The Google engineer who webmasters have learned to love and fear tackled a slew of questions posted to his blog recently. There are only four or five live Matt Cutts sightings in a given year…
…as Cutts responded to a question about his likelihood of traveling to the UK to visit or speak, and regretfully a trip across the Atlantic isn’t in his plans.
That means the Clan of Cutts will have to attend events like Boston Pubcon and SES San Jose to catch a glimpse of him. However, he does make himself available on his well-regarded blog, most recently to answer a passel of questions from commenters.
He reiterated that link sellers should use the “nofollow” attribute to mark links they sell. “Not doing so can affect your reputation in Google,” he wrote. One can imagine the sonorous intonation of James Earl Jones sounding out that response.
The Bigdaddy software infrastructure update has been completed and fully deployed. This means webmaster should see different visits from Google. Said Cutts, “You will probably see less crawling by the older Googlebot, which has a User-Agent of “Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)”. I believe crawling from the Bigdaddy infrastructure has a new User-Agent, which is “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)”.”
But forget about seeing the RK parameter ever again. Cutts noted that the parameter used to be visible in a Google toolbar query. “I wouldn’t expect to see the RK parameter have a non-zero value again,” he wrote.
One commenter questioned Cutts about the 64.233.185.104 datacenter, saying it seemed to work differently from the others and asked if it mainly consisted of newly spidered data. “That wouldn’t surprise me,” said Cutts. “As Bigdaddy cools down, that frees us up to do new/other things.”
Although many follow Google’s most publicly known engineer and his writings, few may realized Cutts has an Emmy. Given that the Emmy in question is of the feline persuasion, it’s more likely Emmy has a Matt Cutts:
Q: “Do you take Emmy with you to San Francisco?”
A: Nope, Emmy is a true indoors cat; she doesn’t like to travel.
The question and answer thread offers some interesting insights into Google and webmaster issues. It is definitely worth a few minutes of the reader’s time today.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
