Matt Cutts Search Engine Celebrity
Mary Bowling | 29 November 2005 |
The thought of a search engine celebrity has probably never crossed your mind.
Imagine a software engineer who can pack a room full of a thousand webmasters and search engine marketers straining to hear every nuance in his voice. Imagine such an outwardly vague response as, "I wouldn’t recommend that", causing a flurry of old-school note taking among a group that rarely touches pen to paper. Imagine a cheerful, chubby-cheeked, middle-aged guy in khakis and a button-down shirt becoming known as "the Mick Jagger of search engines" and being surrounded by groupies taking overhead phone-photos of him.
Well, meet celebrity Googler Matt Cutts.
Matt was, without a doubt, the star of the show at PubCon in Las Vegas last week. His interview with WebMasterWorld’s Brett Tabke had the crowd spellbound for nearly an hour. Then, he very patiently answered more tough questions from the audience. When time ran out, he continued his Q and A in the hallway until the crowd became a "fire hazard".
Matt also spoke at several other sessions, joined random conference-goers for breakfast, talked search at the Yahoo party, hung out in the hotel lobby after hours and happily shook hands with hundreds of attendees. He is the poster boy for the new, friendlier relationship that webmasters and the search engines - particularly Google and Yahoo - are currently enjoying. The attitude is that if we make things easier for the search engines, then they will make things easier for us. So far, everyone except the spammers is absolutely delighted with the new world wide web order.
Brett Tabke deserves a lot of the credit for this, too. In the late nineties, he invited the search engines to get together and exchange information with those who own and market websites and PubCon was born. The conference continually becomes bigger and better.
Within the last few weeks, Google has rolled out several new tools that will help to cement this cooperative relationship - Google Analytics, Google Site Maps’ Webmaster Console and Google Basecamp. Sure, there are serious bugs that need to be worked out, but we know that Google is up to the task.
I consider these tools to be gifts from Google. Thanks, Matt!
Matt Cutts Blog: www.mattcutts.com/blog
WebMasterWorld: www.webmasterworld.com
Mary Bowling - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.
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February 3rd, 2006 at 10:39 am
[...] Three months ago, Matt Cutts, one of Google’s engineers, told us about a data center that Google was testing, dubbed "Big Daddy". This new data center brings a major upgrade to Google’s systems. Instead of being a programming-only update, its a hardware and software update. The easiest way to think of this is like using Windows 98 on a five year old laptop, then upgrading to Windows XP on a brand new dual core laptop. They both are Windows-based, and look and operate very similarly, but XP is a much faster, more robust system. Big Daddy is the same. We are getting a more robust and more feature-filled system. [...]
February 14th, 2006 at 2:32 pm
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