Live Q&A with Google’s Gary – BrightonSEO Sept ’17

If you were lucky enough to have had the pleasure of attending BrightonSEO in person in September, lucky you! For the majority of others however, this was not the case. We all know that other commitments get in the way… Whatever your reason, we understand! That’s why we’ve started to live stream the main stage, so at least the large part of people who can’t make it, can still get that BrightonSEO feeling – and maybe pick up a tip or two on the way…

In this post we have the Keynote talk with Gary Illyes from Google.

Here are some of the questions Gary touched on:

1. First-click free program… Is Google doing away with it? What is changing?
2. You have confirmed that Fred is a series of algorithm changes and updates. Google does 2-3 updates to the ranking algorithm every day. We are in a perpetual state of Fred’s?
3. How many of the algorithm changes done are actually actionable? Can webmasters take something away from them to improve their site rankings?
4. A lot of people use the weather report tools available to understand what is happening with Google, how accurate are these tools?
5. At a recent Google event, they were talking about RankBrain and Machine Learning and they were saying that they were using click stream data in order to rank. Were they actually talking about RankBrain learning or was it about using click-thru rate etc. in our live search results?
6. Is Google using Machine Learning in any other parts of the algorithm, or is it still just RankBrain?
7. Is Penguin still evolving or is it in a constant state of just “being”?
8. Current thoughts on the disavow file? Should webmasters still be disavowing links or should we just trust that Google is on it?
9. Have there been more linking manual actions given out since Penguin turned into this kind of ‘constant state of being’?
10. What are your thoughts on the link selling market?
11. Is there still any value in doing link audits?
12. Is there value in fixing your broken links?
13. Is there anything new to report in terms of the mobile first index?
14. AMP – will there be any demotion for pages that aren’t AMP?
15. HTTP to HTTPS – should webmaster still expect a 3-4 week decline in rankings while Google indexes the new site?

We hope you enjoyed the Keynote as much as we did! Feel free to like, comment, share (or all three!) There is some great insight here from Gary that will help all SEOs and webmasters a like.