Matt Cutts On His Google Years & How SEO|SEMs Can Make A Difference At The USDS : Vlog #32

Note: The first 5:45 of the video is my trip there, you can skip to the interview at the (5:45) mark. I made sure this video was completely unedited outside of the b-roll stuff before and after. Matt Cutts loves doing "one-takes" and actually, so do I, so we went with it. I did review the questions that I wanted to ask Matt prior to pressing record and full-transparency, we did skip some questions that he did not feel were appropriate to discuss for one reason or another.

Matt Cutts (@mattcutts), former head of web spam at Google and currently the Administrator of the United States Digital Service. Yes, he works in what Wikipedia calls an "elite technology unit" housed within the Executive Office of the President of the United States. We met in the Secretary of War Suite within the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, which is in the back yard of the White House - literally a couple of minute walk. I even stopped by and visited the VP's office - he was conveniently not there at the time.

Matt was one of Google’s first employees and he is most well-known in our industry for being the GoogleGuy who bridged communication between the Google search team and the SEO and webmaster community. In the early days he did it single handedly but now, partly thanks to Matt, there is a whole team of people at Google that do this as part of their daily jobs. He worked at Google between 2000 and 2016, but took a leave from Google in 2014 and officially left the company in 2016. He has since been with the USDS, United States Digital Service, with the goal of making governmental web sites and systems easier for users to use. So from working on a search engine used by millions of people, to working on systems in the US that are used by millions of people - he likes to go big and help in a big way.

The first part of the video we discussed his childhood. He grew up in eastern Kentucky. His father was a physics professor and his mother an evangelical Christian, and an older brother who is a mechanical engineer and an electrical engineer. He got a degree in computer science and mathematics at University of Kentucky, then went to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and did computer graphics and virtual reality. To his father’s dismay he never got his PhD, but did get a masters.

Then we moved into his career where we discussed his first job was working at the NSA as an intern for four semesters. His first real job was at Google and left Kentucky and went to California. He applied to Google while in university, he was learning about information sciences and was super interested in what Google was doing with search. He got married, took a honeymoon and drove across the country all in a single month - it was a busy time.

His first real big project was working on safe search. It was completely text based, to figure out how to hide unsafe images. He then worked on ads for a year and he told how he got assigned to working on that. The whole ad platform worked off of one single server named F41 at Google. He then started the quality group at Google.

He saw from his work on SafeSearch that people were taking advantage of Google. One example was an expired domain that had high PageRank and was able to rank well because of that. That was his epiphany that Google could be spammed.

During his 20% time started GoogleGuy to answer questions in the forums - specifically WebmasterWorld, debunk myths and clarify misconceptions about how Google search worked. He did remember mistakes he made around communication with SEOs, referring to SEOs back in the day as watching people juggling chainsaws; it’s entertaining when it goes well and really bad when it doesn’t go well.

From 2001 to 2003, he said multiple people were thinking about the quality of the search results. In 2003, lots of stuff went badly with search quality he said. He said what kicked off the executives caring about this was around the time Orkut launched in early 2004. Slashdot was asking why is Google working on a social network when they have problems with search quality.

Matt explained that one reason he opened dialog with black hat SEOs was to get inside information from these folks. He would get a lot of good intel. He also said it was a source of good will towards the industry. We talked a bit about the naming conventions of Google updates and how we had fun names in the old days and now we have these boring names; thanks Danny.

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