Top all-time · #239
Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO
Personal blog · mattcutts.comwebcareer
Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO is a personal blog at mattcutts.com about web and career. Since 2007, 193 different Hacker News readers have linked it 269 times, most often “Scott Adams’ Financial Advice (2014)”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Rarely recommended · 1 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Matt Cutts' blog as a primary source on Google search, webspam and algorithm changes, and as a reference for Google's own statements on privacy and data.
- Recommended for · 1 comments
- One commenter calls 'How to Get Startup Ideas' worth reading, citing its approach to finding a problem and solving it.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /blog/subdomains-and-subdirectories/10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2009-03-06
- Scott Adams’ Financial Advice (2014)7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2015-12-16
- The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2014-01-20
- Sharing a search story: Matt Cutts on "Search plus Your World"4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2012-01-11
- Disclosure (2009)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2013-12-24
- Dashes vs. underscores4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2009-01-31
- How to Back Up Gmail In Linux4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2009-08-07
- When does Google Chrome talk to Google.com?3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2008-09-02
- Penguin 2.0 rolled out today3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-05-23
- /blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-11-15
What Hacker News says?
https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/join-the-us-digital-service/ wow that's amazing, I guess I sort of quit reading blogs like this when all the RSS readers died.
Comment linking /blog/join-the-us-digital-service/
on “The top-ranking HTML editor on Google is an SEO scam”Submitted Some terrible personal news as a story · 1018 points
HN discussionHere you go: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
Comment linking /blog/
on “The top-ranking HTML editor on Google is an SEO scam”Submitted Give Google Contributor a try: Pay to remove ads as a story · 549 points
HN discussionStart with Scott Adams' financial checklist: https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/scott-adams-financial-advice/ Note the item about hiring a fee-based financial advisor. I hired one starting a few years ago even though I am pretty good at this stuff, but I think they're especially helpful for newbies to establish good expectations and habits.
Comment linking /blog/scott-adams-financial-advice/
on “Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee”Submitted Hard-won lessons about money and investing as a story · 366 points
HN discussionI liked Matt Cuts way to find a problem and solve it. Worth reading http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/business-ideas/
Comment linking /blog/business-ideas/
on “How to Get Startup Ideas”Submitted Staying with the US Digital Service as a story · 330 points
HN discussionOh come on. Google is willing and able to push back on overly broad governmental requests. When the Department of Justice sent subpoenas to 34 companies in 2005 asking for months of user queries, Google was the only company I know of that fought back in court and won. I know because I wrote a declaration for that case. See http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/doj-sent-subpoenas-to-34-compa... ; and http://www.mattcutts.com…
Comment linking /blog/google-responds-to-doj-subpoena&
on “Larry Page addresses PRISM”Submitted Progress against SOPA as a story · 279 points
HN discussionHere's the accompanying link: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/algorithm-change-launched/
Comment linking /blog/algorithm-change-launched/
on “Google algorithm change launched”Submitted Please turn on two-factor authentication as a story · 224 points
HN discussionYes absolutely. I don't think anyone in this thread or in the article denied that the Google Toolbar sends data to Google. And you are absolutely right that Google's use of the data collected should be clearly stated in a privacy policy and EULA. It might be, I haven't read them. But the article clearly covers the available public statements on this issue and patio11 dug up a post from Matt Cutts in his comment belo…
Comment linking /blog/toolbar-indexing-debunk-post/
on “Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results”Submitted A brief update as a story · 180 points
HN discussionIt is widely assumed in SEO circles that Google uses toolbar data, among other sources, for finding new URLs to crawl. They're very enthusiastic about getting all pages on the public Internet into the crawl set. User data gets them there faster and more reliably than a hypothetical competing crawler using only e.g. the observed link graph. Edit: I did some digging to see if I could find an authoritative source on th…
Comment linking /blog/toolbar-indexing-debunk-post/
on “Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results”Submitted Google does not want rights to things you do using Chrome (2008) as a story · 162 points
HN discussionGmail has supported POP and IMAP for years, and it's been possible to back up your email using that, e.g. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/backup-gmail-in-linux-with-get... but I'm really glad that it's much easier now.
Comment linking /blog/backup-gmail-in-linux-with-getmail/
on “Download a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data”Submitted The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO as a story · 159 points
HN discussionYup, that was the same day we announced SSL search, which prevents referrers to http sites. I don't begrudge you trying to make privacy a selling point for DDG, but donttrack.us felt like trying to paint Google with a pretty broad brush. Honestly, it reminded me of when Privacy International decided to give Google a worse privacy rating than any other company. Here's how I responded to Privacy International at the t…
Comment linking /blog/privacy-international-loses-all-credibility/
on “Google tracks you. We don't. An illustrated guide”Submitted Matt Cutts: $1,000 to the 2 best implementations of the recently-hacked Kinect as a story · 121 points
HN discussion"Doesn't Google use Chrome to get traffic statistics, through the opt-in "send usage statistics" and the malicious site protection?" I saw that Peter Kasting from the Chrome team commented on this question at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-bing/#comment-712619 . Here's what he said "I work on Chrome and we absolutely do NOT collect clickstream data through Chrome. Not even when you turn on the off-by-default “…
Comment linking /blog/google-bing/
on “Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results—and denies it”Submitted What to expect in SEO in the coming months [video] as a story · 117 points
HN discussiondemetris, that's exactly what we improved with a recent algorithm change: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/algorithm-change-launched/ . As you point out, that was a more straightforward change, and that's why we were able to launch that one first. That said, if you wanted to share some examples where you're seeing copies rank higher than originals I'm happy to pass that on to the right folks. In fact, some of the right…
Comment linking /blog/algorithm-change-launched/
on “New Chrome extension: block sites from Google’s web search results”Submitted Matt Cutt's thoughts on Google Bing Debate as a story · 116 points
HN discussionI alluded to some of the ways that I've seen people shoot themselves in the foot in a blog post a few years ago: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/the-web-is-a-fuzz-test-patch-y... "You would not believe the sort of weird, random, ill-formed stuff that some people put up on the web: everything from tables nested to infinity and beyond, to web documents with a filetype of exe, to executables returned as text documents. I…
Comment linking /blog/the-web-is-a-fuzz-test-patch-your-browser-and-your-web-server/
on “Suddenly, Hacker News is not the first result for 'Hacker News'”Submitted More info about synonyms at Google (2010) as a story · 115 points
HN discussionGoogle had something like this back in 2007. Matt Cutts: "An easy way to add new features to Google" http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/adding-new-features-to-google/
Comment linking /blog/adding-new-features-to-google/
on “Introducing DuckDuckHack”Submitted Google 2000 vs. Google 2011 as a story · 109 points
HN discussionBut one day, maybe around 2009, something happened. Where once I was delighted with Google's search, it started getting annoying. Things like automatically showing you a SERP for a different spelling of your query, because Google thought you were looking for that. Then they started matching to synonyms (tear and rip, say). And so this tool that used to do exactly what it was asked became too clever by half. I'm pret…
Comment linking /blog/search-plus-your-world/
on “Larry Page to Googlers: If You Don’t Get SPYW, Work Somewhere Else”Submitted Level Playing Field as a story · 97 points
HN discussion
