Matt Cutts

Who is Matt Cutts?

Matt Cutts is a software engineer at Google who works in the quality group. He mainly specializes in web spam and advising webmasters on Google's quality guidelines.

Why is he famous?
Matt Cutts is not exactly famous in the general sense of the word, however he has attained guru status amongst the SEO community through his blog. On his blog he gives what some consider to 'inside tips' on how Google ranks webpages in their search results. Matt has quite a large group of followers who are waiting for Matt to dole out the secrets of how to get to number one on the Google search rankings.

Wow! That's cool!
Not really. Matt doesn't give out any secrets. If Matt did, he would be breaking the confidentiality agreement he signed when he started working at Google. All you need to know about how to rank high in Google's search pages is available to everyone on their Webmaster Quality Guidelines Page. Actually, Matt Cutts refers to this page frequently, and if you are serious about your website make sure you read the page carefully and refer to it often!

So forget about reading Matt Cutts' blog?
I didn't say that! Matt Cutts' blog is very informative and entertaining. He gives real life examples of sites that have been banned, with the reasons, and screen captures of their offences. He reiterates and emphasizes just what the Google spam hunters are looking for. He also gives updates on new technology which will be coming online (such as the Bigdaddy infrastructure rollout) which are important to know about. He also has a lot of non-relevant rubbish to talk about which his most ardent followers lap up, such as entries about bacon polenta. Matt Cutts the loyal Google employee is also not averse to plugging the latest product offerings from Google too, both good and bad! Of course, he won't ever reveal the algorithm that Google uses to rank search results, or any other 'secrets' about Google.

What noteworthy things has he said lately?
This section includes information taken from interviews with Matt Cutts and is updated regularly, so don't forget to bookmark this page!)

• Google will be emailing webmasters who violate Google's quality guidelines. Webmasters will be notified of a 30 day suspension from the search results, and the reasons they were suspended.
• How to 'linkbait', the process of putting controversial, funny or strange things on a website to try and get other sites to link to you.
• The challenge of getting quality sites to the top of Google's search results. An example he gave was a very small hobby site which had better information on it but gets out-SEO'd by larger corporate sites.
• How Google is now starting to eliminate foreign language spam from it's index, the most famous example being the recent ban on www.bmw.de
• Google does not mind if content is hosted on subdomains, there is no disadvantage or advantage in using subdomains.
• How deeply a site is crawled depends on the number and quality of deep links (which is surprising as this will only encourage even more artificial link building campaigns).