While I have a few stories worth sharing, my favorite has to be at a Pubcon around 5-6 years ago. Matt was doing his regular (at the time) update on all things Google search and was starting to take questions. As was often the case, many of the questions were very specific and Matt answered them as best he could.

Then he was asked perhaps the greatest question of all. It went something like: We're building a site and we're trying to build out pages for each city that the company serves. From there we will bring them over to the center of the site to convert them. We've tried a few different ideas, but nothing seems to rank. What are we doing wrong?

Some of the packed house squirmed a bit.

Matt paused.

And then he answered: You want ME to tell YOU how to do doorway pages?

The entire crowd erupted. And then he went on to the next question.

The greatest thing was, despite the obvious violation, he just played it off and moved on. It was funny, but not sanctimonious or vicious.

Without adding the other stories, it's easy to say that Matt is always a guy that wants the web to be a better place. Even if you didn't agree with his decision about your site, you knew it didn't come from malice or avarice. I couldn't be happier that he's taking the same heart to the government sites- to make the web better.