Matt Cutts speaks about chances of successful negative SEO…. Again!

I was grazing though today’s SEO updates this evening and I stumbled on a Webmaster help video by Matt Cutts. The interesting topic of Negative SEO has surfaced again. Thank you Matt Cutts for choosing this topic over all the 423 questions that you received. For the moment of truth we weren’t sure if negative SEO really exists because we have not run any test cases YET. However, there are wide claims from reliable sources that they were successful in creating a negative SEO effect through pretty much simple processes. After seeing the video, I am confused because Matt says negative SEO is impossible, but may occur in some cases? If so, you can use the new disavow tool to come clean? Here is the video

Disavow tool, when lunched was like a real gift to the webmasters.  But everyone thought that the intention of the tool was to correct their own mistakes in link building. Now, Matt Cutts has given a new meaning to the tool. The disavow tool is certainly a way to tackle negative SEO. But the big question – “Is negative SEO possible?” still remains. I just created a fun graphic out of this as it just felt to me that even Matt isn’t sure about this! No offense Matt… Feel free to share...

Just 19 days more for us to step into the new controversial year 2013. The ‘controversial’ label I have added is because of the Doomsday expectations we have on 21st of this month. Once we prove all rumors wrong, the long run ahead comes to our mind and there goes our thoughts safeguarding our luxuries and existence. Each one of us expects to get bigger. It is never an exception to ‘Bill Gates’ and ‘Warren Buffett’ as well.


‘Survival of the fittest’. Only those are fit manage to survive, today. Not really, I say. ‘Survival of the controversial’. Only controversies portray your presence to the world. ‘Gangnam Style’ by PSY is one best example for this. The funny and funky dance moves that PSY does in the entire video makes people enjoy watching and groove to the tune. The viewership status for this top rated video is –

Search Term: Gangnam Style
TOTAL - 74,700 results
Officialpsy - 940,736,112 views
Total views in the entire first page of You Tube search – 1,574,778,731 views


Just drink a cup of water in a different manner, you get noted. That’s the power of internet. The world moves the same pace it was through millions of years, but that is not the case with INFORMATION. Information and data travel faster than human thinking, which was once told to be the swiftest one.


Social media gets people engaged for almost 70% of their time a day. Every person who has access to internet will for sure check their social outlets once in a day. And there are also some jobless people who spent their entire time polishing their social outlets. The reason behind? Your social profile is your mirror now. They let others know who you are. The same applies to businesses also. Your business needs to get polished and made presentable to your clients who are online. No other go! RUN WITH THE WORLD TO SURVICE THE COMPETITION

Here below are the top trends in the search world and social media for the year 2012. The figures are self-explanatory and hence I leave them to your referral.

You are running out of time. Plan how to get your brand name one among these lists for the year 2013. You should be aware of the term “VIRAL”. Yes once your update your content into the web and it go’s viral, you will have no need to look back.

Use your creativity, be different and controversial, to build your brand.

What matters the most in 2013?
Again we are igniting a debate which only Google would know the true answer. Social media signals (links, mentions and likes from social media sites) Vs the conventional SEO backlinks has become a hot topic through 2012. While the majority say social signals play a vital role in successful SEO, does this mean that the conventional SEO links are of no use and has only limited effect? As I said, only Google knows the answer! Thankfully Google has shared the answer when Danny Sullivan interviewed Matt Cutts, Head of Google webspam team during the SMX advanced in June. Barry of SearchEngineRountable posted this video snippet where Matt Cutts shares the valuable point about backlinks.

Now you know what Google values the most! But do you believe what Matt Cutts says?
When preparing the SEO plans for 2013, I am sure that majority of the SEO experts would certainly offer more weightage to the social signals than the conventional links. However, Matt Cutts says otherwise. The big question is “DO YOU BELIEVE MATT CUTTS?” I ran through the comments posted on Barry’s article on the same topic and here is what people think about Matt:

I don't believe Matt. All my friends in social media swear social is more important than links for organic rankings. They can't all be lying..... Or maybe they are just drinking each other's koolaid. – Karen

Social signals have highest correlations with highest search ranking.It based on the relative newness of the results of networks.It had strong correlations with signals of the points. - Sanket Patel

Social metrics are easy to manipulate, i am happy that links are still the most important factor, the problem with Matt is, that he is not always telling the whole truth :( - Marije

Not only in this article, I have seen comments where people openly mention Matt as a “Liar”. No offence Matt, I am just highlighting what I saw in many articles written based around your public information shares.

Believe in Matt Cutts or not, but we did a quick research on this
We did our own research on the importance of social signals in achieving keyword rankings but the research is still immature to come to a conclusion. However, I would share what we have found so far.

• We focused on finding the backlinks and social media popularity of the sites ranking on the top 4 results on Google for a popular keyword.
• The top 4 results showed inner pages of 4 different websites and we did a backlink analysis and a social media popularity check for all these.

As said earlier, this is limited data to come to a conclusion because; the figures about the backlinks are just the number of backlinks. The quality of these backlinks which is a very important factor is not taken into consideration.  As you see, social signals from “Twitter” seem to have a good effect on the keyword rankings.

• The web page on the first position of the search results for our target keyword had only 122 backlinks but has 135 twitter signals which tops the list.
• The website on the second position doesn’t have any social media signal impact but has higher number of backlinks compared to the site in the second position. While checking the quality of the links for this website, the links were from relevant and high quality sources.  Here the backlinks have an upper hand
• The site on the 3rd position has moderate amount of social signals and moderate amount of backlinks. The quality of the backlinks on a quick look was okay as well.
• The site on the 4th position is what the most interesting one. It obviously has lower social media signals than the site in the 3rd position but has the most number of backlinks when compared to the other 3.

The basic findings
Social Signal Comparison

From the social signal comparison chart, we can see that social signals are vital for good search engine rankings but not necessarily. Because, the site on the 2nd position has the lowest number of social signals compared to the others. However, gaining many social signals may be the shortest and quickest route to achieve good keyword rankings as of now.

Backlink Comparison

Comparing the backlink count between these 4 websites, the website in the 4th position has the most number of backlinks but still ranks low. Now the interesting fact is that, the website on the 2nd position has moderate number of backlinks but of high quality from organic web directories and best quality editorial content. That is the reason why the site ranks well even though there isn’t any considerable number of social signals.

So here is the immature conclusion…
We are digging deep into all these findings to come to a solid conclusion on this debate and would be soon publishing the results at our SIM LABS. Right now on a quick look, it seems quality backlinks from top sources still have good effectiveness in terms of keyword ranking. The site in the second position is the best example for that. Social media signals seem to play a vital role in getting an immediate boost in the search engine rankings as well.  The website in the first position is a good example for that. Finally, the website on the 4th position proves that the number of backlinks doesn’t matter at all. To be precise, 3167 random backlinks are equivalent to 745 top quality backlinks.

The biggest challenge in 2013 would be to find a balance between top quality backlinks and good number of social media signals. Below you would find the ratio of social signals and backlinks that each site has. Backlinks are being built by website for almost a decade now and it would take another decade (as Matt Cutts said) for social media signals to overtake backlinks.

We have planned to implement a perfect balance of social signals and backlinks in all our SEO packages for 2013. So, what is your SEO strategy for 2013? More social signals or more backlinks? Share your thoughts!