This Week In Search: November 3 – 7 2014

This Week in Search News

Matt Cutts Gives Some Insight of His Future Role at Google

There’s a buzz happening over Matt Cutts recent appearance on ““This Week in Google”. When asked when he’d be returning as Google’s head of web spam team, Cutts announced that he would be extending his leave into 2015. When prompted if he would return to the same role, he worked his way around the question by stating that his team was doing a great job, and

I loved the part of my job that dealt with keeping an eye on what important news was happening related to Google, but, it’s not clear that having me as a lightning rod for unhappy black hat SEOs, or something, is the best use of anybody’s time compared to working on other things making the world better for Google…so we’ll see.

Google Supports Movember! Maps Pegman Gets a Sweet Stache!

movember-pegman-gmapsOkay, it’s not breaking news that will change the face of search, but it’s still super cute…er…I mean manly! Movember is a yearly event that where men sport some pretty spectacular mustaches to support and grow awareness for men’s health issues, issues such as; prostate cancer, testicular cancer, and more.

Penguin 3.0 Still Rolling Out

It’s been almost 3 weeks now and Google’s John Mueller stated in a Webmaster Central Hangout this week that the latest Penguin algorithm is still rolling out. While previous updates to the algorithm have been deployed much faster, Muelller stated

We’re kind of working on improving the speed of the algorithm there, but we need to make sure that the quality of the data that we generate through that is still sufficient so that it actually makes sense.
So just making things faster doesn’t necessarily make things better.

Spanish Law Makers pass “Google Tax” Anti Piracy Law

Spain is following Germany’s lead by passing a law that would require Google to pay substantial fees to publishers whose content is featured in the “Quick Answer Box” and article excerpts in Google News & SERPS, due to copyright infringement. Germany passed a similar law earlier this yea, which returned in disappointing results for German publishers.