Matt Cutts

Last updated

Matt Cutts
Matt Cutts Headshot.jpg
Cutts in 2008
Born
Matthew Cutts

1972or1973(age 50–51) [1]
Alma mater
OccupationProgrammer
Known forSafeSearch, Google's family filter, Webspam Team
Matt Cutts' voice
recorded June 2013

Matthew Cutts (born 1972 or 1973) [1] is an American software engineer. Cutts is the former Administrator of the United States Digital Service. [2] He was first appointed as acting administrator, to later be confirmed as full administrator in October 2018. [3] Cutts previously worked with Google as part of the search quality team on search engine optimization issues. [4] [5] He is the former head of the web spam team at Google. [6]

Contents

Education

Cutts completed his high school career in Morehead, Kentucky at Rowan County Senior High School. [7] He received a bachelor's degree in computer science and mathematics from the University of Kentucky in 1995. [8] [9] He went on to receive a Master of Science degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1998. [10]

Career

Cutts started his career in search when working on his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In January 2000, Cutts joined Google as a software engineer. [4] At 2007 PubCon, Cutts stated that his field of study was computer science; he then moved into the field of information retrieval and search engines after taking two outside classes from the university's Information and Library Science department. [11] Before working at the Search Quality group at Google, Cutts worked at the ads engineering group and SafeSearch, Google's family filter, which he designed. [4] [12] There, he earned the nickname "porn cookie guy" by giving his wife's homemade cookies to any Googler who provided an example of unwanted pornography in the search results. [13]

Cutts is one of the co-inventors listed upon a Google patent related to search engines and web spam. [14]

In 2006, The Wall Street Journal said "Cutts is to search results what Alan Greenspan was to interest rates". [15]

In November 2010, Cutts started a contest challenging developers to make Microsoft Kinect more compatible with the Linux operating system. At the time, Microsoft had stated that the use of Kinect with devices other than the Xbox 360 was not supported by them. [16]

Cutts has given advice and made statements on help related to the use of the Google search engine and related issues. [17]

In January 2012, on the news that Google had violated its own quality guidelines, Cutts defended the downgraded PageRank of the Google Chrome homepage results, noting that it was not given special dispensation. [18] [19]

In July 2014, Cutts stated that he was going to take a few months of leave to spend more time with his family and try new things, including a half ironman race. [20] Upon joining Google, Cutts agreed with his wife to work for four to five years and then spend a period of time together. Fifteen years later, Cutts made the decision to do so. [21]

In May 2015, Google announced it had placed someone new in Cutts' position as the head of the web spam team, but this person would not be an official spokesperson for publisher and webmaster issues. [22]

In January 2017, Cutts announced that he would be leaving Google to join the US Digital Service. [21] Cutts noted that he handed in his notice to Google on December 31, 2016. Cutts was originally going to spend his leave at the USDS for three months which then turned into six months. [23]

Related Research Articles

Spamdexing is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes. It involves a number of methods, such as link building and repeating unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevance or prominence of resources indexed in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Metasearch engine</span> ALO.Online information retrieval tool

A metasearch engine is an online information retrieval tool that uses the data of a web search engine to produce its own results. Metasearch engines take input from a user and immediately query search engines for results. Sufficient data is gathered, ranked, and presented to the users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Scholar</span> Academic search service by Google

Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents.

The Sandbox effect is a name given to an observation of the way Google ranks web pages in its index. It is the subject of much debate—its existence has been written about since 2004, but not confirmed, with several statements to the contrary.

An SEO contest is a prize activity that challenges search engine optimization (SEO) practitioners to achieve high ranking under major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN using certain keyword(s). This type of contest is controversial because it often leads to massive amounts of link spamming as participants try to boost the rankings of their pages by any means available. The SEO competitors hold the activity without the promotion of a product or service in mind, or they may organize a contest in order to market something on the Internet. Participants can showcase their skills and potentially discover and share new techniques for promoting websites.

nofollow is a setting on a web page hyperlink that directs search engines not to use the link for page ranking calculations. It is specified in the page as a type of link relation; that is: <a rel="nofollow" ...>. Because search engines often calculate a site's importance according to the number of hyperlinks from other sites, the nofollow setting allows website authors to indicate that the presence of a link is not an endorsement of the target site's importance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Danny Sullivan (technologist)</span> American technologist and journalist

Danny Sullivan is an American technologist, journalist, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Search Engine Watch in 1997, one of the earliest online publications about search engine marketing. He also launched Search Engine Strategies, one of the earliest search marketing trade shows. After selling both companies in 2006, he co-founded Search Engine Land, another search marketing publication. In 2017, he joined Google as an adviser at the search division of the company.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barry Schwartz (technologist)</span>

Barry Schwartz is a blogger who writes about search engines and search engine marketing. Schwartz is the founder and currently the editor of Search Engine Roundtable, an online news site covering the search engines and search engine marketing. He also is the CEO & President of RustyBrick, Inc., a New York–based web development company, and a news editor at Search Engine Land, a search engine news site founded by Danny Sullivan. Previously, Schwartz was a writer for Search Engine Watch. He also moderates online and offline panels at Search Engine Watch, Cre8asite Forums and WebmasterWorld's PubCon.

Google Search Console is a web service by Google which allows webmasters to check indexing status, search queries, crawling errors and optimize visibility of their websites.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mahalo.com</span> Web directory and question-and-answer site

Mahalo.com was a web directory and Internet-based knowledge exchange launched in May 2007 by Jason Calacanis. It differentiated itself from algorithmic search engines like Google and Ask.com, as well as other directory sites like DMOZ and Yahoo! by tracking and building hand-crafted result sets for many of the currently popular search terms.

In the field of search engine optimization (SEO), link building describes actions aimed at increasing the number and quality of inbound links to a webpage with the goal of increasing the search engine rankings of that page or website. Briefly, link building is the process of establishing relevant hyperlinks to a website from external sites. Link building can increase the number of high-quality links pointing to a website, in turn increasing the likelihood of the website ranking highly in search engine results. Link building is also a proven marketing tactic for increasing brand awareness.

Scour Inc. was a multimedia Internet search engine, and provided Scour Exchange, an early peer-to-peer file exchange service.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PageRank</span> Algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages

PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results. It is named after both the term "web page" and co-founder Larry Page. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages. According to Google:

PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites.

A content farm or content mill is a company that employs large numbers of freelance writers or uses automated tools to generate a large amount of textual web content which is specifically designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by search engines, known as SEO. Their main goal is to generate advertising revenue through attracting reader page views, as first exposed in the context of social spam.

Google Penguin was a codename for a Google algorithm update that was first announced on April 24, 2012. The update was aimed at decreasing search engine rankings of websites that violate Google's Webmaster Guidelines by using now declared Grey Hat SEM techniques involved in increasing artificially the ranking of a webpage by manipulating the number of links pointing to the page. Such tactics are commonly described as link schemes. According to Google's John Mueller, as of 2013, Google announced all updates to the Penguin filter to the public.

Google Search, offered by Google, is the most widely used search engine on the World Wide Web as of 2023, with over eight billion searches a day. This page covers key events in the history of Google's search service.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Timeline of web search engines</span>

This page provides a full timeline of web search engines, starting from the WHOis in 1982, the Archie search engine in 1990, and subsequent developments in the field. It is complementary to the history of web search engines page that provides more qualitative detail on the history.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephan Spencer</span>

Stephan Spencer is a three-time author under the O'Reilly Media brand, search engine optimization (SEO) expert, inventor, podcaster, speaker, and founder of Netconcepts.

"Did Google Manipulate Search for Hillary?" is a 2016 YouTube video uploaded by SourceFed.

References

  1. 1 2 "Matt Cutts: The Greenspan of Google". Bloomberg Businessweek . March 17, 2011. Matt Cutts, the 38-year-old
  2. ↑ Cutts, Matt (April 14, 2021). "The Next Chapter for USDS". U.S. Digital Service Blog. Retrieved August 20, 2021.
  3. ↑ "Matt Cutts gets the official nod for top spot at USDS". FedScoop . October 22, 2018.
  4. 1 2 3 "About Me". Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO. April 27, 2009.
  5. ↑ Ward, Mark (June 8, 2004). "Inside the Google search machine". BBC News Online . Retrieved May 4, 2008.
  6. ↑ "Google Has New Head Of Web Spam But Won't Be The "New Matt Cutts"". Search Engine Land. May 22, 2015. Matt Cutts remains on leave, but Search Engine Land can report that Google does have someone new in his position of head of web spam fighting.
  7. ↑ Grant Stevens (July 13, 2012). "Google this: Matt Cutts, hometown proud". The Morehead News. Retrieved February 10, 2016.[ permanent dead link ]
  8. ↑ Olgiate, Christina (October 21, 2012). "Google employee Matt Cutts returns to UK". The Kentucky Kernel . University of Kentucky. Archived from the original on October 10, 2014.
  9. ↑ "Just Google Him: CS alumnus talks about how UK prepared him to work for the Search giant". University of Kentucky, Department of Computer Science, College of Engineering. August 26, 2011.
  10. ↑ "Graduate School Honors Fellowship Winners". News And Notes. Department of Computer Science, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Spring 1999. Archived from the original on January 29, 2011. Retrieved October 10, 2014.
  11. ↑ Kaushal, Navneet. "PubCon – Matt Cutts Keynote". PubCon 2007. WebProNews. Archived from the original on May 14, 2013. Retrieved October 7, 2012.
  12. ↑ "Google's chastity belt too tight". ZDNet. April 23, 2004. Retrieved January 13, 2015.
  13. ↑ "'Google': An interesting read on a powerhouse company". USA Today . November 13, 2005.
  14. ↑ Acharya, A., et al., (2005) Information retrieval based on historical data
  15. ↑ "Readers React to 'SEO' Contest". The Wall Street Journal. February 16, 2006. Retrieved January 13, 2015.
  16. ↑ "Kinect hacked days after release". BBC News. BBC. November 12, 2010. Retrieved November 15, 2010.
  17. ↑ "Matt Cutts Talks Keyword Density". www.webpronews.com. December 19, 2011. Retrieved November 15, 2018.
  18. ↑ Arthur, Charles (January 4, 2012). "Google shoves Chrome down search rankings after sponsored blog mixup". The Guardian. London.
  19. ↑ Shankland, Stephen (January 4, 2012). "Two days after Google flub, Unruly raises $25 million". CNET.
  20. ↑ Cutts, Matt. "On Leave". Matt Cutts Blog. Retrieved July 4, 2014.
  21. 1 2 Ratnesar, Romesh (October 21, 2018). "Meet the Obama Appointee the Trump Administration Loves". Washingtonian. Retrieved November 15, 2018.
  22. ↑ "Google Has New Head Of Web Spam But Won't Be The "New Matt Cutts"" . Retrieved June 18, 2015.
  23. ↑ "Staying with the US Digital Service". Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO. January 19, 2017. Retrieved January 19, 2017.

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