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Matt Cutts & Todd Mintz

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Hey Matt,

I enjoyed meeting you and chatting with you at Pubcon. You’re a great guy and I truly believe that nobody could possibly do a better job of webmaster outreach than you and I admire that you willingly journey into strongholds of folks that aren’t particularly happy with Google & Google’s policies. You did tell me to post my Google feedback that I gave to you personally…so here it is…but first an opinion.

1) You argue the “no follow” logic convincingly…so well that you could almost (but not quite) convince me that you are correct. However, I feel strongly that Google’s plan to reset links on expired domains is MANY TIMES WORSE than Google’s no follow policy. Bringing this example into the real estate realm, you are saying that if a house becomes foreclosed and repossessed, the new owner of the house can’t keep any upgrades the foreclosed owner made to the house. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Nobody is gaming the system here…getting an expired domain with established backlinks is like getting a foreclosed home in a better neighborhood…I don’t see how the Google SERPS are being manipulated to the detriment by continuing to count links to domains that have expired. Furthermore, why would you then continue to count links to a domain that has been sold to another who might totally trash the old site in favor of something totally new? I don’t see how this scenario is more trustworthy than the “expired” scenario.

2) At SEMpdx, we post (or would like to post) our monthly events to Google Base. However, Google Base has a feature where it only holds events for 14 days, which means that if we post our event more than 14 days in advance, our listing would expire prior to the event. A smarter system would be to tie events to a calendar and expire the event after it occurs.

3) In Google Reader, I track a large number of feeds that contain company names. Frequently, when a big company “makes news”, it gets picked up by many different outlets that post the same exact story. When this happens I could get a few dozen copies of the same news that hit the feeder over a period of days. It would be really nice if Google could only show me one copy of a particular story instead of a few dozen.

Thank you for taking the time to listen and consider my feedback.

Todd