Matt Cutts has always kind of reminded me of what would happen if the lead nerd, Lewis Skolnick, from revenge of the nerds and Kermit the Frog had a love child. You can’t help but to somewhat love Matt Cutts for the persona but deep down, you know he’s kind of one of the reasons why thousands of business owners had to jump through what seemed like endless hoops just to maintain business. He’s a part of why many people’s lives were destroyed waking up one day to find that their techniques (which were not considered spam the day before) were considered spam suddenly.% D, f& F1 W/ \
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Look, he was the messenger of the devil so to speak. The cold, inconsiderate and self interested giant that is Google left him as the messenger and insisted that he speak in riddles. The problem is, this harmed tons of people trying to just ride the bar because in SEO there really isn’t a choice if you want to rank and aren’t already a giant.6 {$ n1 y8 P m' p
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It’s easy to be self righteous and scream “Spammer!” but when the search engine rewarded spammy behavior, the good guys had to do whatever was working at the time. - h; [1 B$ l+ r
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Again, the term spam is relative to interpretation. Sort of like the word rape sadly, kind of like how some radical feminists now consider looking at someone too hard is considered rape (yes, I am using a harsh subject to explain how semantics do actually matter a lot and words have huge power). Well technically a link is spam unless you had nothing to do with it whatsoever these days. Then some self righteous guy on here is all like “What’s wrong? Upset because your link building spam got you a penalty?”, when all you did was ask a writer to mention your site rather than it happening organically.; h7 g5 ^: K6 z! T9 i* L2 O
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The moral is, poor Matt, you couldn’t deal with the hate anymore but you have to understand how your actions harmed others and sometimes very good people to boot.