All of us in the SEO industry have always had the feeling that Matt Cutts took offense to spam on a personal level. Sure, he always comes across as a cool and level headed sort of guy, but you just know that deep down in his heart of hearts, there burns a not-so-secret hatred for all of the SEO spam artists in the world. He managed to keep this hatred a secret for a long time, but like any dark secret, it eventually came bubbling to the surface. Let’s take a look at what Mr. Cuts had to say about spammers when he stopped being polite and started being real.
On the newest episode of the popular series This Week in google on the TWiT network, Matt Cutts was answering questions from the hosts Jeff Jarvis and Leo Laporte when the topic of spam came about. In an unusually candid reply, Matt Cutts said that he aims to not just defeat them at every turn, but to break their very spirits.
I know it sounds extreme, but it’s the God’s honest truth.
The folks at SEO Roundtable transcribed his exact words. Read them and enjoy a calculated killer instinct from the heart of Google’s operations:
If you want to stop spam, the most straight forward way to do it is to deny people money because they care about the money and that should be their end goal. But if you really want to stop spam, it is a little bit mean, but what you want to do, is sort of break their spirits. There are lots of Google algorithms specifically designed to frustrate spammers. Some of the things we do is give people a hint their site will drop and then a week or two later, their site actually does drop. So they get a little bit more frustrated. So hopefully, and we’ve seen this happen, people step away from the dark side and say, you know what, that was so much pain and anguish and frustration, let’s just stay on the high road from now on.