Matt Cutts On Google Rumor Debunking Rampage

Dec 11, 2006 at 9:04am ET by Barry Schwartz

Matt Cutts has a fun weekend debunking Google rumors at his blog. He covered rumors that the toolbar leads Googlebot to index pages, a story about Google funding terrorism (a topic I avoided on purpose), Google working with the CIA as a conspiracy, and Google cheating on AdWords for their own ads. He also wrote a bit about new features that were launched.

Toolbar doesn’t lead to page being indexed
Watching a story, part I
Watching a story, part II
Debunking: “Google in bed with CIA

Related Topics: Google: AdWords | Google: Critics | Google: SEO | Legal: Clickfraud

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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dazzlindonna

…a topic I avoided on purpose…

Chicken! bawk, bawk! ;)
http://www.seroundtable.com rustybrick

That topic, I think was blown out for no reason.

It can be used in so many cases.

Maybe I did not read it carefully enough, but I am not blind, I saw the 100s of blogs post on it.

Honestly, I thought it was not such a big deal. Of course the title made it look huge, but when it came down to the technical aspects of how (not the why), it is not a huge deal, IMO.
http://www.demib.dk Mikkel deMib Svendsen

> a story about Google funding terrorism (a topic I avoided on purpose),

Berry, I am sorry to say but you are totally missing the point if you think terrorism was the center of that story. It was, and is, about serious click fraud and lack of trancparancy. Yes, terrorism was mentioned ONCE durrin the press conference because it was brought up by AIT that Jim Hedger interviewed but the main focus is click fraud. Is that topic to sensitive for you too? :) … chicken hehe
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ Matt Cutts

Hey, the site got all pretty! I like what you’ve done with the place. Nice layout. :)

Mikkel, as you know I addressed the invalid clicks issue in “Watching a story, part II”. The company in question didn’t set up their ad campaigns to exclude clicks from US/Canada. That puts the invalid clicks allegations in a different light as well.
http://www.seroundtable.com rustybrick

Ok, I missed the point. Happens to me all the time.
http://www.demib.dk Mikkel deMib Svendsen

Matt, that is just your totally undocumented claim. AIT claims different and provide documentation to back it up.

Also, this is not the first time out-of-region clicks has been documented. It happens, and it apparently happens a lot. I’ve seen it personally on compaigns that was perfectly set up. The fact is, Google is NOT hanling this the way they should and is has to change – like it or not.

Also, out of reion clicks is not the only click fraud in this case and you know that.

And finally, as has been pointed oput by many, Googles way of responding to clients on this issue is childish, to say the least. Did you ever had to call customer support, Matt? I guess not :)
http://searchengineland.com Danny Sullivan

I’m planning to revisit the story. I haven’t posted on it not to avoid it but simply because it was complicated, and I didn’t want to dive in until I had time to better understand all that’s going on.
http://www.demib.dk Mikkel deMib Svendsen

Totaly understand that, Danny. Very resonable :)
John A. Robb

Could out of region clicks have anything to do with bogus PTR records? I get Quebec entries all the time for people in Ontario because their ISP has poorly configured PTR info (or backhauls their traffic to an out of region IP).
http://www.michaelvisser.com.au Michael Visser

And here I was thinking Matt might be debunking SEO rumours… should have known…