Wow, it took a while to wrestle the blog back from Jeremy. 😉 Just kidding. Swapping blogs and employers was an April Fools Joke, and I want to thank Jeremy for sending me a couple posts that I could put up. I know nothing about Citabria airplanes, so it was funny when someone commented “oh come on, that sounds just like Matt would write” when it really was a post by Jeremy.
My parents are visiting, so expect light posting this week as we tackle a few things from this list. I’m trying to convince them that I’m normal and not at all a workaholic. I don’t know if they’re buying it. Plus my mom keeps commandeering my laptop to catch up on her email. 🙂
Citabria is an acrobatic (!) light plane – great fun so you should get Jeremy to take you up sometime … but you might want to bring a few barf bags with you … 😉
Hi Matt
Nice to hear from you again. In fact my guess (in a comment in the previous post) was 1/2 right. I thought that you left to Kentuky to visit your parents 🙂
Enjoy your parents visit.
Oh come on! That was _not_ an April Fool’s Day joke! 🙂
“Oh, Search Engines Web – always so-o helpful. As a gift please take a choice of ANY #1 search term Listing desired from Our SERPS.
Yours truly,
Google Search Team”
That’s funny. I guess you’ll be choosing “Britney Spears”, or wait, was it beat out by “Paris Hilton” this year as the most searched for term? It still amazes me that most people who use a search engine don’t use it to look up some meaningful information. Instead they flock like pigeons to get the latest rumor on a celeb.
How about a status update on supplemental?
Anyway: Enjoy your parents visit 🙂
you sure? My money would be on SEW taking V7Nelursrebmem
That would be Parents visiting = Light Posting, not ==.
Have fun!
Try to catch a little R and R Matt 😉
John Lennon said: “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
Was sent to me recently – enjoy your family – I try and do this more these days.
Is that why there are so many SERPs for the rumoured love affair between Matt Cutts and Jeeves?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&rls=GGLD%2CGGLD%3A2006-11%2CGGLD%3Aen&q=Matt+Cutts+Jeeves
What a dirty tramp that Jeeves is. First the Ask.com people, and now he seduces poor Matt. I bet he takes out poor Aaron Pratt next.
Seriously, I don’t get that either. Most celebrities have nothing to offer because they have all the charm and personality of a piece of drywall.
People get all weirded out when they see the search history in my Google Toolbar. “you’re looking for 0x80070005? What the hell’s that? And ‘CSS hover effects’? Who ARE these people?”
Apparently you can use Google for technical information and pragmatic searches (it’s great for ASP samples, too). But shhhhhhhh. That’s a big secret, eh?
It’s good to have you back Matt!
– I’m coming down to the San Fran area in a few weeks and I’d like to take a tour of the G Plex. Do I really need to know a employee to take a tour?
Thanks,
Scott
Matt,
I’m not complaining. Today my site hit PR8 totally out of the blue and wholly undeserved. It has 6 backlinks (according to G) all crap.
I’ve checked several pc’s, datacenters, the api. Everything. I’ve heard of another case like this from posting on forums.
Just a heads up, I don’t want to post the domain – not because I don’t want to lose the PR8. I don’t care, I’m simply paranoid.
A shout out to the Cutts family… hope you enjoy your stay.
Dear Matt’s Mom –
Maybe you should be blogging? I’ve tried to get my mom to do it as she’s got a LOT to say about the world at large but I’ve failed. There are not enough of a “moms” voice online right now.
well you guys got me!
at first i thought it was a joke.. but then it went on for ages so was unsure!
Have fun with the parents in town. I usually find a cool new places whenever I have guests in an attempting to be a good host :).
Awwwwww that’s not fair, dude. You can’t tease us like that. That’s just a felony.
Seriously, I’ve noticed things like that too. I’ve seen a site go from PR0 to PR5 as of yesterday, when the site itself is only 6 weeks old.
Granted, it hasn’t translated into SERP ranking quite like I would like (other than MSN), but that will come.
By the way, Matt, your server might not have accounted for Daylight Savings Time.
I’m noticing that the post I just made is showing up 4 hours behind (4:08 PM), but it used to be 3 hours behind.
Google works in mysterious ways, Adam! My sites oscillate between 0 and 2 🙁
Wouldn’t it be fun to follow Matt around at a fleamarket and watch him try on funny hats, collect books and write down website URL’s in his little cheap assed black book? 😉
If your parents are not fond of reading your blog and all things on the web that mention your activities then it’s safe to say you are not workaholic.
Have fun with your parents Matt 🙂
Elmer, they do read my blog. 🙁
Adam, it could be that my name and Ask Jeeves are both on a bunch of sidebars/blogrolls.
Rahul, I was going for the C/C++ syntax where == is a test for equality. Lame, I know, but there it is.
It seems that Jeremy had fun writing like you do.
I just noticed the usual things like the link to the advanced search (which I don’t think he would have normally entered on his first post) , the short sentences with “google is great”, ” I love Google”, “I am busy”, “I feel so tired” etc..
Sorry, jeremy did a great job misleading me.
Any jokes on april 6 ???
😛
Matt,
We already suspected that it is an April fool joke!!! Thank God! 🙂
Good morning Matt
“Elmer, they do read my blog.”
GREAT!
So maybe The Cutts would be kind to ask you about a weather report regarding PR upadte 😀
Hmm, I thought I was the only person who used the == in general posting :p
“OK, son, tell me again: what is it you do at work?”
“Sit at a computer deleting spam all day?”
Matt: “Uh, huh”.
Dad: “Tsk. I don’t know. When are you going to get out and get a real job?”
Bwahahahahahaaaaa
PR updates are going mad the last couple of days! Here’s my theory, just so I can thump my chest when it turns out to be true.
Google’s giving out PR like candy now, because if everybody has high PR, then link schemes and sales become utterly useless. It’s the great leveler. In the immortal words of The Incredibles:
“If everyone’s special, no one’s special.”
Deep down, you know I’m right.
They won’t ask Matt to do that. Think of all the cool office supplies he’d be able to steal there. You gotta figure there are some pretty high-tech gadgets at the ‘Plex that could easily fit into his pocket. 😀
(And no, I’m not suggesting that Matt’s a thief or anything like that. I’m just being goofy. So like, no one read too much into that, okay?)
Great,.. this swapping wives thing is lousy any way. Great you´re back in your own place.
🙂
Had me worried there Matt :).
To Rahul Jain “==” means equals in C++. I don’t know what programming language Matt was referring to, but let’s say the syntax is still correct.
I’m too geeky.
Anyway cool to see you back Matt.
Matt,
Are you sure they’re your parents, not Jeremy’s who are comming?
Matt — Any comments on John Battelle’s interview with Gary Flake? Gary seems to be pushing the 64 bit architecture pretty hard, saying that it will allow MS Search to have a higher proportion of faster access RAM to disk space, presumably allowing for faster searches (can they get much faster on GOOG?) and more complex algorithms. He also said that, though everyone will migrate to this architecture, it will cost a lot in time and money.
Thanks. Enjoy the well deserved time away from the blog.
Andy
It’s likely a wordpress setting that Matt needs to change. My webhost server handled the time change fine, but my own wordpress blog had timestamps that were one hour off.
Matt,
Any word on what’s up with this latest PR update? I too have a site with internal pages that have undeserved PR. It seems to be following a pattern where every 3rd page deep is 1 PR higher than the page before it, with no external links pointing to them at all. It’s the site in my email if you wanted to take a look.
I had something similar last year, where one of my sites got a PR6, but that was due to a corruption in the database that cause 2000 links that were pointing to another site get credited to mine. This looks something like that, but without the links being credited and much more widespread.
Also, not sure how hard this would be, but you should maybe make it so that if someone submits a post and accidentally forgets to enter the security code (like I just did), the post data gets carried forward to this page, instead of making that person hit Back and have to retype the whole thing again. 🙂
lol !!! great joke !!!
Matt, show this one to your parents, it will make them feel all warm and fuzzy about what you do:
A good friend of mine has been away from computers etc for years, she just got rehooked to the internet, she’s a musician. After playing around for a while, she started looking for stuff that actually was of interest to her, expecting little. Google was the tool. The search was very specific, highly specialized musical stuff, jazz.
Not only did google meet her expectations, it wildly exceeded them, to the degree that she said that she actually yelled out loud in surprise at how good the results she got were. I’ll assume that not only did she find far more than she expected, she found areas she didn’t even expect to see.
Which means that in this case, the google algo was totally successful. A non-seo, a normal bright user, looks for something, not knowing how to look, puts the keywords in, and got a wide range of answers, which gave information she didn’t even know she could get.
Kudos to the team. Personally, I’m totally sick of reading the my [probably] worthless adsense site isn’t ranking so google sucks type comments.
Just thought I’d give a view from the objective side, the one with no preconceptions. I asked her what she thought about google because I knew she’d been online for a few weeks now and figured she’d tried a search or two.
h2 makes a good point. If you use Google (or any other SE) to search for things, you’ll get better results if you have an idea of what you want going in.
In the girl’s case, she was looking for jazz-type stuff. One thing about jazz music is that it really isn’t a competitive genre, and it tends to be somewhat cooperative (at least this is what I’ve picked up from my girlfriend’s dad, who happens to be a saxophonist himself…and no, I’m not linking his site because I’m trying to avoid Mick Foley cheap pops and shameless plugs, although Foley is God.)
Because she had a pretty good idea of what she was looking for in the beginning, she was able to narrowcast and find what she wanted. And as I’ve said on here before, big G is the best engine if you adhere to that basic principle…try to narrowcast as much as possible. Put in a hex code into Google and you’ll figure out exactly what’s going on with it and how to fix it within 3-5 results, which is my primary reason for using any engine. (Although MSN has made some pretty good strides that way in recent months.)
This is not to say that Google provides relevant results for all searches all the time (I think Matt could admit that). For example, it’s not all that great for looking up anything for North York (one of the major Toronto boroughs).
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&rls=GGLD%2CGGLD%3A2006-11%2CGGLD%3Aen&q=North+York+pool+hall
Although, to be fair, neither is MSN:
http://search.sympatico.msn.ca/results.aspx?FORM=TOOLBR&q=North+York+pool+hall
or Yahoo!
http://ca.search.yahoo.com/search?fr=slv1-&p=North+York+pool+hall
As a result, I’m forced to use the local Yellow Pages (which I absolutely despise doing because they’re controlled by Satanspawn aka Bell Canada):
http://www.yellowpages.ca/searchBusiness.do?what=pool+hall&srchtype=category&city=North+York&sType=simpleSearch&action=homeSearch&step=getDirectory&Se=smp
Now…do I expect Google to go accommodating the denizens of North York just because the SERPs suck for anything related to it? Hell no. I’m just providing it as a purely academic example of how narrowcasting doesn’t work all the time (and as a possible feature down the road).
And for those who would suggest Google local search, the closest thing it comes up with is a pool hall located in downtown Toronto, which is at least a half-hour drive. I enjoy a good game of pool once in a while, but not if I have to drive more than 10 minutes to do it.
Nevertheless, it has come a long way from the period 5 years ago where every other search I tried turned up gay and lesbian results for some reason. If that’s your game, that’s cool with me…I don’t judge. But I was getting really tired of finding gay hockey leagues and Toronto Naked Men’s clubs when I was looking up tourist bureaus. I don’t think that’s very good for tourist revenue. But that was years ago, and as long as that’s kept to a minimum, I’m generally cool.
Anyway, side academic rant and tangental thought. I wonder what you guys think.
Andy, I did have some thoughts Dr. Flake’s interview, but I’ll mostly keep them to myself. I liked the “MS was pushing Web 2.0 values over a decade ago” claim. Let’s see, a decade ago would be 1996, right?
h2, I appreciate that. One post like that keeps me going through negative posts. 🙂
>>>>h2, I appreciate that. One post like that keeps me going through negative posts.
Just think Matt though – when the Canonical issue is fixed in a week or two ? most negative posts will dry up – well mine will.
Hi Matt
To be fair, the majority of comments usually are very constructive and friendly. However, some friends could have been frustrated of the situations of their sites, especially those whos sites suffer of canonical or supplemental issues. Hopefully the new infrastructure emerges victorious and the said issues will be fixed down the road and everybody will be happy again 😀
Have a great weekend.
Indeed Harith.
Matt – we must be getting close now ?
PR has returned to some of these sites, Related links are returning to some of the sites.
There is still something holding them back though – the site appear last on the related search – still cant appear for “www.domain.com” search, site:domain.com search still not ordered.
Heres to happy days.
Matt wrote:
“I was going for the C/C++ syntax where == is a test for equality. Lame, I know, but there it is.”
I hope you really meant “parent visiting” implies “light posting” and not “equals” because otherwise every time we don’t see your posts for a couple of days we would expect your parents visiting you.
The other way around, if == IS Google’s interpretation of the “imply” operator and associative and commutative laws apply just as with the C/C++ equivalent, then according to this logic an observation of “Spam site implies reciprocal linking” would be logically equal to “Reciprocal linking implies spam site”. Such an interpretation would cause a lot of sites to marked as spam. If this is Google’s interpretation of the == operator, I would ask you to do some bug fixing this weekend. You might have a lot more happy blog comments on Monday 🙂
Matt,
You can please some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time!
As for me, Google seems to be doing an excellent job, taking its time to get the new infrastructure together, one thing at a time. Patience is a virtue, and when the upgraded, updated, and Superstud Google has accomplished all that BD has intended, all else will be seen as history 🙂
Hi Matt,
I was hoping you could shed some light on who broke the PR?
I’m sure you know what’s going on, but for those that don’t there was a TBPR update where only new pages and/or new sites received PR. Sites/pages with PR previously remained the same.
The PR values handed out seemed almost to be random. I have heard of several people with 1 month old sites, no backlinks, etc., getting PR 6 – 8.
Matt,
Glad to hear you’re taking a break. Even SEO Rock Stars deserve a few days with R&R in the hustle and flow.
Brief question I hope you can help me with:
Is the Google “flight box” for City Pairs considered a Paid Search listing … or is it a natural search result?
Either way, is there a product manager at Google who could discuss it further?
I believe there were originally 3 sites listed (Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity) then Priceline. Now Hotwire is a choice.
Thanks and have a great weekend!
Kevin
>> my mom keeps commandeering my laptop…
Are you sure it’s for her emails Matt?
…. it wasn’t long before “Mrs Cutts SEO Inc” became the world’s top search placement firm. “I’m proud of Mom but doesn’t know how she got SO good SO fast!” said a surprised Matt.
First of all thank you for the blog as it makes great reading while I sit in hotel rooms due to my extensive travel.
For years McDonalds has been leading the way in technology with the Happy Meal toys, in 3 more toy releases Iran will be able to finish the nuclear bomb they seek.
I have a theory about the PR situation. Seems new pages are updating PR using the new math while established pages are maintaining a current/archived state – I think once the tweeks are finished we will see a normalizing occur and all will be right with the world.
Matt please be sure to answer Kevin or direct us to the new policy. I’m blogging very negatively about this because I think showing so many advertising links within the organic listings area is a big departure from Google’s stated approach to separating ads from organic listings. e.g. search this: Dallas to SFO
Matt,
I’m sure it blows your mind that no matter what the topic, you could post about your dog getting run over by a lawn mower and your kids all traumatized and in therapy, and some dimwit will still use the thread to ask about some website or PR nonsense.
Come on people, there is Matt the person and he’s not just a little googlebot here to answer all your inspid little questions no matter what the topic is and and I think with all the help Matt gives people you should be a little more respectful to Matt but then again there wouldn’t be anything in it for you if you did that would there?
Don’t mind me, I was in Florida for 10 days and I haven’t been ranting enough on my blog so everything sets me off now, I’m all backed up with rants, it’ll pass in a week or so.
Have fun with the parents but I read your “list” and for the love of god don’t drag them to Chipotle’s as nobody should be forced to eat McMexican. Take ’em to La Bamba’s in Mtn View – it’s a hole in the wall but so authentic you’re afraid to drink the water. The burritos are to die for and the quesadilla suiza will knock your socks off. If nothing else and you must go to shiny fast food Mexican then Baja Fresh is a better bet.
Bill: as much as I agree with you (and am guilty of asking a question from time to time myself), that’s not going to happen.
Matt is learning in a big hurry (if he hasn’t already) about The Disadvantage of Intelligence. See…our boy here has a clue. He’s got a brain in his head. And he’s willing to share it on his terms and his time.
But you see…when you have a brain in your head, and therefore a clue, you end up having to contend with the one thing idiots can manage to successfully figure out on their own. “Hey…this guy (or girl) has some knowledge. It’s valuable stuff too, so let’s see how much we can squeeze out of the well with no regard to his/her mental and/or physical state. We’ll just keep pushing and pushing the envelope until one of us cuts our tongue on the edge.”
In other words, Matt’s screwed in this regard no matter what he does as long as he keeps the blog going. And the scary thing is he rejects/prunes a lot of stuff out. I’d hate to see that rejected pile.
Personally, if he answers one of my questions (and he has and then some…in some cases, questions I had but never asked, which is even better), the blog’s worth it to me. And I think we should all look at it that way…if Matt gives each of us one piece of advice that helps us or keeps us from doing something dumb, then it’s a good deal for everyone.
The following is not a rhetorical question:
Has anyone here had all of their question go unanswered that they asked and that had a general impact? (Not the “why doesn’t my site rank anymore?” questions…questions like “what’s the future of directories and their impact on SERPs?”, that type of thing.)
Adam, I’m guilty of asking Matt questions too but I try to contain it to the proper place. Whem someone says “parent in town, light posting” then you won’t see me whip out a big tirade about canonical urls and redirect issues when the guy says “light posting” as the question will be buried by the time Matt sends the parents packing and it’s just kinda rude to try to encourage Matt to waste his quality time with the folks answering webmaster questions.
Go forth young Matt, be the good son and ignore these people 😉
That’s well put, Bill. I’ll drink to that.
Just a quick note not sure if this is the place or not but might as well since it evolves google. I believe it was 1997 if im not mistaking, I was working at an IT firm over at Marina Del Ray California working as a head graphic designer. Of course that was the time of the internet boom, the hype, the etoys.com days. Anyhow if I can remember correctly, we had a big server crash where a few techs were called in to fix the issue. To make the story short, one of the techs used my computer to download a fix from the web, he typed in http://www.google.com and did a search for the drivers of some sort.
Anyhow that’s where I asked him what google was and his reply was “ the next big thing don’t forget” and I guess back then (correct me if im wrong matt ) google was great for pulling drivers from their search strings…not sure about that…
Anyhow, a decade later here we are, its google this and google that, did you google it, etc. just my memory of google.