Matt was always gracious, insightful and helpful. He turned search company / search community relations from adversarial to friendly.
Here are my favorite memories of things said by or about him.
""Matt Cutts is a senior engineer at Google. Which is all you need to know about him."" -- Danny Sullivan, SMX Advanced 2010
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Question: If I do doorway pages will the whole site get penalized or just the doorway pages?
Matt Cutts: Are you asking me how to most effectively build doorway pages?!
Question: I have to …
Matt: Oh, somebody kidnapped your family and is demanding that you create doorway pages? OK, I sympathize. But tell the kidnapper that these pages don’t work anymore. They won’t help him.
[2 questions later]
Danny Sullivan: [Pretending he's reading a question] I have my doorway pages on Blogger …
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Danny Sullivan: What tweaks are you making [to Panda]?
Matt Cutts: It’s in my head.
Danny: Well, then let’s hope nothing happens to you before you get back to Google
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Danny Sullivan bought the @mattcutts Twitter account as part of a joke. Danny Tweeted from it as a FakeMattCutts. Then he gave it to Matt.
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Danny: Do you still get that boost if you buy AdSense?
Matt: Aargh!!
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Matt Cutts when asked “how do I know if I’m getting penalized?” : “If you disappear from Google. That’s what we call a leading indicator.”
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Matt McGee: I know you’re all waiting for Matt Cutts. I just got a text from him. Says he’s running late, got caught up at the black and white animal exhibit at the Seattle zoo. I don’t know how he got my number. I never gave it to him. He does work at Google, but how would he get my number?
Starts with the recent video compilation of Matt Cutts webmaster videos. “Get the same phrase on the page as many times as possible.” “IN addition to keyword stuffing … it might be really annoying .. and that’s fine .. you will rank higher … if you run AdSense … I would definitely recommend that .. I do think that Bing, Blekko … are doing really cool things … like hacking sites …”
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[There’s a sound behind them. Matt: I think that’s a dog. That’s our link bloodhound. We found a link buyer and we’re mauling him out back. Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war]
Douglas Adams wrote “Space is big. You have no idea how mind bogglingly big space is. You may think that the walk down to the druggist is big, but that’s nothing compared to space.” The same is true for data on the web. It’s mind boggling how much stuff we’re indexing and ranking.
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Danny: I do a search on your name every day. People have been really mean recently. Do you just shrug that away?
Matt: The beauty of participating on these forums since 2001 is I’ve had time to develop a thick skin. So I’m always like “that’s not the worst I ever heard.” I always assume people aren’t vicious, they’re just defensive and worried. So we try to get to the kernel of truth and consider that. It is weird to be on a black hat forum and people are saying I’m going to spam my way through this and then they get banned and they’re like that’s not fair.
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Danny: [Twisting advice Matt just gave] So we should create an artificial link network totally in your control so when you complain we can take them all down and show quick progress …
Matt: That’s why I’m so glad you’re not a black hat SEO, Danny.
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Danny: What do you like most about what’s new and coming?
Matt: There’s something great that’s coming up but I can’t talk about it yet.
Danny: That wasn’t helpful.
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Matt Cutts had to take a break from live interaction sessions because the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu wanted to borrow the PC he used for those sessions. Matt figured it was good karma and his computer would come back much nicer and calmer. [Maybe it came back as a Mac].
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I always smile when I think of Matt. He just made the search world much friendlier and more positive.
Thank you Matt.