Matt Cutts Shows Up, Panelists Freeze Options

[cre8pc]

I'd love to get Rand's take on this. This blog post describes a session on paid links at Pubcon that went south when the panelists saw Matt Cutts walk in and seat himself in the back of the room. They apparently clammed up.

Matt Cutts Ruins "Link Buying" Session at PubCon

[AbleReach]

What a way for Raven to launch a SEO services forum.



Added to my feeds.
Great picture!

[iamlost]

Which is silly.
The session was being live-blogged.
Not exactly a 'secret' event.

Apparently the 'best' tip was Jim Boykin saying 'stay under the radar and don’t p*** off Google'. The others said much the same obvious common sense stuff in rather more words.

Mr. Cutts is a convenient out for a session that never could actually give up link building 'secrets'. Makes the presenters sound like they just might 'know' secret stuff though. That should be good for business.

Jon Henshaw does a nice humourous writeup about a non-event and the bloggartsphere goes gaga. Amazing...

[Autocrat]

Interesting... so there are a group of people giving advice etc... and someone who is known to be smart in that field, and against what the advisors will be likely to say, shows up... and the advisors go quiet...

and people assume it's because they have secrets?
Obviously I'm more cynical than I believed, as to my mind that would have suggested they didn't havea clue, and someone they knew could shut them down showed up.


The real gigle is it isn't like it was a suprise... anyone could have checked his site and known he was going

[jonhenshaw]

The thing is, I've seen Jim Boykin dish out some really good advice, secrets or whatever you want to call it, at PubCon before. But I've never seen him shut up like this. I agree that it was silly, regardless of Matt's presence, to have the panelists clam up. But clam up they did.

I generally expect to hear about 90% of what I already know, 5% of a reminder of something I forgot and 5% of something totally new that I've never thought of. I was hoping to get that from this session – as were many other people I've talked to since then – but what we ended up getting was a complete waste of time. I only wish I had left the session earlier.

[joedolson]

I'm going to disagree, myself. The Link buying session was NEVER going to include any meaningful "tips." Matt Cutts was in the session from the very beginning; and some of the panelists, at least, already knew he would be there.

(Anybody with any sense would have known it, at any rate.)

I found the session to be very enjoyable, in that it effectively portrayed the whole debate about the concept behind paid links: what they are, how they're identified, and how much it matters to the web marketing industry as a whole. Jim Boykin's comments were clever, in that he acknowledged that the only real value to purchased links is to ensure, as best as possible, that they aren't readily detectable.

But if anybody seriously believed that the point of the session was ever to provide helpful tips on tricking search engines they were deceiving themselves. Wasn't going to happen; won't happen. Any serious link building secrets are far too valuable to give up in that kind of context in the current anti-paid link environment.

[iamlost]

joedolson: stop trying to bring reason to a tabloid story

[joedolson]

stop trying to bring reason to a tabloid story

Whoops. My bad!

Edit:
Is anybody else cringing as much as I am that I wrote "my bad?" Eeuw.


This post has been edited by joedolson: Dec 6 2007, 11:33 AM

[eKstreme]

Yes, you're bad.

(Pun 100% intended.)

Pierre

[cre8pc]

LOL

I actually had an internal self debate before even posting to the story...knowing it was likely link bait for the writer and all.

Bad Kimmy won!

[Autocrat]

Has the Xmas sherry been opend by everyone already
Still, nice to see others using bad syntax/grammer... makes up for my renaged hands making it look klike I canont type

...joedolson...
I'm inclined to agree with your view (not the you being bad ), but about the tips... then again, if paid links are considered as bad/wrong... how comes they seem to get seminars and attendee's?

[iamlost]

if paid links are considered as bad/wrong... how comes they seem to get seminars and attendee's?

I do trust that is a retorical question?
Or shall I sit you down and explain the birds and the bees the webmasters and the SEs...
It is a tale of excitement and woe, of secret handshakes and loose lips, the drama of good and evil writ large and played out on the seminar floor...

Bad Kimmy won

Now it's a genuine tabloid screamer - all that had been missing was the bad girl...

[AbleReach]

New captions for the photo of Matt crushing candy bar:

Bad Kimmy Won

Shall I sit you down and explain the birds and the bees the webmasters and the SEs?

Yes, you're bad.

Anybody with any sense would have known it, at any rate.

[cre8pc]

My caption for Matt in the back, apparently mutilating a candy bar:

Damn! My invisibility cloak is malfunctioning!

[Autocrat]

no... should be "has anyone seen my cloak of invisibility?"



...iamlost...
LMAO

Only partially a legitimate question That being, if we all know it's pants... why pay attention?
It would be little different than someone hosting seminars on how to build sites that suck... and having people show up for it (then again, you could at least obtain positives form the those negatives).

[AbleReach]

Why? Because it's fun?

..............

Matt *could* be making the ASL sign for "yes."

"Say, Matt, is that chocolate?"
"Yes."

Make the letter S, a fist with the thumb going across the front, and then nod the fist like a little head that's nodding "yes."

Now you know one of my 20 words/phrases of ASL.

[Wit]

IMV it's a cross between the sign for "twinkie" and "w**ker".
Had I been on the panel, I would have been offended as well heh

[AbleReach]

I can sign "kitten" or "star" or "stop" or "pasteurized milk," but I have no idea how to say "w...

that other thing.



(thinks Wit is an, um, interesting personage)

[iamlost]

AbleReach: curl hand, thumb tip to index and move wrist up and down.
Yes it can look as rude, crude, and Brit as the term itself.

A deaf friend once upon a long time ago spent a lot of our date-time explaining the nasty mean signs...I don't remember the alphabet or much except some 'bad' words...strange that

[projectphp]

What possible secrets are there that can be shared? Think about it: if something "works", it is a gibbon that it won't for ever, and the only value in the secret is making hay while the sun shines.

As a matter of fact, what secrets could there possibly be? Link building == getting wiomeone to put <a href="http://www.example.com">text</a> on a page accessible to, and indexed by, SEs. Anything beyond that is just execution, effort and spotting an opportunity first.

The agriculture analogy is actually pretty accurate. There is no secret to what makes a good glass of wine: Terroir (which means a combination of climate, soil and outlook). Finding a good site for a winery isn't a secret, it is just hardwork. I am not sure that hard work is much of a secret, but given the ammount of top ten this, ecret way to that %#$%#%# writen about SEO, perhaps hard work is the ultimate secret that very few people get?