In a previous post I said “I have to bounce,” and a good friend told me that I’m not quite hip enough to pull that phrase off, and that in fact no one has tried to pull off that phrase since, like, the 90s.
It’s okay. I realize that I’m not hip, and I embrace my geekhood. I’m at peace with it. For example, a hip person would not take a picture of me with Dax, the blackhat spammer hammer, and then photoshop it to look like I’m using a traction beam to suck blackhat secrets out of his brain:
A cool person just would not do that. But I would.
My only hope is that I can plow on past hip, into geeky, and then just keep going until I wrap back around to hip again. Please don’t tell me if I get snagged on geeky and never quite wrap around. 
{ 52 comments… read them below or add one }
LOL!!! Dax is hip and totally in love with himself.
Don’t worry Matt, people still luv ya…
Matt, sorry for commenting on an irrelevant topic – but I wanted to get your attention on this matter, as to get a bit of clarification.
A few months ago I used the URL remove tool on a set of forum URLs to avoid duplicate content, as I had some rewrited urls. Now I switched back to the original forum URLs that were removed by the URL remove tool. I understand it takes 6 months or so for Google to start re-indexing them… and that can’t be undone, but what worries me is that I won’t get hit by some form of penalty from going from 30-40 odd pages to 50,000 or so.
Please drop me an email when you get a minute to clarify the sitauation.
Reaching into peoples chests, blachat xray vision extraction. We getting onto a theme here?
Matt – are you teaching through example here or just loving those blackhats? You’ve linked to the blogs of spammers and have NOT used nofollow – I assume because the blogs have no spam or link manipulation schemes.
I think you are treating Jeremy Z’s blog too harshly but I assume you are adding “nofollow” to those links to make a point that he’s got questionable links and therefore loses authority or ability to pass PR?
Matt, what about the AOL deal? Google got into a deal that even Microsoft rejected as unethical (that’s MS’s word for it.) Google will give AOL priority ranking. How is this to the user’s benefit? Is “Do No Evil” now “Do Evil”?
geeks.
There was a discussion some time ago about the possibility that geeks were now cool. Don’t believe it for a second. We may potentially be cool to other geeks, but that’s about as far as it goes.
So don’t worry about those other people, Matt. It’s their loss. Oh, gotta go. I’m Audi 5000.
I do like following your links – never know where I’m going to end up – found the blog of someone I briefly met and had a very interesting chat with – totally un-internet related
but – this chap, Dax, needs to stop trying to sound all not-grown up and cool and embrace HIS geekiness.
he ends up sounding like my 10 year old trying to impress the local ‘gangstas’ after reading a few Mickey Spillane books.
it’s not big and it certainly aint clever – just tedious
Good evening Matt
Btw, I read several places that you were working on your PhD before joining Google. Do you have now a PhD degree or a MS degree?
Thanks.
beautiful shot – although my own traction beams are blue….you must have the 1.0 model – time to upgrade Matt.
So, can we expect this blogg to fall out of favor with Google now it has many links to bad neighborhoods?
“So, can we expect this blogg to fall out of favor with Google now it has many links to bad neighborhoods? ”
rel=”nofollow”
nofollow is only on commentors’ email addresses, not the posts themselves
Matt…
Maybe I’ve totally lost it, but methinks you look like Ferris Bueller in that pic. And FB was hip.
So clearly something doesn’t compute here.
2005 had a movie called “Roll/Bounce…” That can be reworked to troll/bounce
So what blackhat secrets *did* you suck out of his brain, Matt? Is that beam generated from nanobots embedded within the lenses of your glasses (developed deep within the secret labs of the Google complex)?
For those interested in whether geeks are or can be cool, you should visit The Foundation to Create Cool Geeks.”
(must use IE to view the site)
http://web.syr.edu/~jcmorris/
http://web.syr.edu/~jcmorris/moreaboutus_files/frame.htm
Wikipedia has some very interesting information on the meaning of “Geek” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek
Depending on which definition you use, if you consider the fascination our culture has with information and technology, it definitely is now cool to be a geek . . . and not just to either geeks.
Matthew Broderick will hate you, but I like the way you think, AdamL. )
Joe, most of these people don’t spam from their blogs.
Harith, like Larry and Sergey (and lots of other Googlers), I was working on my Ph.D. but left before getting the degree to join Google. I picked up a M.S. along the way though. Contrary to the brand spanking new Wikipedia entry about me though, I was primarily doing computer graphics and some movement tracking rather than information retrieval.
Good morning Matt
M.S. is great, Matt. How about me with that little B.Sc.
You are still young and going strong. And who knows, maybe one day you decide to get that Ph.D. after all.
Have a great day and a successful week.
A phenomenon that may be less perceptible from where you are Matt is the warping of the geek-hip continuum by Google (and its effect on language and culture). I’ll bet even Matthew Broderick would concede that.
Joe,
Matt is right. Most of black hats are clearly capable to have completely separated black and white recource. They do not spam their white hat resources (e.g, their blogs – it). But they still attracts links to some of their white hat sites just due to the fact that they are also know to be a black hats.
If you want laser beams instead of tractor beams, you should get a cat like this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sudent/12931588/
Wow – Cool cat pic
Matt – are we likely to see the test Datacenter back soon – hopefully it will be a nice Xmas prezzie for the people who have suffered with 301,302 and canonical issues.
Cheers.
Stephen
A cool person would never write a Christmas Carol tribute to Google either, but there you go:
http://www.searchenginecollege.com/2005/12/google-christmas-carol_19.html
HA!!! Cool image, let me try to post it for ya, feel free to delete if I mess it up Matt.
My Jeremy Zawodny interview is up on the buzzbox today if anyone is interested.
Matt,
You seem to be gazing at Dax a little too longingly. Are you thinking about joining the dark side?
Paul
hmm, that x-ray vision of yours seems a bit shaky and blurry Matt. Did you quit your sprite tactics?
Hi Matt,
Since you keep getting back to those black hat SEOs, and I’m in a position where I’m trying to understand our local Swedish varieties of the same kind, I just have to ask you a question.
When a very black hat SEO company dissapeared from Googles index recently, there where many who considered it as a good sign for Swedish SEO. Almost immediately the other large Swedish SEO firms started cleaning up their acts.
When the site emerged again, after just a couple of days, it sends a very strange message to these companies. Sure, they cleaned up their main site, but they are still doing the same ugly things out there on the web. Sneaky redirects, hidden links to link farms, cloaked dooray pages, links from their ususpective client’s sites to link farms…. Like
http://www.google.se/search?q=intitle:%22sitemap+and+seo+by+altus.se%22&filter=0
No. I realise that this is a question I should as through another forum, but I happen to believe that you are te best person to explain the policies behind this.
Best regards,
Nikke
Hej Nikke
Sikkert noget spam skidt det omtalte svenske SEO firm har lavet. Lad os håbe at Matt læse dit besked og gør noget for sagen.
Ellers, forslår jeg at du melde firmaet via Google’s spam reporting, og skriver lige i starten “Att.: Mr. Matt Cutts”.
http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
Held og lykke
Aaron
“My Jeremy Zawodny interview is up on the buzzbox today if anyone is interested.”
Great interview. But I could see that you were “soft” on Jeremy. You could have stirred the pot a little more
Matt,
I follow your blog and this post really cracked me up. Thanks for the Photoshop tip and chuckle for the day! :0)
Nancy
Hi Matt,
I’ve never posted here, but I’ve been a Stomper fan for quite awhile now (Stomper is Brad Fallon’s SEO practice – have you heard of it)? He has proven himself as someone who has cracked the Google algorithm – his wedding company for example, myweddingfavors.com, is a lock on #1 and that hasn’t changed in months.
Until recently, he disappeared. Then, he popped right back to #1 after about 2 weeks. All of the Stompers were intrigued. His latest blog post on http://www.bradfallon.com/ (see December 15 post) suggests that he now is able to manipute Google at will! Do you think that claim is possible? He sure seems to know what he is doing!
Thanks,
Lucas
Matt next time beam a few more vocabulary words into Dax for his blog. Call me a Victorian moralist, but I’m really tired of
the F word as a substitute for … all adjectives and nouns.
Dude, geekiness is awesome. Being “hip” is totally overrated. I say this as a slightly-hip, slightly-geeky, slightly apathetic person who aspires only to be a comment whore and increase blog traffic. There, I said it.
I also say that, while spam sucks and all, that guy you’re tractor-beaming is hot. Except for the beams, those are geeky. Tell him to lose those.
Bye for now, I’m out like a trout (see that? Now that’s just geeky. Nothing hip about it. Just to clarify.)
“Hej Nikke
Sikkert noget spam skidt det omtalte svenske SEO firm har lavet. Lad os håbe at Matt læse dit besked og gør noget for sagen.
Ellers, forslår jeg at du melde firmaet via Google’s spam reporting, og skriver lige i starten “Att.: Mr. Matt Cutts”.
http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
Held og lykke ”
what?
Smoke2Much and all
Sorry. It seems that I wrote my reply to Nikke in Danish, “by relflex” I guess
Its only now I thought about it after reading Smoke2Much “what?”
Wish you all a great evening.
Sorry about that Matt. Fixed the wikipedia article. Hey, nobody else wants to edit?
“I’m not quite hip enough”
u iz be cool my n_gg@ M
Matt,
If you think you are cool you might be, but probably not. If you think you are a geek, then you are. Embrace the geekhood. Besides from what I have seen at conferences you are the coolest geek there. Go with it man.
Lucas, I checked Brad’s blog and didn’t see a Dec. 15th post where Brad claims that he can manipulate Google’s rankings at will. I would be interested to read such a post.
HI Matt
I think Lucas is referring to this http://www.instantseoexpert.com
From http://www.instantseoexpertdotcom
“Learn how Brad used his professional SEO Skills to achieve a #1 position for “Wedding Favors” in Both Google AND Yahoo”
That is hillarious! I bet you get free steak knive as well
Hi Matt, thanks for the response and taking a look!
The post is found on http://www.bradfallon.com, and it reads:
December 15, 2005
A new article title?
Title: How to get de-indexed and re-indexed in 10 days.
Subtitle: An experiment not for the faint of heart.
Again, his website went from #1 on Google to nowhere to be found about 2 weeks ago and now back to #1 a few days ago. He seems to indicate that he is able to manipulate Google at will – could this be true?
Thanks again!
Lucas
Lucas,
“Again, his website went from #1 on Google to nowhere to be found about 2 weeks ago and now back to #1 a few days ago. He seems to indicate that he is able to manipulate Google at will – could this be true?”
That have been happening to many sites, as I read on webmasters forums. Reason mightbe the everflux that followed Jagger update, or because Google is doing some tweaking of algos and filters.
You actually hang around with that loser?
I just lost some respect for you. His blog is pathetic and so is he from the looks of his sad little posts. I wonder if his mommy would kick him out of her basement if she caught him posting like that…? What a tool.
Hi Matt
Big Fan, read your blog daily, Glad to see your taking the war to the spamers,
I usualy never post, ,, But today i came accross sometyhing you need to look into and address. It concers the article at SEOMOZ
http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=645
on Submit express th’re boosting how there 300 000 backlinks get them number position. They rank number one for search engine optimisation on Google, what the hell do these opunks have to do with SEO, stuff like this drive crazy, please review put the law down!
Hello Matt,
Today I’ve received a Google Alert regarding a site that I monitor that is called: http://www.aboutmedicalalarm.com but in fact, when I enter the link it wasn’t about this website. Instead it led me to a clear spammy one, in my opinion, called http://www.aboutmedicalalarms.com. We’re talking about on letter of difference (alarm to alarms) but yet, I’m worried knowing that even Google Alert had mistaken the urls. I think this http://www.aboutmedicalalarms.com should be removed from the search engine as it displayes only some keywords that lead to pages full of advertising text arranged as a normal SERP results.
Thank-you and I wish you luck with the big changes of the Data Center. I’m sure it would be even better than the actual one. And by the way, please send my best wishes, admiration and support for the stand that Google has taken against the US government abuse intent. Let us know if there is something we could,as community, n order to actively support Google in its defence of the confidentiality cause against the Bush’s Inquisition.
Roxana.
GREAT PHOTO, BUT WHOS WHO ?
WHICH ONES – MR QUERNA.
Great picture! Photshop makes it very cool
I randomly stumbled across this photo searching for images of “tractor beam.” I know it was posted over a year and a half ago, but I can’t stop laughing, and I’ve just gotta give you “props” before I “bounce.”
I just located this thread. In this thread, someone discussed Brad Fallon and how he has a “lock” on Google. Personally, I do not think that anyone has a “lock” on Google.
In recent months, I have read where Fallon’s myweddingfavors site has fallen out of the rankings, at times. You cannot “game” Google. It simply will not work. Developing good “old fashioned” quality content is the only way to search engine success.
Hhahahahaha…. looke like superman from the past. I cannot stop laughing.