snuffle snuffle

If you’re wondering why no posts for a few days, it’s because 1) I’ve been prepping for an internal meeting tomorrow, and 2) I caught a case of snarkitis this past week; everything I started to write came out slightly snarky. I composed 4-5 blog posts in my head, and actually wrote 2-3 of them. But after sleeping on it and re-reading them, I didn’t like how they came across, so I’m not posting them. I look forward to a full recovery from the snarkitis (and the meeting) in a day or two. πŸ™‚

77 Responses to snuffle snuffle (Leave a comment)

  1. Glad to hear it’s just that. Venting is good. This blog could use some vitriol.Be well.

  2. Good morning Matt “snarkitis” Cutts πŸ˜€

    Glad to hear that you are still on this planet and withinn the thick walls of the plex πŸ™‚

    Lets have those 4-5 blog posts. Better “snarkitis” posts than non.

    Have a great weekend.

  3. Glad all’s well – you’ve been missed πŸ™‚

  4. Makes us wonder what we’re missing πŸ™‚

    “I have a bunch of blog posts but I’m not publishing them, nyah nyah!”

  5. PS nice favicon, what is it?

  6. Was getting worried about you

  7. Wish I was as organised as planning my blog posts – I just rant without thinking. My last gaffe was a rant about banning alcohol on planes, to say it got a bit heated is an understatement πŸ˜€

  8. snarkitis must be catchy cuz I got it this week, sleepin’ on it is a great idea, must…..remember….this.

    (or you can just prune your entire blog each month and suffer from the results in the serps) πŸ™

    Internal meeting? ah oooooh!

  9. Has not really effected me but I think someone needs to come out in the open ( ie, Matt Cutts) about G’s current crawling behaviour and clear the air and stop the rumour mill.

  10. Matt,

    I recently read a post @ Web Guerrilla [http://www.webguerrilla.com/] referencing the spamming of some of the cheap hosting companies and this has me very concerned. If time permits, could you elaborate some on what we should do (bread-crumb webmasters) to avoid being penalized for the tactics of our hosts? Also – does G have any suggested affiliates who are more on the whitehat side?

    Regards,
    Webhasher

  11. maxD, mebbe this blog entry is doing just that

  12. maxD: big G needs the rumour mill though, as stupid as it sounds. Rumour mill leads to false information which leads to people trying to manipulate SERPs in goofy ways which leads to less actual successful manipulation of the SERPs. So big G needs that.

    Besides, Matt can’t come out in the open about everything. Google’s got at least what, 10,000 employees? Let one of them step up.

    Matt: there’s nothing wrong with a little attitude once in a while. It’s all well and good to be a nice guy, but I’d personally like to see you throw down a little bit of the nasty every so often. Let’s face it, some people need it (including me, probably, but I won’t listen so don’t bother. πŸ™‚ )

  13. Well Matt just so you know, you wasted 3.2167 seconds a day for the last week checking your blog for input.

    JK. Hope your feeling better

  14. btw. What the hecks going on with the DC’s?

  15. Hate to sound the stupid one, but what is snarkitis ;)?

  16. >but what is snarkitis πŸ˜‰ ?
    He’s just trying to rank for some more keywords. Ah these webspammers … πŸ˜€

  17. Being a non-american, I just had to look up “snuffle”:

    “Snuffle simply works by using a hash function to generate the random-seeming text (…)”

    Sounds to me like the definition of a lot of web-spam. Matt, are you going over to the dark side? Snuffle snuffle, hmmm.. LOL.

  18. No Match for Snarkitis.com…..

    How long until somebody here registers it?

  19. hmmm . . . maybe I will. I find myself owning over a hundred random domain names, one more shouldn’t hurt. It’s becoming slightly draining on my bank account though. πŸ˜‰ Maybe we should come up with a work for that. Domainitus perhaps?

    Anyway, Matt I feel your pain. I actually removed the entire bottom half of one of my posts this week due to excessive ranting. My advice: kick back with grandpas old cough medicine and throw in β€˜Return of the Jedi’. Always seems to work for me.

  20. As the blogs resident lurking physician I can throw some light on the issue:
    “itis” = inflammation
    Thus: tonsillitis is inflamed tonsils, appendicititis is inflamed appendix etc etc – you get the picture I’m sure.
    Snarkitis = … well … I think my snark was inflamed once too but it settled down after a long walk and a stiff gin and tonic.
    PS – a painful snark would be Snarkalgia, a puffy snark would be snarkedema and removing a snark would be snarkectomy. Just thought you might like to know !!

  21. I doubt I’ll put the snarktastic posts live. If I were to think back to some of the snarky posts I would have done in 2002, I would have regreted it. πŸ™‚

    maxD, last week when I checked there was a double-digit number of reports to the email address that GoogleGuy gave (bostonpubcon2006 [at] gmail.com with the subject line of “crawlpages”).

    I asked someone to read through them in more detail and we looked at a few together. I feel comfortable saying that participation in Sitemaps is not causing this at all. One factor I saw was that several sites had a spam penalty and should consider doing a reinclusion request (I might do it through the webmaster console) but even that wasn’t a majority. There were a smattering of other reasons (one site appears to have changed its link structure to use more JavaScript), but I didn’t notice any definitive cause so far.

    There will be cases where Bigdaddy has different crawl priorities, so that could partly account for things. But I was in a meeting on Wednesday with crawl/index folks, and I mentioned people giving us feedback about this. I pointed them to a file with domains that people had mentioned, and pointed them to the gmail account so that they could read the feedback in more detail.

    So my (shorter) answer would be that if you’re in a potentially spammy area, you might consider doing a reinclusion request–that won’t hurt. In the mean time, I am asking someone to go through all the emails and check domains out. That person might be able to reply to all emails or just a sampling, but they are doing some replies, not only reading the feedback.

  22. Matt,

    Thank you for the update πŸ™‚ Is good to hear that possibly our emails to GoogleGuy will receive a looking.

    cheers

  23. Excellent! Hadn’t expected the bostonpubcon emails to get such individual treatment. Thanks

  24. RE: REinclusion requests

    Matt is it EVER appropriate to file a reinclusion request when site:problemsite.com still shows the pages of the problem site?

    At Pubcon it was suggested that simply appearing in the index does NOT tell you the site is free from penalties.

  25. Matt, too bad you write blog posts in your head and not online with the ability to ‘Display On Site’ feature. I wrote that into my blog system.

  26. “There will be cases where Bigdaddy has different crawl priorities, so that could partly account for things”

    Yeah, this is what I see people whining about. Basically sites getting uncached and new sites not getting crawled at all.

    Also came accross this in El Reg

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/04/google_bigdaddy_chaos/

    This article is basically a good summary of what I heave read in forums over the last week and if Mr C could shed some light that would be cool.

  27. My favorite Matt snarkism so far was SEO Dreams.

    I am with you Adam, nothing wrong with ripping sh*t up once and awhile eh? πŸ™‚

  28. If you really want the answer, then the answer is ofcourse no. No, I didn’t miss you at all. It will be better if you post useful stuff rather than annoying and ecentric posts like these…

  29. My favorite Matt snarkism, wasn’t a single post, but when Matt entered into a total snarkitis mode on April 24, 2006 @ 6:57 pm .

    Personally, I don’t know much about servers. That morning (my local time), Matt bombarded me with two very heavy snarkitis bombs. First something about “Simplifying Apache configuration?” which I felt dizzy after reading it. Then followed by another snarkitis bomb “Summer of Code 2006” which knocked me out.

    Stayed away from Matt’s blog and recovered first when he posted about “Miss Kentucky, baby” πŸ˜€

  30. Accept your snarkiness. Embrace it.

  31. haha, this is why i keep comming back here. nice and honest.

  32. I have a simple concept when I feel that my posts are snarky. I post them.

    Real life isn’t all sunshine and flowers, sometimes things just make us a little more honest.

    BTW, my Dad thinks your cool for using the term “snarty”, not too many people use it anymore.

  33. i don’t have a problem with snarkiness. i find it a birthright. i guess that’s snarky.

  34. Matt,

    Please can you post a comment to acknowledge (so I can sleep at night) that it’s understood by the people over there, that the issue that many (if not most – see wmw) people have, is that crawling is FINE (many googlebot hits – more than normal, and everyday) BUT pages are still dropping out of the index and down 95%+ on 2 months ago.

    Thanks,

    Insomniac

  35. I am with you Adam, nothing wrong with ripping sh*t up once and awhile eh?

    You got that right, buddy!

  36. Hi Matt

    Btw, have you found a good name for Emmy’s boyfriend J.D. πŸ™‚

  37. Sobriety Online

    I think google will just show home pages in their index from now on to save storage space.

  38. Hi Matt

    That’s good to hear about the Sitemaps monitoring – a big thank you.

    But seperately, if you go to the forums [ e.g. WMW ] you’ll see a lot of worries by webmasters who are observing the DC’s and related results. I guess it’s true to say, instability has been reported since Jan/Feb.

    Any idea how long it will be before we see something that we could call “stable”

  39. Matt said;
    >>>So my (shorter) answer would be that if you’re in a potentially spammy area, you might consider doing a reinclusion request–that won’t hurt.

    Matt, Just what would you consider a ‘spammy’ area to be? Is there a list we can see?

    Not to be a jerk here, but it seems to me that just about every area that is involved in e-commerce has become ‘spammy’ to a greater or lesser degree…

    it appears to me that If there is money to be made the spammers and scammers are there.

  40. Hi Matt

    Bit confused now what is considered a penalty and when a reinclusion request is needed.

    If a site shows in the serp on a site:domain.com search Google always said the site has not got a penalty – are you now saying that sites that can be found with a site:domain.com search are penalized ?

    Or were the sites you looked at in the email suffering from a penalty whereby no pages returned in a site:domain.com search ?

  41. Also Matt

    http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/34061-3-25.htm

    MSG 58 onwards – Hmmmz – sounds like the old Canonical problems (in fact if you look at some of the sites you will see that it is)…..

    Anyway – hope you are feeling a lot lot better now.

    Cheers

    Stephen

  42. Any word what’s going on with the instability of the DC’s that we’ve been seeing over the past while?

    Many sites have completely disappeared or gone home page only, some caches are dating back to 2004 for pages that haven’t even existed for quite some time, even over a year. That wouldn’t help further the machine crisis storage problem would it?

    >> Re-inclusion request reply:

    Before you can even submit the form, you must admit to some wrong doing, say what you have done wrong and promise to never-ever do it again and then describe in detail what you have done..

    What about sites that have done nothing wrong but must admit to some wrong-doing to even submit the request?

    This is similar to admitting guilt in court before they will tell you what the charges are that you are admitting to.

    IMO, Google quickly needs to implement better communication channels with webmasters.

    PME, Inc

  43. HI Matt,
    was this the snarkitis concerning the site: function in google _. ?

    I tired several data centers site: for a site of 14 000 pages, google shows 280 000, some places 210 000 but the real number I got is when i installed GOOGLE Adsense and used the Search adsense on some sites by the function site: , it was then when i got the right indexed pages numbers .?

    Thanks for any advice, Hope you had a great Bonus or promotion so you can recruit us. hehehe lol
    Take care.
    KAI

  44. Take some nap and write something and post them… for we are waiting for them

  45. Perl Mountain

    “What about sites that have done nothing wrong but must admit to some wrong-doing to even submit the request?”

    Here you need to be creative. You may wish to write as follows:

    To my best knowledge, I might have commited one or more or non of the following mistakes:

    – gateway pages
    – hidden text
    – duplicates
    – keywrords stuffing
    – sneaky javascript redirects
    – and more….

    And I promiss hereby that I shall never ever in my life repeat doing any of them.

    Easy, isn’t it πŸ˜€

  46. Hey, thats alright just abuse me for a bit, give me ya best, let rip, I’m ready

  47. matt, you may not only be you being busy… the last days have been slow on WMW, with you and the other RSS feeds I have in my reader… Nevertheless is google shifting heavily here, from Germany, as usual on the end of the weekend… one or the other impact of the spider cache and the real visible changes by bigdaddy is there and we would LOVE to see some comments from your side! Any thoughts on live.com, products.live.com or alexa? Any thoughts on the impact of Open Source on the internet market this year? How is the google video thing going?

    I have been to the Linux Day in Wiesbaden on Thursday and got a Google Pen but no Live.com Pen πŸ™‚ – however has your staff been well “uninformed” about the spider cache, which I explained to them (invoice follows πŸ™‚ ).

    Means: Google needs its public voice (=you) more than ever, even the snarky comments!

    Cheers! P!

  48. Where is Matt πŸ˜€

  49. i think Matt is recovering from the internal meeting πŸ˜›

  50. Patrick

    Or Matt is busy in writing another grab-bag thread. We better start collecting “critical” questions for him to answer.

    And here I go:

    Hi Matt

    Can you tell us more about whats happening on this baby πŸ™‚

    http://72.14.203.104

    Thanks.

  51. I quite like that one Harith. Thanks for pointing it out. If I had some Danish cappucino here I would toast you! πŸ˜‰

  52. “I asked someone to read through them in more detail and we looked at a few together. I feel comfortable saying that participation in Sitemaps is not causing this at all.”

    Yeppers I believe my site is in that batch. At least I hope. That is good news that the sitemaps isn’t a cause. I happen to enjoy that feature.

    Speaking for many who have sent in their site (well those of us who have no clue what is wrong or what we are doing wrong)…we hope to get a little more feedback into some of the problems. Even if it is a notification to do a reinclusion request would be helpful. I do have to say thanks for giving us an opportunity to send in our sites. You wouldn’t believe what it means to some of use to be able to get a little personalized attention and possible feedback. My luck though I probably won’t get any response or my email got lost somewhere in China or the Middle east. Still I will be checking πŸ™‚ – Again thanks for doing this for us.

  53. Ok, I got to ask … Just how many recopies for SPAM goes Google have? lol. Every time I log into my gmail account it shows a different one.

  54. But those ones make for the best reading so let em fly Matt “Snarky” Cutts!

  55. Hey Matt, how about an update on the big switch over to geo targeting on the search index?

    It seems that location has become super important now… at least I’m seeing fluctuations on the same data center that change depending on where I’m searching from… at least Detroit / Ottawa / Cincinatti / Vancouver seem to be giving me different results.

    I’m sure you can’t comment on it.. but it’s very interesting. Can’t wait until you guys tie search in with my Adsense / Gmail / Search History / Analytics / Sitemaps / Blogger / Adwords data too.. that should really make black hat SEO a pain, while making search more relevant.

    // typing that sentence made me think of Googling my Google to the Google to Google some Google.

  56. Wow, I’m impressed at the idea of not publishing posts because they’re too snarky. That’s an excellent idea …. maybe I should consider doing that too…. :/

    Best wishes for a full and complete recovery.

  57. Hey Matt do you know when Google update pr? I have worked and waiting for the update πŸ™‚

  58. Hi All

    I guess Matt is still at that “marathon” meeting since last Friday. Or maybe he hasn’t recovered yet of that snarkitis πŸ˜€

    But of course there is still the possibility that Matt spending much of his time studying this baby πŸ˜‰

    http://72.14.203.104

    Wish you well, Matt.

  59. Matt, Without your blog update we are not aware of the google udpate, do some postings… πŸ™‚

  60. SchachMattπŸ™‚

  61. As a guy serving me pizza on Broadway used to say, “you’re still alive!” πŸ™‚

    Since the web gets bigger every day, I assume spider has to do more and more work to keep up. Based on what Eric has said about Google “running out of space”, and what you just mentioned about Bigdaddy having different crawl priorities, I’m wondering if number of pages Google spiders per day is at a standstill, and filters are cranked up higher than usual to prevent lighter/less trustworthy pages from getting indexed. Consequently, some sites are finding it next to impossible to get new pages indexed by Google.

    Just speculating out of pure frustration πŸ™‚

  62. ::Time Passes::

  63. So, if you have a sites index page that has been replaced by a another page from the site and then the index page is indented under that other page when typing in the company name, what does this mean?

    Anybody, somebody, Googlebody, it’s maddening.

  64. Steffen

    If you are sure your site doesn’t contain duplicates, hidden text, sneaky javascript redirects, gateway pages, keyword stuffing and whatsoever spam:

    You may wish to file a reinclusion request today!

    http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/reinclusion-request-howto/

    Good luck.

  65. SpamHound May its better we Diskusse This via mail ,on the page you found an Emailadress under IMPRESSUM may i learn more to understand it . Matt Excuse me for this post

  66. When are you going to tell us your Cisco story?

  67. Isn’t a re-inlcusion request for if your completly out of the index. In my case, I’m not. Just when you search on the company name instead of being on the first page normally at #1 like we have for years, we suddenly show up on page 5 with the index page indented under another inside page. I guess I could do a re-inclusion and make up something I did, but the site is pretty clean.

    Also most of the pages are still indexed so they haven’t been removed.

  68. Harith , thanks for your writing i do this now 30+ Days no redirects, no hidden text, no gateway pages , keyeordstuffing . For my technical unsdertanding is this site cleain like a virgin . Sorry for this english , but its going better day by day.

    steffen

  69. Steffen

    oooops!

    Is your site only 30+ days old? in that case you don’t need to file a reinclusion request.

    You just need to wait for another month or so. Meanwhile maybe some already indexed site(s) shall link to your site. That will make things much easier for sure πŸ™‚

  70. Harith : our site is now i think 6 years in the index -30Days πŸ˜‰ but iam wondering that we have a pr=4 but nothing is in the index . I wrote 5 or 6 friendly mails with question what is wrong , i wrote 2 reinclusion requestΒ΄s . the answer was only standard mails thats it .

  71. Steffen

    I see.

    Then you might wish to read what GoogleGuy said about the reinclusion requests:

    ” I just found out something about reinclusion requests. If you send in a reinclusion request, you’ll get an automatic reply with a tracking number in the subject. For best results, if you need to discuss that site in the future, it’s best to reply to that email instead of mailing with new messages. Replying to the message keeps the same tracking number, so that the person who evaluates the site for reinclusion will get the complete correspondence about your site. If you send lots of disconnected emails so that you’ve got lots of different tracking numbers, the person who is evaluating the site for reinclusion won’t have the fullest picture available to them. Just a tip for anyone who is doing a reinclusion request. “

  72. Harith , i do it like this thanks . We told our custumers the same then we have fullest picture available to them. That is the easyest way to communicate i think

    This post from GoogleGuy’s and many others i do reading last 15 days . I am getting a Blogaholic i think . I search for an Answer , for a mistake in our Shopsystem but it looks very nice. so i have to search but no answer , itΒ΄s frustating. i search to some sites the do the same as we sell the same products but what they do ? They use things that you told me in your first post to remove . And they are still included !?!?!?!?!?!?

    steffen

  73. Harith this Article is Very Intresting i Think πŸ˜‰ Google After "Big Daddy" Update

    I hope This is not the Thing why google deletet our Site πŸ˜‰ or they do ….. mmmm.

    Steffen

  74. Steffen, try copyscape.com and think about the results

  75. Ralf i found 1 match and one with a eu domain , i think you mean Dupe Content
    we make on the same Day a redirect like matt talks about ??

    Steffen

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