality teams.
As a Webmaster Trends Analyst my role is to follow trends in the search industry and among webmasters to see what types of issues site owners are having and how Google can help address these issues, be it through new tools & features, better education and documentation, bug fixes, etc. I spend time in our Webmaster Help Forum
(https://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters?hl=en) helping webmasters to resolve problems and to get the most out of Webmaster Tools and search; I write for the Webmaster Central Blog (https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/); and I attend and speak at webmaster- and search-related conferences, among other things.
For a more humourous background, you can check out my profile in the Google Webmaster Help Forum: https://www.google.com/s2/profiles/115302775259305531611?hl=en. I also have a (lately much-neglected) blog at https://twopieceset.blogspot.com/
2) I’ve noticed over the past year that Google has been more aggressive in outreach initiatives to webmasters. Can you talk about some of these steps?
The more we can help people make high-quality, original content available online, the more high-quality content we’ll be able to surface in our search results. So we’re trying to be creative about scalable and easily-accessible ways that we can reach out to a wide variety of website owners (including those who wouldn’t necessarily think of themselves as "webmasters"). Over the past year we’ve hosted several live online webmaster chats (https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/10/join-us-for-our-third-live-online.html),
in which we present on several topics and then take questions from attendees; webmasters from all over the world have called in to these events and I would expect that we’ll be doing more of them. We’ve also been attending and speaking at a variety of conferences, from very advanced, SEO-focused events to more marketing or business-oriented events where attendees may be fairly new to the web. And we’re trying to make more of the content that we present at these conferences available online for people who couldn’t attend (https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/state-of-index-my-presentation-from.html).
We’re also continuing to expand our communication with webmasters all over the world; we currently support official Webmaster Help Forums
(Fora?) in 16 languages, and plan to roll out several more languages this year. We also publish several non-English webmaster blogs, and Webmaster Tools is available in 40 different languages (https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/12/webmaster-tools-in-40-languages.html). If folks have other suggestions about how they’d like to see us reach out, they’re welcome to drop a note in our forum to let us know.
3) There is a common perception that reporting spam / paid links to Google is a waste of time and those reports goes into a black hole. How would you respond to that?
We absolutely read these reports and use them to improve the quality of our index. We try to use them to detect patterns and apply algorithmic solutions as much as possible, so that we’re growing a scalable method of reducing webspam rather than fighting it one URL at a time. For this reason people may not see immediate action on the
URL(s) or links that they report, but we definitely use these reports and encourage people to keep sending them. We’ve written more about this here:
https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/impact-of-user-feedback-part-1.html
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.