Getting better..

My dad reminded me that it takes about seven days to get over a cold. But if you go see a doctor or take a lot of medicine, it only takes about a week. πŸ™‚

I’m feeling better and should be ready to play rollerblade hockey again in a day or so. Thanks to everyone for the cold remedy suggestions, except the folks who suggested chugging a quart of boiling water. πŸ™‚

63 Responses to Getting better.. (Leave a comment)

  1. Of course, now my wife is coming down with a cold. I do believe the cruel, cruel finger of blame is pointing at me on that one.

  2. Matt glad to hear you are feeling better – me too – I think your dad is right about the 7 day rule. Lots of good pix of you and SES on Flickr if you haven’t checked them out.

  3. I’m glad you’re feeling better.

    Maybe they should place some kind of β€œSneeze Guard” around you folks at the β€œAsk the engineers” session next year. ;^)

  4. Wuss. WUUUUUUUUUUUUSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS. πŸ˜‰

    Glad you’re better, dude. But if you’d have just listened to me (and your wife damn well better), you’d have saved yourself about five days. πŸ˜‰

  5. Dave (Original)

    Now it’s not you with the cold Matt, test the boiling water theory on her πŸ™‚ If don’t Blog ever again, we’ll assume it didn’t work as expected πŸ™‚

  6. Hi Matt!

    This is my first comment here – i’m a lurker from Ireland but have been really, really enjoying your recent Google Video Sessions, so try to get better soon πŸ˜‰

    On another note, being a Paddy, we suffer from colds and flu all the time – i’ve got one now! Our typically Irish solution is to go out and get hammered and forget about it, but i’m not sure if thats a remedy that would go down well worldwide!

    Keep up the great blogposts, and get well soon.

  7. Rollerblade hockey, Matt ? Who do you play for ? I belong to a speedskating club (in Oz) and we play inline hockey as a warmdown..can get fairly willing at times…

  8. Dave (Original), do you want me dead? πŸ™‚ Blacky, I just play here at the company. You’d think it would be easy to get 7-8 people to come out on Tuesdays/Thursdays, but it can be harder than you’d think. πŸ™‚

  9. I suggest EmergenC’s, you can get them at Trader Joe’s or you can get’m here: http://www.mrprotein.com/alacer-emergen-c.html

  10. ha ha ha…. hockey!?!…ye are a lost Canadian!

    Oh and careful.. you may send it back and forth with the missus for a few weeks…. then you can’t play hockey, eh?

    Take one from the great white north.. no smoochy for a bit… :0}

  11. or take a lot of medicine, it only takes about a week πŸ™

    Getting Rid of a cold is different from getting rid of the SYMPTONS
    It has taken Millions of Years for these Symptons to EVOLVE – they have a practical survival purpose.

    Listen to Oh Search Engines WEB, rejoice those symptons and allow them to do their job!

  12. or take a lot of medicine, it only takes about a week πŸ™

    Getting Rid of a cold is different from getting rid of the SYMPTONS of a cold. 😐
    It has taken Millions of Years for these Symptons to EVOLVE – they have a practical survival purpose.

    Listen to Oh Search Engines WEB, rejoice those symptons and allow them to do their job!

  13. Good morning Matt

    At your convenience. Would you like to tell us about a typical working day of the friends at Google Search Quality Team / Google WebSpam Team. Few pictures also maybe.

    Wish Mrs. Cutts a speedy recovery.

  14. Hey,Matt..
    I’m very happy that you are feeling better πŸ™‚

  15. Actually Matt the hot water theory does work but you are supposed to mix salt into the water and gargle it for a couple of minutes. In saying that, some people believe that standing on your head while eating a carrot and blinking your eyes works too.

    I still suggest four hot Irish whiskeys and if I was a doctor I would prescribe it to all my patients, maybe that’s why I am no a doctor πŸ™ but hey you may as well suggest it to your wife as a test run.

  16. Matt,

    Glad to hear you’re feeling better. What are the team names in roller hockey?

  17. Always Behind Dave

    Glad to hear your feeling better, Your dad’s saying reminded me of the Yogi Berra commercial, “cash, and thats the same thing as money”. Funny stuff.

  18. Matt glad to hear you are feeling better.

    Harith assigned a very interesting question =)
    it would be desirable to hear the expanded answer….

  19. Matt – Just blame your cold on a spamming internet marketer who shook your hand at SES 2006

    Just wait until you have your first kid, then you will REALLY know what it is like to get sick with all the latest strains. ;-(

  20. Boiling Salt water? Standing on your head?

    Why don’t you just prescribe gargling broken glass and running around your house naked 3 times?

    The whiskey’s where it’s at. It won’t cure any of your sickness,but it will make it a lot more fun!

  21. Being off ill gives you lots of time to think – wait a minute heres a throught coming through now… why not add a button to the google toolbar so users can identify spam sites for review by an as yet un invented system which will qualify it as spam and remove it from the listings – imagine your very own volunteer spam police running at billions of members!

  22. Home remedies are great when they work, Matt. But you may get a kick out of my “Magic healing powders” blog post (click on the link above). I finally gave up and went to the doctor yesterday. Turned out to be quite the adventure.

    As far as boiling water goes, if you’re willing to drink hot tea or coffee, that works just as well. The heat helps to soothe the throat.

    The doctor I saw yesterday (not my regular one) told me to drink Apple Juice. It has tanic acid and apparently that helps. He’s right. It’s almost as soothing as the hot drinks.

    But probably the best thing you can do is go get the magic healing powders. I feel great compared to yesterday mornding.

  23. How you feeling today?! We want more Videos!! .. haha just kidding. You know you gotta keep that immune system up, especially when shaking the hands of all those dirty SEOs. πŸ™‚ Vitamin C !!!

  24. Roller Hockey? Woulda thought google would spring for a quality olympic sized ice rink. I’m sure the google puck bunnies would arrive in droves.

  25. Matt,

    You should get a buddy and do a video commercial for the boiling water remedy. That would be comical!

  26. I can imagine Google index would be 100% clean of spam and spammers if Matt & Co start using the new tool in fighting back on spam: Boiling Water πŸ™‚

  27. “Just wait until you have your first kid, then you will REALLY know what it is like to get sick with all the latest strains. ;-(”

    And send them to daycare, then the whole family can get sick every other week!

  28. erm..7 days is a week..

  29. Hello Mr Cutts,
    Glad to hear you are feeling better as I wish I was as well. I have had this nasty chest cold for near 2 weeks now and it’s not getting better very rapidly. In the meantime I find myself siting here spending oodles of time attempting to find out why our site remains penalized in the Google results. I have posted in Google Groups, WebmasterWorld and many other open forums, and as yet still have no definitive answers, just a lot of speculation. I have tried all the techniques over the past year to try and alleviate this situation, you name it, I have tried it, and still the penalty or filter or whatever it is remains. Being slightly delerious from this cold I have even begun removing content because many have said my content was being stolen and duplicated and that was the cause of my woes…but still nothing. Before long in this state of mind I will end up with a blank page with Title only..yes I know…sounds extreme, but all else has been a dead end.
    Well, time for another hit of cough medicine so I will bid adeu for now Mr Cutts and hope we both recover soon from our ills.

    Yours Truly
    DJ

  30. Hey there I hope you’re getting better. I recommend vitamin C or other natural products, not pharmacy (chemicals) products. Also, just having a nice hot bath is good πŸ™‚

    by the way, I’m loving your video’s – hope you get better & you do more videos

    All the best.

  31. http://travel.ian.com/index.jsp?pageName=index&cid=27477

    Not sure if this is a problem site or not in your sig. but to me it seems you are doing a redirect back to your main page on all these links or actually hinding the true url’s. I would say this was an issue that is generating all the problems as you are having

    just my 2 cents.

  32. Don Reese

    You might wish to take a look at this one:

    Thin Affiliate

  33. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Works for me. The only thing is that it keeps you away from the nurses too. You may not want that.

  34. Joe,
    Not quite sure what you are getting at with your post as I want a link back to my main page via my banner.

    Harith,
    Yes I am an affiliate site, why should I be punished for being open and upfront about that? Is it better to deceive and hide this just for Google’s benefit? That just doesn’t seem right. Google, if they are punishing us are doing it unfairly and unjustly. As far as being thin, yes, we removed tons of content, see my above post, because Nothing, and I mean Nothing else seems to be working.

  35. HI Matt Cutts

    Since you are higher up at G do they “let” you win when you play hockey?

  36. Don Reese

    Sorry to hear about your “suffering”. However, here what I would have done:

    – upload all the content you have already removed, turning your site to a thick affiliate.

    – go through Google’s webmaster guidelines word by word and make an honest attempt to meet them

    – submit a stiemap

    – file a reinclusion request as per Matt’s tipshere and here

    Good luck!

  37. Don Reese

    Here is the othe other link (didn’t appeare in my previous post)

    Filing a reinclusion request

  38. Matt glad to hear your doing better.

  39. Don Reese: I think Harith is giving you excellent advice. That said IMHO Google has become very hard on travel sites that use a lot of affiliation content and links as yours does. I’d guess they feel – rightly in most cases but perhaps not yours – that the “real” content is from the parent sites (IAN and several other sites in your case).

    If Matt checks in on your (algorithmic rather than penalty) issue you’ll be lucky enough to win a cold virus and free whiskey for a year.

  40. Dave (Original)

    Don, being an affiliate site you must add some good unique and useful content. If not, you are nothing but a mirror of 1000’s of other pages out there.

  41. glad to hear your doing better and thx for the good tips & news on this site

  42. If you’re going to test the boiling water theory on your wife.
    Can you video tape it?

  43. “Of course, now my wife is coming down with a cold. I do believe the cruel, cruel finger of blame is pointing at me on that one.”

    You wanna hope she did n’t get it from the postman! πŸ˜‰

  44. I hope you get over your cold soon! Hot & Sour soup is always my favorite. Found in almost any Thai place.

    You posted earlier this week about the importance of the Sitemap feature for Google. I setup sitemaps for the company I work for and everything was approved.

    As of Tuesday of this week I am no longer able to login to my google account gmwilson@gmail.com (3 days after signing up for Sitemaps). It’s telling me my password is invalid. I’ve had this account for 3 years now. I’m running Analytics, Calendars, Gmail, Sitemaps and Google Adwords. Now I’m unable to access any of these sections?

    Is there anything I did in sitemaps that would lock me out?

    Thanks George.

  45. Matt is this you on Myspace?
    http://myspace.com/mattcutts

  46. Best cure for flu / cold is whiskey and honey – that’s what my gran told me when she was alive, and since I’ve flu type symptons from camping in the middle of the rainy English Lake District, the whiskey has gone down well – don’t care much for honey!

  47. re. travel affiliate sites. I have a dislike for any website that has been created simply to promote either 1) affiliate banners or 2) Google Adsense, be it travel or not.

    Create a travel site with tons of unique content, and add a few affiliate links and Google Adsense etc. on to your website, and you’ll not suffer – I’m afraid many too people think that the internet is an easy way to make money, and they are entitled to be listed on any search engine.

  48. Dave (Original)

    RE: “I’m afraid many too people think that the internet is an easy way to make money, and they are entitled to be listed on any search engine.”
    ==========================================

    Ain’t that the truth! It only takes basic maths to work out that, for any given search term that 1000’s more that will fail, than succeed.

  49. I’m gonna be the first one to predict that the Myspace profile isn’t Matt.

    Here’s why:

    http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=101672761&blogID=157357446&MyToken=e8036f1d-8cab-4156-bba3-2bf7a1b6684e

    1) Matt said he didn’t try the boiling water thing.

    2) That’s a pot of ice water, not boiling water. I’d like to give Matt a little more credit for intellectual capacity than that. πŸ˜‰

  50. Hope you can recover fast and keep going better matt..

  51. Ask any Russian, the solution to the cold or any other aliment is a shot of vodka. If it doesn’t work at first, repeat until it does. Even my Russian mother in law who doesn’t drink will take a little vodka when she isn’t feeling well (she particularly likes my vodka soaked strawberries for a sore throat). If you don’t have vodka, Konac is a good substitute.

    Just remember when it comes to vodka, don’t do the cheap stuff.

  52. I don’t wish Matt to end as an alcoholic drinking all that vodka and whiskey some of you have recommended πŸ™

    And I do wish him to end as a classic hard-boiled eggs following Canadian Adam’s boiling Water remedy suggestion πŸ™

    Better drinking cold Sprite πŸ™‚

  53. Let’s try boiling spammers in hot salty water… πŸ˜‰

  54. Just to say that I am not correlated to those sites in any way. I just founded them today into an italian blog.
    What to say… Matt is enough famous to get some parody. πŸ˜‰
    Bye,
    Emanuele aka P|xeL

  55. Let’s try boiling spammers in hot salty water…

    Good idea content and very informativity!

  56. Echinacea and goldenseal — provided that you have no allergies to either of them. A few days or sooner and your cold should be gone. It may be shocking, but it works. Quercetin can aid in recovery as well.

    Mike

    P.S. Don’t do a site search on my site for it — possible side effects, that is — it may not be found. Not trying to be a jerk about it, but it is odd.

  57. Hmm, fealing better??? Think it’s time to place the following url at number 1 result in google for “remedy for common cold”.
    http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/frickin-cold/
    If you wouldn’t have been “feeling better”, there would have been 400 more “unique” remedies there…

  58. Hope you haven’t had the same relapse as I have with that evil SES cold. I’m catching up on some movie watching though. Maybe I should’ve gone with the boiling water remedy.

  59. Simple old chamomill tea works wonder for colds. Cheap also.

  60. Glad to hear that you are feeling better, Welcome back.

  61. sudafed, zicam and guiness! Not in any particular order

  62. hey it is true on boiling water.. I drunk almost boiling water a littre or so and next day was absolutly in shape, can’t explain anything just how it was, so you might well try it, you are not going to be first one…}

  63. Well, they say the best way to get rid of cold is to kiss somebody and pass your cold to him/her .. Anyway, good you are feeling better. But you should avoid kisses from somebody having cold

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