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Matt Cutts Doesn’t Respond to E-mail Anymore

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There are 15 comments on this article. Add your comment.

1. Marion
   October 22nd, 2007 at 2:49 pm

   “Why is Google trying to fight the battle that is useless?” What kind of unique response were you expecting? Seriously, Jonathan, Matt has enough to do without answering philosophical questions from random people (no offense meant, I know you’re not really random :-)). Being an absolute egoist, I would prefer that he take part in one good public interview every three months than that he answers any email at all. Just my 2c.

2. Jonathan Dingman
   October 22nd, 2007 at 3:14 pm

   Marion,

   I see your view, but I’ve been in contact with Matt for quite some time now and met up with him, I would imagine he would at least have the courtesy to write me back personally — even if it said “sorry, no comment.” Anything personal would have been fine.

   But to be “too busy” to even reply to a friend? That’s just wrong in my books. If Matt is “too busy” to respond to people, why does he even have e-mail at all? Why not just send all e-mails to a :blackhole:. That might be more effective than sending back automated responses that have absolutely no value to them.

3. Sebastian
   October 22nd, 2007 at 4:28 pm

   Why didn’t you simply file a paid links report? Reread your email, is it really worth a personal reply? I think not.

4. Jonathan Dingman
   October 22nd, 2007 at 4:36 pm

   Sebastian,

   The email wasn’t to warrant a personal response on specifically that issue, but rather the whole issue of paid links.

   I want an explanation why some sites are allowed to have “paid” links, while others are not allowed to.

   It’s hypocritical and wrong for Google to make those kinds of decisions.

5. Marion
   October 22nd, 2007 at 5:39 pm

   Let’s see - you sent your email on friday, and “just” (before posting?) got the response. It’s no autoresponder, it’s a manually sent packaged response. Somebody read your email before replying. Maybe even Matt (but probably not). Does that help?

   Let’s change the words in your question for fun: instead of paid links, concentrate on Googles mission: organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. It’s essentially impossible right? IMO they’re doing a damn fine job of that anyway, certainly not perfect, but getting better all the time. I don’t think it’s any less impossible than recognizing sponsored links.

6. Jonathan Dingman
   October 23rd, 2007 at 6:30 am

   Marion,

   So then it still begs the question, why are they even bothering with the battle of paid [sponsored] links?

   That’s really what I was asking Matt.

   Even if they did manually read the e-mail, why would they include, specifically, that it was an automated e-mail?

   I’m in contact with Adam Lasnik about it right now and I’m coming to the conlusion of this: Why bother having an inbox if you can’t respond to it.

7. Matt Cutts
   October 23rd, 2007 at 1:32 pm

   Hey Jonathan, I’ve been crunching on a project for the last several weeks. At one point, I was almost 500 emails behind. I’m about 300+ emails behind now, but clearly I’m not able to scale in my email communication as much as I would like to in an ideal world.

   There’s also the issue that email is a 1:1 way of communicating. In the 3-4 minutes to reply to an email, I could also reply on a forum, blog, or start on a blog post that everyone could benefit from (not just one person by email).

   The answer to your question is that a page’s reputation can be affected by the sites that they link to. In the specific case you mentioned (http://iwantmyopenid.org/bounty/sponsors), I would worry at least as much about the spammy links showing up on that page, e.g. “sohbetchatsohbet odalarıçetarkadaşchat odalarısohbet chatyonjasohbethiphopchat sohbetsitesohpet” or “online information about pharmacology, drugs and medications” The specific page you asked about has a lot of these spammy links, which suggests that search engines shouldn’t be trusting that page as much as some other pages.

   Best wishes, and sorry that I haven’t had the cycles to reply to everyone that emails me recently,
   Matt

8. Jonathan Dingman
   October 23rd, 2007 at 1:40 pm

   Matt,

   Some valid points. Thank you for taking the time to leave a comment to prove my point wrong — you’re not a robot :)

   So then the basic principal, if I’m understanding you right, is that you are penalizing sites that have irrelevant sponsored links?

   That’s fair enough.

   I agree, e-mail is very limited in how effective it can actually be because, exactly right as you stated, it only benefits one person — unless that one person were to go post the response. Probably would have been the case here that I would have posted it here and plenty of people would see it.

   I know the feelings of being behind on e-mails, at one point I was behind some odd thousand or two e-mails. It’s not fun.

   No hard feelings though. Thank you again Matt.

9. Matt Cutts
   October 23rd, 2007 at 4:52 pm

   Thanks for being understanding. Being this far behind on email has really made me ponder not only better time management, but also how I can do better at tackling external communication.

10. Jonathan Dingman
    October 23rd, 2007 at 5:17 pm

    Matt,

    Here’s some food for thought. Setup some sort of private e-mail account that will let you manage all your private contacts and then have a general mailbox, such as your account that already exists, and use an auto-responder with something along the lines of recommending to people where they can most likely find their answer.

    From my past experience, it’s better to get a response immediately, even if it’s an auto-responder, than it is to get a delayed-automated-response, such as the one I received.

    That might help filter out a lot of your junk requests (such as mine :) and let you focus on the serious stuff.

    Just my two cents for you. At any rate, would love to hear about how you end up tackling (like a fish! Hey, you should be a fish for Halloween!) the work load.

11. Karen Loren
    October 24th, 2007 at 3:09 pm

    Cutts doesn’t respond to phone calls or fedex either. But hes got plenty of time to waste on his blog discussing irrelevant topics.

    Google has the worst customer service on the planet. They are getting too big for their panties and are following the same path that Microsoft and other powerful companies have. A search engine who responds to webmasters will eventually trump the big G.

12. Matt Cutts
    October 29th, 2007 at 12:14 am

    Karen, my blog is my personal blog. If you only want to get Google/SEO posts, you can subscribe to
    http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo/feed
    and you won’t get any of my non-Google posts.

    The official webmaster blog would be the other place to check out: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/ and they done several posts just this past week.

13. Jonathan Dingman
    October 29th, 2007 at 10:03 am

    Karen,

    I wouldn’t go as far as to say they have the worst customer service on the planet, I’ve seen some pretty bad customer service in my lifetime (but I’m not particularly mentioning 1&1 Internet.)

    Google is a different beast when it comes to customer service. They are indeed the first search engine to offer webmaster communications, but they are lacking in some areas still. They are trying to improve it though, which is a good sign.

    Matt points out some good links for you to read as well, official and non-official.

14. The Google PageRank Update… What I’ve Learned
    October 29th, 2007 at 2:40 pm

    [...] Dropped all Reciprocal Links Pages. (according to Matt Cutts, linking to certain sites can actually decrease PageRank) [...]

15. Ivan Cvetic
    August 13th, 2008 at 10:40 pm

    Hello Mr.Cutts
    I tried to find a email via your blog, but without success.My question is simple:Can you give me 5 minutes via chat?
    5 minutes of your life to change mine doesn’t sound hard

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