Jan 13, 2009 at 9:51am ET by Barry Schwartz

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Google’s Matt Cutts posted a twenty minute video summarizing two presentations he gave last year. The video goes over what he considers to be virtual “blight,” or when a site or community becomes stale with spam. In addition, Matt shows us how to put on a “blackhat” and think like a spammer.

The video is pretty interesting to all levels of SEOs, so I embedded it below. In short, he summarized the three types of blight, including link spam, open landing pages and hacking. He then goes into how to think like a blackhat, in the “blackhat mindset” segment.

He also cross posted this video and presentation at the Google Webmaster Central blog.

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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karllong

I think the risk to twitter is significant from spammers and MLMrs. I think the risk to Twitter is that spammers/phishers/MLMrs etc. are motivated to invest in trying to hack the site to spam it.
http://experiencecurve.com/archives/why-mlm-will-kill-twitter-hint-because-they-have-a-business-model
Scott Salwolke

Matt, I hope you continue to do this video tutorials. This one was very helpful especially about black hats and trying to think like them. As for renewing domain names, I can relate to that. One of my first clients neglected to renew his domain and afterward couldn’t retrieve it. It wasn’t just the PageRank he lost, but all the print advertising and yellow page ads that pointed to the site that no longer existed.

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