The power of social media has never been more apparent than in this epic trolling on Twitter. Matt Cutts is the head of the Google Webspam team, so he has to be very careful what he says publicly.
With 35,000 Re-Tweets, 5600 Favourites and a tonne of new followers, @DanBarker has really made our industry smile with this fantastic tweet:
.@mattcutts I think I have spotted one, Matt. Note the similarities in the content text: pic.twitter.com/uHux3rK57f
— dan barker (@danbarker) February 27, 2014
Last week Google announced a new tool to report scraped content out ranking the original. So in other words, if someone takes your original content from your website and adds it to their own, if their version out ranks you you can report it and in theory Google will sort it out.
Dan Barkers tweet to Matt Cutts (Boss Man of Web Spam at Google whom announced the new tool) demonstrated how Google themselves had scraped content from Wikipedia and placed it about the organic Wikipedia result.
The reason Google does this is because they are working hard to answer queries much better by providing direct answers as part of it’s “Knowledge Graph”. The problem with this is that once the answer is displayed above the organic search results, the user doesn’t need to actually click through to the website.
The fact that Dan Barkers tweet has already surpassed the 35,000 re-tweet mark is incredible and possibly indicative that there’s a general opinion some may not approve of the way Google is using publishers content. For a tweet to gain so much traction, especially one that is related to an industry niche (SEO) is a big deal.
Should Google publish snippets from websites to satisfy users queries even though it potentially can result in less traffic to the website in question?
