Google’s Matt Cutts has recently provided some advice on SEO and explained how Google combats spam.

Matt recently was interviewed by Jefferson Graham of USA Today. The article was named Google’s Cutts: Good directions drive traffic to your website. The article covers five topics of SEO: keyword phrases, title tags, links, blogs, and Google Webmaster Tools. You can see a video of the interview, which spotlights Matt wearing the “We ♥ Webmasters” t-shirt.

Over the weekend, Matt posted a blog post at the Google Blog that goes through some of the techniques Google uses to fight search spam. The techniques include using data to fine tune their algorithms in combating this spam, as well as detecting it early and removing any spam that gets into the index.

Getting back to the USA Today interview, here is a wonderful five-minute video with Matt and Jeff:

The main takeaway from the Google blog post on fighting spam is that Google uses log data, IP addresses, and cookie information in this process.

Related Topics: Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | SEO: General | SEO: Spamming

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