On Friday, Matt Cutts, Google's head of fighting all evil web spam, posted on Twitter an interview he gave to the usesthis.com blog. It is basically a place where a guy named Daniel interviews nerds about what hardware they use.
The latest interview was Matt Cutts and you can read it over here. I read it, included it in the daily SearchCap this Friday and didn't think anything of it.
But Matt got a lot of reaction to the interview, calling it out because of all the keyword rich anchor text and the affiliate link at the bottom linking to the hosting company.
Here is Matt's tweet:
Want to read about the hardware and software I use? My "Uses This" interview just went live: http://t.co/8heeWGsuf2
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) April 4, 2014The first response was quick and directed about the links:
@mattcutts That's an interview with impressive amount of links in there… :-D
— Dennis Goedegebuure (@TheNextCorner) April 4, 2014Matt responded:
@TheNextCorner it took me a while to answer the questions because I wanted to do it well..
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) April 4, 2014Matt didn't respond to most the other criticism, but when someone said it was a "double standard", Matt decided to respond. Here is the tweet:
@mattcutts Wow! You are endorsing this and you can see massive amount of links and affiliate links too (probably). Amazing! Double Standards
— Ahmad Wali (@E_Wali) April 5, 2014Matt responds:
@E_Wali none of those links are affiliate links. Likewise, none of the links in my blog posts are affiliate links.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) April 5, 2014Well, there is one affiliate link in the footer.
So while it is in the footer and not in the blog post, some SEOs are jumping on that.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
