Matt Cutts Admits To Not Acting Fast Enough With Paid Links & Content Farms

Matt Cutts responded to a question from a twitter user this week, asking whether or not he had any regrets during his career dealing with web spam. Matt responded with two confessions regarding paid links and content farms, before discussing them in more detail in a video.

Matt discussed a meeting with a popular SEO during a search conference in San Jose, where he learnt that the general opinion was that paid links were far too common and that people wanted to Google to come up with some kind of algorithm to combat this.

Cutts explained that he felt he had made a mistake with paid links as they were simply getting too far after passing PageRank, although he did insist that Google had cracked down on paid links since then. He also emphasised the fact that most people are now aware of Google’s disapproval of paid links, with more and more people looking to avoid them entirely.

The second thing Cutts talked about was content farms, where he felt that he hadn’t acted fast enough to deal with something that people were really struggling with due to its horrible user experience.

His excuse at the time was that he’d already ran a search on how to fix a toilet in his home and found the experience to be user friendly, although he did accept that he had based this opinion on an “over generalised” example.

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