Mattaholic

If you’re a Mattaholic, there are several places to get your fix. Here are a few in reverse chronological order:

  • Nick Wilson gets in and picks around about blogger tools and recommendations for bloggers. Performancing just made it onto my Bloglines list because of the amount of technical detail they go into.
  • Sarah McKay did a follow-up interview after PubCon. I also did an interview with Sarah on 4/26/2005 that’s on that same page. If you’ve got an MP3 player, there’s lots of fun stuff on Webmaster Radio. I admit that I hadn’t been listening until another Googler got me hooked, so I recently downloaded 2+ gigs of SEO mp3s to listen to. It’s a hoot to listen to SEO Rockstars in the car and hear them say “Now Matt, would you consider www.forwarding****.com a spam site?” It’s like my radio is talking to me. πŸ™‚
  • Philipp Lenssen did a fun interview, which included asking whether I have any connections to the NSA, Freemasons, Illuminati, etc.
  • Aaron Wall kicked off this round with loooong interview about general SEO topics.

Aaron Pratt over at SEO Buzzbox has twigged to this method of getting lots of interesting content in return for asking questions, and he has interviewed SEOs galore. If you want to know more about Graywolf, you have to go there. Aaron, do nuevojefe and cornwall next! Personally, I’m about interviewed out. It’s gonna take me a few weeks before I have anything interesting to say again. πŸ™‚

Update: Librarians rule. I was delighted to write an article for the first Google Librarian Newsletter. The article is an overview of how Google crawls, indexes, and ranks documents.

28 Responses to Mattaholic (Leave a comment)

  1. Ah yes Mr. Cutts, you are a very funny man, thanks for the good word. I agree that there is no need to interview you at this time; you have done well answering all our questions through multiple channels (blog, interviews, posts in blogs, conferences, blah blah blah). Are you ready for my next interview with Greg Boser? πŸ˜‰

    Don’t worry, we will put the bottle down soon, I am finding the developer community to be an extremely interesting bunch in need of our support.

  2. Good evening Matt

    Here you have a chance to say something interesting again πŸ™‚

    I wish to ask whether this pilot program Alerting site owners to problems is still alive and whether you have anything you wish to share with us regarding any progress.

    Thanks!

  3. It was nice to have a face to put with the name ==> http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/my-name-is-inigo/ πŸ™‚

    Well now we also get to actually hear the voice : http://www.webmasterradio.fm/episodes/index.php?showId=26

    Thanks for sharing so generously. I’m definitely a fan.

    Badi Jones

  4. Hello,

    Matt nice voice πŸ˜€
    Now I really understand how to get ranked well in Google! Content!

    Also, the voice of the lady sometimes have those peaks that destroyed my ears.

    Thanks for the info.

  5. Hi Matt

    We have a number of people working on our site http://www.indigoguide.com. I decided to add SSL on the contact, advertise, disclaimer pages – more to allow users to TRUST the site – IE they have the added security of the certificate. I noticed on https://www.google.com it redirects to http://www.google.com. Sometimes a link from the https page goes to a page you don’t want as an https – my fears came true when searching on “indigoguide” – IE the https page ranks first:
    http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2005-09,GGLD:en&q=indigoguide

    This is duplicate content again. After much searching I found the following code to do the redirect.

    RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
    RewriteRule ^(contact|advertise|disclaimer) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]
    RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 443
    RewriteRule !^(contact|advertise|disclaimer) http://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

    This has created another problem – on the page https://www.indigoguide.com/advertise.htm – the SSL certificate no longer appears?? It must have something to do with the redirect. Any suggestion would help. Sorry this is off topic – tried to find the most relevant post to add it without success.

    Steve

  6. Aaron, I think it was smart to start interviewing so many SEOs. You could call it the “SEO Interview Project” and get all high-falutin’ . πŸ™‚

    Harith, we are still actively writing to webmasters as we find hidden text and similar problems on sites. While we don’t do it with every site, we’ve been ramping it up, and at this point we’ve emailed hundreds of sites.

  7. Matt, sorry i’m gonna go on a tangent here.

    1.) what’s your take on this? http://techdirt.com/articles/20051214/129218_F.shtml

    Google blocking certain users searches if they have some malware on their computer?

    2.) That IG API gives me tons of freedom πŸ™‚ Using Adam’s google logo changer, it’s really easy to change a google logo to MSN, and a search box action as well as some web page formatting. I could effectively turn google into MSN by doing so. Here’s 2 second example:
    http://www.seotrax.com/msnlogo.xml (for those of you with the developer widget, it needs inline)

    how does one get inline permissions? I could have a ton of fun with this. hehe πŸ™‚

    // sorry, bored.

  8. You and Jeremy created one of the most enjoyable SEO debates in some time – great work!
    P.S. Is anybody there still reviewing canonical problem reports via the normal support system?

  9. “Aaron, I think it was smart to start interviewing so many SEOs. You could call it the β€œSEO Interview Project” and get all high-falutin’ . :)”

    Yes indeed, to maintain a good attitude and keep a sense of order an interviewer (me) must be all high-falutin’ with folks. I still can’t figure out why people don’t like to be called Mr. and Mrs. though. πŸ˜‰

  10. Matt – Let me just say I know exactly how you feel… I think I’ve given 4 interviews in the last 2 weeks (obviously not counting the one for Wired/Newsweek) and my email box has been (what does Cartman call it – oh yeah) “festively plump”.

    Hey – did you notice my beginners guide is giving you a run for your money in the “SEO” rankings at Google. But, don’t worry – I linked to some “bad neighborhoods” earlier today, so that should shut me down. πŸ™‚

    I also checked our Alexa rankings and you’re still kicking my SEO ass(clown), but who knows, I’ve still got 5 more days of press to take you down πŸ˜‰

    BTW – It’s neat to see you blogging more often. Nick W would tell you that’s the ticket for keeping the readers coming back.

  11. Or, for the REAL Mattaholics, there’s always pseudomattcutts dot be . Anyone notice a familiarity in the content? πŸ˜‰

    (By the way, I’m not giving these losers a direct link and letting them find out how Matt found out.)

  12. .be domains are free for a while longer; pseudomatt.be must be cheapskates? πŸ˜‰

    rand, no fair. I thought I was the young upstart? We’ll white-hat race to the top. πŸ™‚

  13. Ryan, that’s a throttling message usually displayed when someone is sending queries that resemble a worm that tries to spread by searching Google for vulnerable phpBB servers (for example).

    Many search engines throttle people if they send excessive queries. Search for [Yahoo 999] for example.

  14. Here you go Matt, it’s my interview with Greg Boser πŸ˜‰

    Note: Even though I tried to stir things up a bit in the interview Greg was an absolute gentleman and spoke well of Matt, can I get an Amen? πŸ˜€

  15. Mat – it’s being seen a lot lately. I’m getting it myself at least once a day. An AUS forum I use has had several people posting about getting it over the last few days.

    Maybe Google could expand on the message … some people get worried when they’re told they’re infected. Specific (or even slightly-less-general) instructions or advice wouldn’t go astray. πŸ˜›

  16. Hey Matt,

    It’s great the keyword list on the google sitemaps got a bit longer.

    I read at the bottom:

    There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
    β€” Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), British politician

    I hope Google is not using too much statistics πŸ˜‰

  17. Good morning Aaron

    “can I get an Amen?”

    Well.. after reading what Greg Boser said in your interview with him:
    “Matt is truly one of the most dedicated and passionate guys you will ever meet.”

    I can say:

    Amen πŸ™‚

  18. Good job Aaron. Boser is always interesting. The most entertaining discussion I had with anyone in Vegas last year was Greg. Makes great points about the difference in obtaining links now versus a few years back.

  19. Well then maybe I should interview you Matt, none of that yawn inducing search engine blather, I’ll ask more important questions about your favorite beer which could be very controversial if you answer wrong, pizza toppings, and which clumping cat littler you prefer.

  20. [quote] do nuevojefe and cornwall next! [/quote]

    I don’t know about nuevojefe, but the fact that I sometimes live in cornwall is really all the world need to know about me.

    Difficult to flesh out a full interview with that.

    cornwall

  21. Don’t forget whether he uses 2-ply toilet paper or the other kind. People need to know this stuff. πŸ™‚

  22. Ask him what SE he REALLY uses πŸ™‚

  23. Perhaps you should change your forum handle to “GooglePosterBoy”? πŸ˜‰

    What do the folks at work think of your recent coverage?

  24. Incredibill – LOL!!! I need to talk to you after the holidays about sumthin’, you are one hell of a funny guy! πŸ˜‰

  25. Hey Matt,

    Semi-off-topic question: how long does it take for the spam reports to kick in? I’ve reported quite a few sites, as have a few of my clients, over the past month and they’re all still there.

    A couple of the more chronic offenders:

    frynge dot com – I think the noframes tag is pretty self-explanatory.

    n 49 interactive dot com/go pro dot ca: an interlinked “network” of almost 60 low-content sites containing 4 or 5 listings for each of about 60 home improvement categories. They’re not scraper sites because they sell the listings individually (one of my clients has been hit up by them at least 3 times), but if there was ever an argument for devalued links, this is it.

    Just the list on the home page should be enough, but click on the “And Many More” link to see what’s coming.

    wedding bouquets dot com : keyword stuffing in the top right, although they do raise the question “what’s a bokay?”

    Suggestion as far as that goes: what if you allowed users to put in their email addresses to report these guys like you do on the sites carrying Google AdWords? That way, we could get feedback.

  26. Re: Wikipedia – I just wrote [[Matt Cutts]]. Edit away!

  27. I don’t know if you addressed the length for recording a SpamReport in another post–I’m still working on mixing syntax in my searches so I’m still unable to determine whether or not you’ve done that yet.

    I have to agree with Senor Adam, because I’ve seen some incredible spam, reported it over a course of months and still see my clients pushed below spam site after spam site.

    The worst part is that many of these sites get included in DMOZ, when they should be kicked off the SE’s altogether. Meanwhile, legitimate clients of mine who I encourage (over & over again) to remain white hat are increasingly demoralized and ignored by DMOZ (and by extension, Google).

    sirens secrets dot com has a ton of keyword repetition and link stuffing on the site.

    home ware house dot com has done a prodigious amount of manual blog bombing and still rank highly in yahoo. while they don’t rank all over google (so you did catch some of their work), a ton of those spammy blog comments are still indexed and the site has ever-increasing PR.

    I first met you at the Google Party 05 during the San Jose SES, and then again at Pubcon Vegas. At that time (while I was still working for InfoSearch Media–very closely with the incomparable Sarah Mackay!), you told me to bring these spammy sites “to your attention”.

    What else needs to be done? We’re trying to help here, Matt. A little bit of guidance would be very reassuring for us doing some QA work for you, after all…

  28. I need to add another (and totally blatant) spam violation that should really be addressed. Spam reports just arent’ working, and this is a scheme that needs to be recognized.

    VERY SIMILAR TO TRAFFIC POWER LINK SCHEMES:

    There is a shady SEO company named W E B C O N S U L S dot com that is loading the same php script page with 100 or so links (currently, but ever growing) onto all of their clients’ websites, artificially inflating all of the inbound links of their clients. Is this or is this not acceptable?

    An example is on:
    w w w dot sober living dot com / w e b c o n s u l s / index.php.

    These guys are totally manipulating a large number of sites in a very important industry–helping people in dire need. If there’s anything that should be done properly, it should be helping people who are in serious need. There’s no room for questionable morals here. People using shortcuts, tricks, & deceipt to make a buck on those who genuinely need help is just despicable. Add that to weak and old, unimaginative spam and you get someone begging for you to hit that “delete” key like in that dream!

    Otherwise, please let me know that link schemes like these are acceptable and I’ll be sure to push these limits with thousands of other groups of websites…

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