Google’s Matt Cutts On Spamming Cuil, Helping Masses, Debunking Evil Google & More

Google’s head of search spam, has decided to publish a bunch of blog posts that were sitting in draft mode on his personal blog. He said his blog needs to cough up a hairball – hence the animated GIF used here.

But, we can learn a few things when Matt Cutts coughs up hairballs. A few of the 16 blog posts he published last night contain some Google insight.

Helping The Masses Versus Individuals

Matt wrote a blog post named email backlog where he explains the rational about responding to individual emails requesting help versus producing videos or posting a blog post that can help hundreds or thousands. Matt explained that when he replies to one email, it helps one person. But when he produces a video, it can help tens of thousands. Matt’s point, if you don’t get a response after you email him, do not be insulted.

Here is a snippet of what Matt wrote:

So now I’m looking at these 150+ emails from outside Google, and I’m pondering about how much time I should spend on email compared to other things. Email is a 1:1 communication, so I could answer 10 emails and help roughly 10 people. Or in the same amount of time, I could comment on a forum, start on a blog post, or plan out another video that could benefit a lot more people. I did a series of about 15 videos last year when my wife was out of town, and the videos have been watched over 300K times and downloaded over 100K times.

Debunking Google Is Evil Press

In a blog post named example debunk post, Matt tackles a German paper calling out Google as being evil for delisting a webmaster’s site. This is a long interview with the webmaster, where it makes Google look like a really evil company. When Matt looked into why the site was delisted, he noticed that someone logged into Webmaster Tools and authorized a removal request.

Here is a snippet:

Except I haven’t told our side of the story. Our side of the story is pretty short: someone from benbit.ch used our automated url removal tool to remove benbit.ch themselves. Now why would someone from benbit.ch remove their own site (multiple times with multiple url patterns over multiple months, I might add), and then lay the blame at Google’s feet? I could speculate, but I genuinely have no idea.

How To Spam Cuil, A Former Google Competitor

Cuil was a search engine that launched years ago to compete against Google – it failed. That being said, Matt Cutts has a blog post named How Cuil generates its categories, where he describes how a spammer might take advantage of the new, now defunct, search engine.

Here is a snippet of what Matt shared:

Most search engineers can get a good feel for the strengths/weaknesses of a new engine within 10-15 queries. And I’d like to think that with another 5-10 queries, I can usually figure out how I’d spam a search engine. It’s my job to protect Google’s index from spam, so naturally I’m intimately familiar with different webspam techniques.

I always find it fun to read Matt’s posts because it does give you a glimpse of his personality, his thoughts on search, webmasters and technology in general. The more you understand the head of Google search spam, maybe the better off you are.

Check out Matt’s blog at mattcutts.com/blog.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

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 can be followed on social media at @rustybrick, +BarrySchwartz and Facebook. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio and disclosures, click over here.