Matt Cuts

My departure - the crossroads

2007-01-05T22:39:00.000-08:00

I know some SEO blogs having been quoting a recent post at another blog MattCutts.com (yes, I speak of myself in the 3rd person sense at times) and want to set the record straight.

I had mentioned "...at some point my wife is going to wake up and smell the coffee. She’ll say “Hey, we agreed we’d try this Google thing for four or five years, and then I’d get to pick what to do next. "

Well, this got a lot of people speculating that it meant ol' Matt was ready to make a move. Oh contraire, mon frere.

While my wife has mentioned how certain places have been "speaking to her" to help with missionary work, I made sure she saw the grand scheme of things.

So, instead of moving to some underdeveloped region, we've opted to manage spam farms in places like Somalia are other areas. It's a win-win situation.

I've been think about retirement lately, and I'll be honest, it aint easy.
I mean, islands don't come cheap.

But regardless, it is without further adeiu I throw out a hearty thank you to my "cutletts". I'm not saying I'm leaving, but felt this as good a time as any to say thanks for the moral and emotional support you've brought.

Best in 2007!

On another subject, I wondered how this ever got indexed

Adsense Arbitrage is Dead

2006-12-17T13:49:00.000-08:00

With Google's latest quality score changes, you're all screwed if you're playing the arbitrage game. These MFA (made for adsense) websites are just garbage and ruin the entire search process.

However, since this is Google's primary source of income, we can't just shut y'all down! So we'll "clean house" with a quality score!

Learn more here

Shoemoney says he was misquoted in article. See more here.

Good read on arbitrage here.

Link quality and what Google wants you to believe

2006-11-16T15:59:00.000-08:00

As I was saying to my good friend Irish Wonder
"forget about the link quality and neighbourhood, it's like 1999 all over again."

Ya, we're talking keyword stuffing and all that. We've come full circle.

Why? Because we're running out of ideas over here, and spammers are really starting to stroke our G spot at the plex.

My gift to you - Merry Christmas!

Early horror story

2006-10-15T16:46:00.000-07:00

Hi Kids!

Welcome back to another episode.

Speaking of episodes, I just about had one the other day.
Allow me to explain.

Because Matt's virtual bedposts notches were almost deleted from Google.com by a certain jackass noob know-it-all. I know! I couldn't believe it either!

Cleverly disguised as "Moms", my online shrine to former lady friends and lovers
is my epitaph, my virtual love grotto. My tribute, if you will.

But some new intern almost deleted it. That burns my bacon!

Oh well, better to have loved and lost than not at all.

Matt
xoxo

Sandbox stories from the trenches

2006-09-12T19:34:00.000-07:00

I was telling a friend from overseas an expression we use in America that was similar to something he said, which kind of inspired this post. He said "You dont spit on the water you drink from", to which I replied "and you don't shit where you eat".

What does this have too do with anything. Not a whole lot.
I think it had something to do with Google being my personal playground, or sandbox to some, and sandbox made sense to discuss. At least it made sense to me.

Ah, the sandbox. What a marvelous concoction. Although I do have a bit of guilt gnawing at me just knowing there are hundreds, if not thousands of webmasters clamouring to appease the Google Gods and avoid the wrath of the sandbox.

Well, I have something to tell you. I hope you're sitting down.
The sandbox, well, its not real.
I guess it is in a sense, but its nothing like people have made it out to be.
Basically, if your site trips a red flag, it scores against you.

Some examples of what could devalue your site;
- new site/domain
- duplicate cotent
- inbound links that are not related
- text matching background color (a personal favorite!)
- meta refreshes, and just about any other thing I want.

On page optimization

2006-09-09T23:06:00.000-07:00

On page what?!?!

This is getting old fast.
As long as your title and url are a match to your keyword,
not much else matters.

The text on your page should have a your keywoord phrases contained within.
I can't say the exact percent as that's part of the secret sauce even I'm not privvy to. but I can say it's between 5 - 10 %, probably not as high as 10 though.

But you know what's more important than on page factors?

I'll give you a hint - it starts with "L".

How to kick ass in Google

2006-09-09T22:33:00.000-07:00

Some of you might be surprised that I'm sharing such tips.

It's a little known fact that us Google engineers tweak the algo's
for personal gain as we dominate the serps for our own affiliate and spam sites.

And today I thought I would give back to the community.

Rule #1
Everything we have been telling you - do the opposite.
I shit you not my friend. It's called reverse psychology.
If I say something as advice, you can bet what I'm really doing is releasing info that can actually help.

Rule #2
Quantity before quality.
You've been hearing me say it's about relevance and quality for a while now.
This is partially true. Be sure you have some relevant ones, but mostly it's a numbers game. More is good.

Rule #3
sub directory versus sub folder.
This is one of my favorites. No one cares!
Look at number 2 again. It's about links.

So there you have it. If you don't rank for a term and someone starts talking about link relevancy and the "link neighborhood", you know what to say to them. Then go drop your link a few hundred guestbooks.

Until next time!

Mein Fuhrer

2006-09-07T20:04:00.000-07:00

The Raelians, scientology, atheism, communism, even the freemasons can't touch me. David Koresh gave me the idea, and Google gave me the means to do it.

I love this shot. I feel like Big Brother educating the people Oceania of the newly created Ministry of Spam and thoughtcrimes.

Kind of fitting as Google embarks on operation Mass Surveillance.
Heil!

The Truth about Pagerank

2006-09-07T19:23:00.000-07:00

When I started at Google, we wanted to give webmasters a reference so they could easily identify when they're doing right and wrong. As much as we wanted to tell the webmaster community exactly how we would like to see their websites content, hierarchy, navigation, and such, we had to maintain a certain distance.

Which is why we created the webmaster guidelines. It was the only way we could share our criteria for success. But to take it a step further, we also fabricated what is now most commonly known as PageRank.

Or at least that's what we wanted you to believe. PageRank was a fabrication of mine to try and control the onslught of growing spammer. And it's worked beyond my wildest expectations.
Much like the whole nofollow thing, but that's for another post.