Matt Cutts
Matthew Cutts has been working as a software developer at Google since January 2000 and is responsible for improving search quality as head of the webspam team. For many years now, Matt Cutts has provided public information for search engine optimization of websites. With hundreds of videos his YouTube channel and steady contributions in webmaster forums such as WebmasterWorld or specialized portals such as SearchEngineLand he has been providing webmasters and website operators with valuable first-hand advice on how the Google ranking system really works.
Matt Cutts is the most famous public voice against link spam and other unethical practices to improve the search engine ranking. His motto is “design content for users, not for engines” should remind any webmaster that those websites, which offer high-quality useful content are the most important and are the highest rated. Not those that try to manipulate the search engines and merely annoy users.
Career
Matt Cutts graduated at the University of Kentucky with a Bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science. He subsequently completed a course of study in computer graphics at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill with a doctorate. After additional training at the Institute of Information and Library Science at the same university, he switched to information retrieval and thus came to work on search engines.
At Google, he worked first in ad development before transferring to the Search Quality Group and finally becoming the head of the Webspam Department. Cutts is also a registered co-inventor of a Google patent on information retrieval based on historical data.
Matt Cutts and Google
Although Google does not reveal its rankings criteria publicly, Matt Cutts was permitted to publish his advice, according to his own words. The following liability statement can be found on his blog: “I’m one of several Googlers who answer questions online and sometimes for the press. I usually handle questions about webmasters or SEO, so in those areas I’m more likely to make sense and less likely to say something stupid. If I post something here that you find helpful as you build or manage your web presence, that’s wonderful. But when push comes to shove: This is my personal blog. The views expressed on these pages are mine alone and not those of my employer.”
Google appeared in the headlines in early 2012 because they had violated their own guidelines with a campaign for the company’s own Google Chrome browser. It was Matt Cutts, who defended the reduction of Chrome’s PageRank to the press and stated that Google does not give itself any special treatment.