Last week, I drove down to Washington, D.C. to interview one of the still most well-known Google personalities in the SEO space: Matt Cutts. He served as the head of web spam at Google and was one of the company’s first employees, joining in 2000. Cutts took a leave in 2014 and officially left Google in 2016.
He now is the Administrator at the United States Digital Service, a startup-like division in the US government working on making governmental websites better.
In our interview, we talk about his days at Google, from him writing the first SafeSearch algorithm for image search, to being on the ads team for a year worrying about the single ad server going down and how Google’s efforts grew around search quality, web spam and SEO communication. We then talked about how the search community might be able to help the US government in the USDS and how to apply to work at the USDS at usds.gov/apply.
Note: The first 5 minutes and 45 seconds is about me going to interview Matt, so feel free to skip to the core of the interview at 5:45:
I started this vlog series recently, and if you want to sign up to be interviewed, you can fill out this form on Search Engine Roundtable. You can also subscribe to my YouTube channel by clicking here.
About The Author
Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land’s News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.