Attack of the In-laws!

My wife’s parents are visiting for the next few days, so my weather report is “light posting, with a chance of sunshine.” Me getting sunshine, that is; I get outside more often when people visit. 🙂 I’ve got a big batch of email that I’d normally sift through on the weekend, but that will have to wait for a little while longer.

I’m lucky to have good in-laws. When my wife and I showed up in Nebraska late last year, everyone on her side of the family had made “Midwestern Cuttlettes” T-shirts. It was great fun. 🙂

47 Responses to Attack of the In-laws! (Leave a comment)

  1. Matt

    Hopefully you enjoy the family visit. I thought that you have arranged another travel for Mrs Cutts, her mother and yours to China. That way we would have had our Easter Grabbag post for sure 🙂

    Btw, how does a “Midwestern Cuttlettes” T-shirts look like?

  2. Sounds like fun! I am lucky to have good inlaws also. I like they they never stop feeding me when I go there.

  3. “Midwestern Cuttlettes” – Awesome, sounds like a fun family. We’ll have to get Shoe to schedule the next NPMMO around your next visit to Omaha! What do ya say?

  4. Did you mean: Cutlets

    (Just repeating what Google asked me)

  5. Not so lucky with my in-laws, I’m afraid. Well, they haven’t murdered me. Yet.

  6. Hey Matt,
    I noticed you had to through in the “I’m lucky to have good in-laws” comment after the “I get outside more often when people visit” one…Just kidding…I too have very nice in-laws but get out of the way when they are in town. We all know the truth is my in-laws don’t come visit to see me.

  7. Matt, can you please do another grab bag post? I don’t especially want one personally; I just want Harith to stop asking and he won’t until you do one. 😉

    And ummm…can you send the sunshine northeast? Like just off of Lake Ontario? It’s about 24 degrees Fahrenheit here now, and it’s April. Cold…bad!

  8. Good idea Matt – get out there and show them the coast or the wine country or whatever.

  9. Great to hear you are taking some time from hard work to spend with your family. I’m sure none of your readers are complaining at the least because you have provided so many of us with great advice and insight into SEO techniques, trends and news.

    I want to personally thank you for sharing your expertise and enthusiam for SEO. I wish I had more time to work with SEO and content optimization in my regular work and with my blogs (which I unfortunately have little extra time to work on – as many bloggers who can’t afford to not work full-time know. It would be great to be a full-time blogger and provide people with a wonderfully packaged web experience for a range of current issues.)

    Although I’ve had very little time so far to work on my new blog – thegoogleblogger.com – I hope to begin posting to it more regularly soon. If possible, I’d love to conduct and publish an interview with you. I promise I would edit my list of more than 300 SEO ideas and questions to about 10. :0)

    Phil in Los Gatos, CA

  10. Adam

    “Matt, can you please do another grab bag post? I don’t especially want one personally; I just want Harith to stop asking and he won’t until you do one.”

    I know I can always count on your support. I Owe You One 🙂

  11. “I’m lucky to have good in-laws” If you think so then then you are really lucky!

  12. Dave (Original)

    RE: “I’m lucky to have good in-laws”
    =========================================

    Luck likely has nothing to do with it.

  13. lucky man, but i think you write it because they come and you want to have a good time no? just a joke 😉

  14. You can all relax now, …SearchEnginesWebs have just arrived in NYC for SES 😕 😛

    Well what do you know – guess who got into one of these shots 😮

    Click on this link and put your mouse over the image…
    http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/swf/sesvid.swf

  15. Really good in-laws is in-laws far away enough 😉

  16. Have fun enjoying the sunshine!

  17. Sunshine, darn its snowing today here in Buffalo. I need to move.

  18. I realize this is off topic but I assume that will be ok based on your general post. I recently joined the google website optimizer and found it interesting that I had been under the impression google discouraged landing pages but here encourages using one.

    Did I misunderstand Google discouraging landing pages or is this a change?

  19. While Matt is getting more sunshine and going in the light posting mode, we might as well read some entertaining stuff about him 🙂

    20 Real Facts About Matt Cutts, Google’s Spam Sheriff

    Enjoy!

  20. all the best with your in-laws 🙂

  21. I wonder if your in-laws read your blog.

  22. Hope you enjoy your family visit.

  23. What the heck is a cuttlette?! I am afraid to ask! lol

  24. What part of Nebraska are your in-laws from?

  25. I enjoy my family visits, its the only time the garden gets tidied 🙂

  26. Hi Matt:

    I am on my third set of in-laws. Good luck!

    This is off topic but…..

    Why don’t you write a book about “Webmastering for SEO Sucess” subtitled “Winning without SPAM”?

    You could use some cool online way to publish it and (so as not to get in trouble at the Googleplex) donate some of the proceeds to a good cause.

    What brings this to mind you ask?

    Well, every once in a while I think “Hey, why doesn’t Matt write more about SEO for success?” and then upon examination I think that you have pretty much covered the topic. I man how many times can you say, “ads don’t effect ranking”, “dont’s buy links”, “Don’t Hang Out in Bad Neighborhoods”, …….etc.

    A book would be nice or a well organized and tabbed informational website.

    Cheers,
    Ted Z

  27. What do you do when your mother-in-law sways through your backyard?
    Shoot again!

    Just kidding mine is just fine.

  28. Hi Matt,

    Good luck with the in-laws! Can’t wait to see one of your posts again, I’ve been check often and am anxiously waiting for a new SEO post on your blog… but hey in-laws are in-laws 😉

    I have a question that I’m sure many webmasters have asked before, and sorry if its off topic, but maybe you could write a blog entry about it? Its DMOZ.

    It seems that no new sites have gone up because of the issues they have been having since last year and I was wondering how much importance Google is giving DMOZ listings nowadays, considering that many are now outdated and no new content has been added in months.

    Thanks in advance.

    All the best,
    Augustin

  29. Good luck with your in-laws!

  30. Hi Matt,

    Have they captured you also ?! no posts for last 4 days!!

    vivek

  31. Hey Matt pls post pics of cutlet t-shirt. Whatever that is

  32. vivek kedia, I’m still around. 🙂 I’ve been juggling some stuff at work.

  33. Matt

    And I thought you were out in the sunshine away of Adam Lasnik. I see the folks talking much about high PR sites suspected of selling backlinks and breaking the holy Google Webmaters Guidelines. Maybe its time to do another great post “Tell me about your backlinks”. Just to remind folks that you hear them 😉

  34. Matt – really your in-laws are good!! or you are —– your wife

  35. Hey Augustin!

    I will fill in for Matt who I am sure will correct me if needed when he is done with his outlaws.

    DMOZ, Google’s version of the DMOZ (when was the last time this was updated?), Yahoo, and other directories are treated like any other site. There is no special attribute assigned to a directory that gives it more clout due to directoriness. I hate to mention PR and ignite a fire storm of discussion but, If you look at the PR of these pages it will give you an idea of how much weight Google gives them.

    Ted Z

  36. Matt,

    Sorry to bother you while your in-laws are visiting but I’ll send a question:

    The way I got it google.com has got a PR of 10 by default and the PR 10 we see is not a result of any calculation. But, I bet you calculate it’s PR somewhere for testing. Would it be possible that once you’ll tell this little unimportant number info to us. It’d be interesting to know how much Google is worth by it’s own measures 🙂

  37. Matt,

    I ran an Alexa check (I know) on Google vs Yahoo vs MSN this morning, and it looks like Google traffic has topped. MSN is getting a small bump from the ie7 and Vista releases that will unwind as people replace them, but the shocker was it looks like Google visits leveled out in 2006.

    At the same time, I Google Trend(ed) all sorts of common words and phrases (trusting Tends more than Alexa), and the search trends were almost universally down unless I picked a real growth interest, like Global Warmning. My conclusion was that text search has saturated the US market, that all the waves of new users running curiosity searches have passed, and it will be a steady-sate, zero sum game for Internet publisher from here out.

    Please poke some holes in this because I’m depressed as all get-out. Wish I had in-laws to cheer me up.

    Morris

  38. Dave (Original)

    Matt, totally off-topic but in Google’s interest and abhorrent IMO.

    http://www.ihelpyou.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=24744

  39. Ah shucks – Dave that’s just an automated script causing that return.

    I don’t think a real human being at either ebay or google has gone ‘hey! Let’s advertise for molestation products’ – you’d probably get ebay ads for just about anything you typed in a search box – they like to use adwords and they use a pretty broad brush when it comes to the keywords they target – they’re just trying to corner the market.

    And it’s not just Google – I’ve seen contextually inappropriate ads served on other sites too – this is a funny (non-google) one I saw on one of the major Australian news sites recently – http://www.utheguru.com/ad-selection

  40. Dave (Original)

    RE: “Ah shucks – Dave that’s just an automated script causing that return”
    =====================================
    Your point being??

    RE: “And it’s not just Google”
    =====================================
    Again, your point being??

  41. Matt

    “I’ve been juggling some stuff at work.”

    C’mon Matt..say it. You have been juggling the serps. As a result many webmasters went crazy of the back and forth Matt Data Pushes 🙂

  42. MY point is that it would be obvious to most people that this is a anomaly caused by ebay’s tendency to pay millions on adwords and try and target as many keywords as they can.

    I’ve seen numerous circumstances where such ebay ads seem rather ridiculous / out of context…. I once saw an adsense add from Ebay saying:-

    “The Sahara Desert
    Great deals on
    The Sahara Desert Shop on
    eBay and Save!”

    So, let’s ban the word involved from adwords – where’s that then leave charities / help organisations that want to use the word to advertise help services? Or are you just after a ban on that particular ad?

    I don’t see this ad as a particular violation of the adwords content policy – https://adwords.google.com/select/contentpolicy.html – it is just completely tasteless, but probably accidentally so. Who is to say that ebay doesn’t / hasn’t at some stage sold books of advice for victims of that problem?

    Having said that, a quick Google search for terms like ‘report an inappropriate adwords ad to Google’ doesn’t show up any obvious way to do so – it could be a worthwhile service to implement.

    M

    There are procedures in

  43. With this being a posting about the in-laws, I found it interesting that the search term that Morris choose to focus on was Global Warming. Is there a connection?

  44. so I’m coming back off my holiday and decide to pick up a computer mag… nothing special in it but what’s on the back page?

    non other that mr cutts pointing wildy at the google logo on his building…. shocked I was! (alas no cats)…

    seems they are having a google issue next time.. I might pick it up and have a look

  45. My in-laws arrived yesterday…somebody help me.

    Here is the type question I ask when the in-laws are in town. What determines the priority of sites listed when you do a “site:www.*.*” ?

    See, I need medication 🙂

  46. Dave (Original)

    RE: “MY point is that it would be obvious to most people that this is a anomaly caused by ebay’s tendency to pay millions on adwords and try and target as many keywords as they can.”
    =========================================

    Actually it wouldn’t be “obvious to most people” at all. I would guess less than 1% of Google users would have any clue that it is “just an automated script causing that return”. Also, money is never a legit reason for this sort of thing IMO.

    RE: “So, let’s ban the word involved from adwords – where’s that then leave charities / help organisations that want to use the word to advertise help services?”
    =========================================

    Nope, let’s just ban automate “automated script” from using such words. I bet “charities / help organisations” would be all for it too!

  47. It is good to have in laws that want to get along and make things fun. I am blessed with that as well. Sometimes when they are visiting us I think they like me better. We don’t fight or anything which is quite different from what goes on with their blood relatives.

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