I’m on webmasterradio.fm!

So I’m going to be on the SEO Rockstars show on webmasterradio.fm right about, oh, now. Expect me to tease Greg Boser about www.monkeypics.co.uk. I’ll update the post with a link to the mp3 when it’s ready.

Update: The show is live at http://www.webmasterradio.fm/episodes/index.php?showId=16 so go download the mp3. It’s a mere 70-ish megabytes. Highlights included an update on BigDaddy, some questions about possible sandbox behavior, my take on the new show Lestat before it heads to Broadway, SEO contests, and my current pet peeve (subdomain spam, which BigDaddy does better on). I promised to come back in a few months, and I’m adding one condition: No press release next time.

60 Responses to I’m on webmasterradio.fm! (Leave a comment)

  1. I’m tuned it! πŸ™‚

  2. Well I’ll be damned, Matt’s a guy! I always pictured him with breasts :(.

  3. Matt on SEOrockstars or Simon and American Idol – I’m so torn

  4. You’re really, really weirding me out Ben. πŸ™‚

  5. I do wonder sometimes about whether or not Google serves actual amount of pages from a domain. I see 35,000+ pages for one of my sites, but I know the content only has about 4,000 pages total. Seems to be a little bloated — but hopefully BigDaddy will clarify the ‘realness’ of it.

  6. intresting radio station never knew there was such a specialist radio station the web does not stop amazing me.

  7. I was there for most of it, but I got disconnected about the time you were making fun of that Jones girl. Damn I can’t believe I missed it. haha.. all well maybe next time. Good show Matt!

  8. Lol I tried to get you to respond to my question about a dropped homepage in the chat room well anyway nice show good info.

    On to my question:
    On Dec 27th my homepage was hit hard
    and fell down in the serps for many keywords and it also fell in allinachor, text and title.
    The rest of my site seems fine with pages ranking above my homepage somehow.
    What could have caused this?, no keyword spamming no strange reciprocal linkage.
    I’ve been changing things on my site everyday to try to fix this problem but to no avail.
    The site I’m talking about is here for you to check if possible at all.

  9. Great show Matt! Almost forgot you were going to be on. The chat room got pretty crazy for sure. Look forward to hearing part 2 in a couple of months.

  10. Hey Matt, I’ll have to listen to the show tomorrow when they post it to here what you said as the feed dropped right when the conversation started to get interesting.

    It’s not everyday that we get to here you questioned directly, first time for me. Too bad they didn’t ask you any real interesting questions other than that last one about what’s hacking you lately in SEO. I really with they’d come up with better questions rather than just asking personal garbage about their link condom site and SEO contests. Boring and useless info.

    My question, which in error was boiled down to display:none, was actually about reporting web spam. I discovered a webmaster the other day in our industry who is using display none to hide 90% of the text on their site and that of tons of other client sites. I’ve reported the spam but nothing gets done and it isn’t changed in Big Daddy.

    I guess I expect that if Google expects me to play on the right side of the fence (which i always do), I expect Google to do something about those blatantly on the wrong side of the fence. While you’re not the Internet Police, I’m sure you hate web spammers even more than I do. I just don’t understand why nothing is ever done about it when it’s so blatant.

    If you need specifics, contact me via email or let me know how you’d like the spam report referenced and I’ll leave it again.

    Take care!

    KJ

  11. Hey Matt, I just wanted to tell you that I appreciate your ability not to be dragged to one side or another. When asked about the v7n contest, you were looking at both sides of the original issue and made up your own mind. It’s good to see that after all of the debates and arguments, the one who actually works for the search engine everyone is trying to run after, can see the good within the contest despite of the original attempts to shut it down.

    Mike Dammann

  12. Makes me wish Google would hurry up with free WiFi for everyone in the United States πŸ™

  13. w00t w00t πŸ˜‰ fun stuff

  14. Hi Matt,

    I didn’t listen yet, but I did hear last week on CNBC that you use to work for the NSA. Is that true?

    My academic background is International Relations. National Security is a tough business, huh? Is that why you went internet (or was is Google $$$$)?

    I went internet because it’s wonderful to have a job where you can meander around alpine meadows and take pictures of butterflies or stoll the beach and take pictures of sea worms.

  15. So I see you are not this dry, stuffy person Matt, it is nice to see you have a sense of humor. I like everyone else probably would like to have heard a little more about what Google is doing to target spam.

  16. Here is the last Rainmaker interview with Matt on WMR for those who missed it.

  17. Wayne, You thought this guy http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/my-name-is-inigo/ might be dry and stuffy? πŸ˜‰

  18. Anne, that was before I knew there was internet πŸ™‚

  19. Matt I was sorry to miss it thanks for posting the archive link.
    How did the technology work for this – were you on VOIP from Googleplex to …where?

  20. Good morning All

    Would any of you be kind to post a link to Inigo’s interview on the SEO Rockstars show .

    Thanks.

  21. Hi Matt,

    We really need the Big Daddy info you promised this week…

    Ellio

  22. SEOrockstars, dude you are like famous and stuff – pls somebody hook us up with a link to that interview….

  23. Hi Matt, I look forward to hearing the archive.

    Aaron, thanks for the link to Matt on the Rainmaker interview.

  24. Hmm I wonder how I ended up postign my comment in the wrong post??? Matt, feel free to delete the wrong entry.

    Well anyways, what I meant to say is, nothing unexpected has been said during the show but I still enjoyed it very much πŸ˜‰

  25. Matt, its obvious you are enjoying your cult status and good luck to you.
    But are’nt you fraternising a little too close to the enemy.
    Webmasterradio is made up of well known and major spammers.Google at the moment has more spam than any other time in recent years, most of it perpetuated by major spammers such as “Online marketing Biz”.What if I was to show a connection between some of your black hat friends and this major spam
    Isn’t there a real and perceived risk of compromise on what you stand for?
    Especially as there seems very little action on reported spam

  26. Hi,

    This is very inspiring stuff for Online Marketing professionals. Keep the good work going!

    Best wishes,
    SEM Times

  27. Hi Matt

    I hope you dont mind me posting the link to the page now it is up on the archive:-

    http://www.webmasterradio.fm/episodes/index.php?showId=16

    Cheers

    Stephen

  28. Great news, looking forward to hearing from it Matt.

    Best of luck, not that you need it.

  29. LOL
    /snarf/
    Your avoidance tactics are legendery with the questions.
    /snort/

  30. Matt

    Great interview – loong and covered some good aspects.

    With ref to BD the one thing I dont understand is that Google is now finding the destination url a lot lot better and handling canonicaliztjsofgjro (sp πŸ˜‰ ?) issues a lot better.

    But the index is still not treating the page as if it has got any rank. EG say a hijack took over http://www.domain.com and http://www.domain.com lossed all PR/Rank etc to an extent that the page no longer got crawled – now BD is following the destination and http://www.domain.com is getting crawled again – but the rank is non-existent.

    At this stage of BD should we just be concentrating on the identification process when giving you feedback ?

  31. Nice to put a voice to the man. Love the “spirit of the radio” intro, that’s funny.

  32. “Start small and build out”
    “Start small and build out”
    “Start small and build out”

    that pretty much answers it all for me, thanks matt..

  33. “agree”
    “agree”
    “agree”

    Like a real business would growing organically over time.

  34. Matt, the one question I’ve never seen advertised is how do you linkbait for legit businesses?

    Example. let’s say I sell widgets, and have a website.

    There are TONS of other websites selling widgets; but they’re definitely not going to link to me or trade with me.

    My widgets have a target audience of people ages 25-50, so nobody will be talking about them on blogs.

    Suppose now these aren’t awesome super cool new products, but every day essentials like lightbulbs. I won’t get any media coverage, and unless I offer an affiliate program, not many websites are going to put up a “buy widgets here” link. There’s nothing in it for them.

    Other than having nice relevant keyword rich content, what is this type of site supposed to do? There are many people searching to buy products or services online (who don’t use froogle), yet unless they’re searching for the company name or there is a serious lack of competition, they won’t find the website they’re looking for.

    Example, I had a payday loan site in canada ask me for advice in optimising. I re-wrote their title, changed the flash application to a text form, and told him to open an adwords account.

    What is one to do in this case? Thousands of people search for payday loans (and most of the results are news articles about them, not websites offering them). No payday loan competitors will link (obviously).

    How does a site like this build links? Joe 6-pack isn’t going to go home and blog about getting a $200 payday loan so he could repair his busted windshield.

    I think this would be a great topic for a post. I have no problem SEOing my quirky new sites like slang translators, text message reminders etc because these ideas are new and people talk about them. It’s trying to get rankings for the legit business sites that is hard.

    It’s obviously a problem affecting many people, and searchers aren’t getting relevant results. Example “payday loan” results in a spam page, and an article about a potential lawsuit as 2 of the top 3 results where I would expect to see a company who can provide me with a loan.

  35. Jonathan D, you might want to check for reaching the same content from duplicate urls. For example, wordpress supports
    http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-linkbait-and-linkbaiting/
    and
    http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/?p=190

    but I think the content is the same.

    Kelly Jones, can you do the spam report with the keyword “bigdaddy” somewhere in the description textarea? And maybe “Matt Cutts told me to do it like this after I listened to the SEO radio show that didn’t answer my question.” πŸ™‚

    Thanks, Mike Dammann. I tried to see it from both sides. I expected Greg/Todd to be zen about it any current hijinks, esp. since they sort of crashed the party in the first place. I didn’t think that they were taking aspects of the contest personally; that surprised me a little bit. Greg, Todd: if you want to be Black Hat Leaders, you need to be bigger than that! πŸ˜‰

    Pat, if you look up my mattaholic post, one the interviews (Aaron Wall) I discuss that subject a little more.

    Joe, I used my office phone to dial a normal-looking number from work.

    HaHa, Todd knows that if he had black hat stuff and it got caught, it would get handled just like anything else. I know Greg knows that, because I’ve thrown stuff of his out myself before. (Greg, surely you don’t mind if I mention that? You’ve said as much yourself.) DaveN has joked that we have a DaveN filter looking just for his stuff. In the chat room, I said hello to teeceo, but I know the stuff that he was doing and it’s shoot-on-sight. I think anyone who is blackhat knows (or should know) that I’m happy to talk to anyone, but that we’ll still take action on the spam we find.

  36. Matt you mention that Google will take action on spam you find. Most of us who practice whitehat love to hear that, but there are several threads going around presently on a few of the better forums, wmw and Dp to just name two, where webmasters are not seeing this.

    I have my own personal frustration with the spam reporting system, where reports have been filed but no action and you cant get anymore blatant than what I reported. Because of this frustration I have tried to acquire your email address because of the lack of response from the spam tool.

    Believe it or not we are not all whinners, we just want the playing field leveled, especially when we are dealing with as Google and other webmasters coin them, big money phrases.

    If you care to supply a way to contact you by email please feel free to PM me on digitalpoint..user Las Vegas Homes.

    I am sure we all hope to see Google level the playing field and rid its engine of spam and the techniques used to manipulate your serps.

  37. Good evening Matt

    Have listened to the interview. What I found most interesting is your talk about the removal tools; background, use, expected and unexpected effects especially when some fellow webmasters used the tools to remove their entire sites from the index for 6 months πŸ™‚

  38. Wayne, I just a new post. Do a new spam report with “Bigdaddy” as a keyword and get at the head of the line for new feedback. πŸ™‚

  39. Thank you Matt, it was just submitted but I do believe you will find it interesting. If you would like to take a look please contact me and I would be happy to forward it to you. I do not wish to post this on your blog as it is a very cleaver way to manipulate Googles Serps. It is something that I dont believe your bots could pick up on. From my limited experience and understanding of your bot, this would have to be something manually reviewed in order to catch.

  40. Thanks for clearing up the Q on Mattaholic….I read the interview and saw your UNC page.

    Now, I don’t mean to be nitpicky but you do know that Daddy Long Legs are NOT spiders ,but are close relatives? Great news about the Kauai Cave Wolf Spiderlings being discovered, hope you caught it.

  41. Matt,
    Great interview.
    It’s always a pleasure to listen to you.

  42. Matt! Enjoyed the interview and appreciated that Greg asked you specifically about our ohwy.com problem with 301s reappearing, but you seemed to be really vague with the answer. I’m planning to kill the old pages again with removal tool but that didn’t help before and it’s been a whole year with virtually no Google traffic due to what appears to be a technical issue. (if this is NOT a technical issue just email me and I’ll stop bugging you so much!).

    At least I’m not weirding you out like Ben!

  43. I know Matt rarely revists his posts or doesn’t comment in his them much after a day or two but does anyone know about changing posts in blogs?

    Example: I am a horrible speller and often post to my blog then throughout the day revist and edit them. Matt mentioned in the interview something about annoying folks with RSS readers but does this also annoy the search engines? Is it also ok to go back months later and add good updates to past articles, blogs, webpages? This is a normal webmaster activity but I am afraid it can bring negative results if the engines are not “aware”.

    Thanks in advance if you got the info.

    Aaron

  44. Matt,

    Thanks for doing the SEO Rockstars show last night!

    I think the interviewers should take off their ‘Radio Interviewer Hats’ and stick to the ‘hats of black’ they are most comfortable wearing. I was, as I’m sure you were, hoping for a range of good SEO questions for my 1 hour+ of listening investment.

    Hopefully next time we’ll have less gasing from the angels and more useful SEO questions for us all.

    Thanks again – your SEO help is working both ways.

    Conor

  45. Aaron, if the decision whether or not to fix an error or post an update on an older blog article relies soley on how the search engines will react, you’re approaching the problem entirely from the wrong direction.

    The goal of being ranked in search is to bring visitors, but many people forget that.

    Posting updates, will also bring visitors, and help them out.

    Sacrificing visitors, and relavancy, to rank higher in search, so you can appear more relavent and get more visitors is a vicious cycle.

    Just update your blog if and when it needs updating πŸ™‚

  46. Hey Matt,

    I must say, some of the things you said really clarified some things with me. And further acknowledged some of my other theories.

    I especially enjoyed the explanation that creating a new site and targeting the largest market of your genre is a bad idea. Start with something unique to your genre and stick with it and build it. I know domain name age is the first to be acused in some cases of the sandbox effect, I am glad you pointed out that it is only ONE of many other factors that come into play with that.

    Thanks for the good listen.

  47. Thankyou Matt, I appreciate the clarity on your dealing with spam.
    Of course it begs the question, though, how do you guys actually find the spam when all spam reports to google seem to be unacted upon and even my dropping of spam urls in this blog go unnoticed.:)

  48. Is the iPod you mention our iPod Matt?

  49. Hey Matt, have you seen this http://pr10.darkseoteam.com/
    PR10 from Google cache
    PR is dead folks – fact

  50. HaHa, I’m quite aware of you and your posts. πŸ™‚ Freelancer, I’m also quite aware of Dark SEO team and their PR faking (and the bacon polenta tests that they ran a while ago).

    g00gl3r, if you’re the folks who are ponying up the iPod for the SEO contest, then yup: that’s the one I think I was talking about. Are you going to have it engraved with the keywords of the contest? πŸ™‚

  51. Ryan, regarding linkbait for legit businesses: if it’s a local business, I wouldn’t neglect the power of the hometown newspaper or local media for a write-up. Even a site like lightbulbs can still have some info on it. I was recently playing around with some wallplate switches, and I couldn’t get the wires to come out. On a hunch, I hit the big G and found out that there’s a slot to each side of where the wire comes out, and you have to press a screwdriver or something into that slot to release the wire. If I ever need a new wallplate switch, I’ll be ordering it from that small business.

    So my answer to the question “What about something like lightbulbs? There’s not much to say” is “I’ve always wondered if it’s true that oil from fingerprints makes light bulbs last longer. Put that info up on a site along with directions for the best way to remove/insert light bulbs, especially if the light bulb breaks off in the socket.”

    That’s a bit of a non-answer, but I do think that lots of niches could still do with more information. Then there’s old standby techniques like newsletters, forums, tutorials, contests (but not for links, πŸ™‚ )…

  52. Matt, just curious why you DKed my previous comment here. I can’t imagine that you confused me for a bot, though I have been accused of being indecipherable in the past. I’ve done a lot to socialize Google Ethics among a community where those messages are desperately needed. I’d be crushed if I had somehow stepped afoul of the very line I have pledged to help others to see.

    Jack

  53. First time I read that blog headline, the tune “Mexican Radio” by Wall of Voodoo jingled through my head… I’m on a webmasterradioooo…f..mmmmm…. πŸ™‚

  54. Matt:

    Did you nuke the rankings on the linkcondom.com during your appearance on SEORockstar.

    I just listed to the 2/8/06 show and Greg and Tom claim that http://www.linkcondom.com completely disappeared from the index after the show. 24 hours later, it shows up #1.

    Are you trying to confuse all of us reverse engineers?

    Come clean, confession is good for the soul.

  55. Matt,

    Just listened to your appearance and a point you touched on brings up a quetion that has been tormenting me for some time that might make for a good future post about proper SEO.

    The issue has to do with multiple websites for the same client/business. As an example, most of our clients are real estate agents/brokers and mortgage brokers some of which are both. We frequently consult on the best manner to target both markets in the same geographic region with either 1 or 2 websites. If you consider that the two topics are closely related (about homes, home loans…) it would be bennificail to know the best way to address such an issue regarding Google. Considering that if two websites are used there is at least a minimal risk of duplicate content respect the company itself.

    We face a simalar dilema targeting both the real estate website design market and the mortgage website design market, the simalarities in the two product lines are many yet they are two completley different target markets. Throw on top of this a website for general website design in our local market and you can imagine our concern for at minimum dupplicate content risk.

    Thanks for your consideration,
    John Oppenheimer

  56. > Well I’ll be damned, Matt’s a guy! I always pictured him with breasts . πŸ™
    LOL. That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it? πŸ˜€

  57. Very good! I like Webmaster radio and I listed everytime I have the opportunity.

  58. especially enjoyed the explanation that creating a new site and targeting the largest market of your genre is a bad idea. Start with something unique to your genre and stick with it and build it. I know domain name age is the first to be acused in some cases of the sandbox effect, I am glad you pointed out that it is only ONE of many other factors that come into play with that.

  59. There was en error when i tried to listen. : /

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