Matt Cutts on Spam

posted on March 9, 2009

Matt Cutts, an engineer at Google, took some time at the Web 2.0 Expo to talk about spam. It’s a great video, you should definitely check it out.

It’s a pretty helpful video. You can watch it embedded here, or you can watch it on Matt’s blog itself.

It’s not just about Google – it includes a little bit of everything. Things start out about Google and how Google is fighting spam, and then later on how to fight spam on your own website. There’s a few notes on SEO in between, so be sure to check that out also.

The video is 9:11 minutes long. Here’s a list of topics that are covered in the video (in order):

Introduction (0:00-0:33)
Web Spam (0:33-1:36)
Motives of Web Spam (Money) (1:36-2:35)
Trust and Reputation (2:35-3:14)
PageRank (3:14-3:50)
Preventing Spam (continued later) (3:50-4:08)
Search Engine Optimization (and fake Search Engine Optimization) (4:08-6:07)
Preventing Spam/CAPTCHAS (6:07-7:09)
Dangers of Spam (7:09-7:46)
Recap (7:46-9:11)