I have a little story to tell about Matt which really made me chuckle when it played out.

A few years ago, when the first 'new' Google Dance was going on I was watching all the happenings from Twitter in the middle of the night (my UK time), while all the people were arriving at the dance in the US.

I noticed Matt Cutts suddenly shared this blog post (below) from years ago on the Twitter Google dance hashtag. (It's below). I think most people were just arriving at the dance so a bit distracted by that as it seemed to go a bit unnoticed.

But I read it.

Took me a while to find it again actually tonight. Had to do a few random searches on Google.

When I read it, it made me chuckle a lot.

It was written by an engineer from the web spam team talking about the Google Dance years back and how Matt was chatting away small-talk with all the hard core black hats (and taking notes in his little note book about link networks), when the other engineers were careful to only talk to other Googlers at the dance.

Anyway, as would happen someone from the current dance cohort (SEO), tweets "yay, the foxes are in the hen house" as they arrived at the Googleplex and were getting off the bus (about SEOs being in the Googleplex).

I tweeted in response "or the hens are in the fox' house? ROFL face, ROFL face" (after reading the blog post Matt had shared earlier).

Matt must have seen my response because he suddenly liked it (only thing he'd ever liked of mine and only thing since)...

He knew exactly what I meant and he knew I knew exactly what he meant...

I was chuckling away from my UK middle-of-the-night vantage point then.

You'll know what I mean if you read the full blog post he shared ... but he was, and is, super, super smart. Totally admirably smart.

Strategically smart.

Aside from that on a more vanilla note I always loved his weekly questions and answers sessions, and the way he always used to end them with "hope that helps"... I believe he genuinely meant that.

Plus his 30 day challenges inspired a lot of folks :)

I was gutted when he didn't return to Google but wherever he goes he'll always do an amazing job.

Anyway, the post about the Google Dance of old is below.

https://googletshirtproject.com/2016/02/13/google-dance/