I only met Matt once at a conference, and even then it was only for a few seconds before he was surrounded by Cuttlets and swept into a corner, where he had no escape until a conference organizer freed him. Whether fanboys or site owners who were convinced that just talking to Matt could fix all of the problems with their sites and launch them to #1 in the SERPs, Cuttlets were a mainstay of conferences as long as Matt was in attendance. You could just look for a super-concentrated cluster of people circling around a central point, and you would know that Matt Cutts had entered the room. But that's who Matt was for the SEO industry - friendly and accessible ... probably to a fault on both counts.

For me, Matt helped establish a central philosophy behind SEO, a general intent behind all of the changes that Google made to its algorithm and to its SERPs, free from the cynicism of so many of the top commentators of the time. Yes, I understood that the truth was probably somewhere in between, but understanding the stated intent, according to Matt, I was able to build a framework that wasn't altered by every single algorithm change. And it still holds true today, well into the age of machine learning. His presentations, blogs and vlogs where very instructive in this respect.

Matt has also been a fellow country-boy-makes-good story; both of us are from the Appalachian South, and both of us are products of the UNC System (him from UNC-CH and me from UNCA). So, he is a personal inspiration as well.

I wish him the best in his life, and I hope he's able to see how appreciative the search industry is of his time with us.