Wow, so where to go… I guess it’s back at the beginning.

Around 2004 a local church near me had some issues with it’s site getting taken over by a gay porn site. Their listing in Google was less than flattering, to say the least. I found the story was in the local news here. I was still fairly new at SEO, wasn’t really part of the community, but I’d heard about this “Matt Cutts” guy in my travels.

I decided to try and track him down to see if there was anything Google could do to help. Being the search geek that I am I managed to find an old Stanford email address and gave it a go.

Within a few hours Matt replied to me, so I scanned the newspaper article and sent it over with the details. That was on a Friday night. He then proceeded to work with me and the site owners over he course of the next few days. In fact, he was still sending me emails at 11pm on Sunday night (8pm his time). And we finally sorted it out.

I never, ever…. Forgot that. I was a nobody. The Church just a tiny site in the middle of nowhere here in Canada. But still, he took the time, his own time, to care.

We remained in touch over the years and exchanged emails regularly, talking about life, family, information retrieval and of course… cats. I really didn’t talk a lot of SEO with Matt… I didn’t want to put him on the spot. And it was a secret relationship because back in the day, Google was the enemy and a lot of SEOs would have roasted me LOL.

We’ve talked about meditation, family life, web-spam and so much more. But I’ll never forget how we met (getting kinda teary eyed here..)
Thanks Matt, you’re always my fav geek!! Keep on being yourself!

Dave aka TheGypsy