Matt Cutts at WebmasterWorld 2005 - Las Vegas

Here are the best excerpts from a coffee talk with Matt Cutts of Google:

Q: How does Google feel about SEOs, SEMs, Webmasters?
A: At times there is an element of conflict. In Matt’s mind, its best to work with Webmasters. He thinks as SEO and spam as two different things. Spam is outside of their guidelines and they don’t like that. Anyone who is whitehat or tweaking keywords or making a site navigation more crawlable are good. SEO is not spam, its only when you go against guidelines, when it is spam. There is a large online publisher that wasn’t doing well in Google. They changed the robot.txt file that said, no search engines can crawl the site. That is why. Changing your robot.txt file is not spam.

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Q: Does the sandbox exist?
A: Matt said here comes the audience part? How many feel there is a sandbox? How many feel there is no such thing as a sandbox? SEOs normally split down the line. There are some things in the algorithm that may be perceived as a sandbox that doesn’t apply to all industries. He knows it works to keep some spam out.

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Q: Duplicate content, stolen content. What can we do to protect ourselves?
A: We watch what people are saying about this. They have projects on the way to determine who first wrote this text, its not a 100% done, but its on the radar.

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Q: Aging delay? Is there?
A: Its like the sandbox Q. Just because a patent application is released, it doesnt mean they are using it.

Q: CSS positioning? How does it affect ranking.
A: Good question, I don’t know. If your doing an include, it probably wont matter either way. In his mind, positioning text at top or bottom, is over rated. But try it.

Q: Do you use the toolbar to figure out what to crawl and how often?
A: Nope. Its all pretty much based on PageRank.

[...]

Q: Let’s go back to text links.
A: Best links are earned, not sold or traded. You may not get what you pay for. He said, if someone is selling text links, they should give you a free test trial to make sure it works. They have both manual and algorithmic approaches to detect paid links. He said Google.com gets emails asking to trade links. The guy who came up with the pixel homepage thing, that was creative.

Not much new here — all pretty standard answers. Though the CSS positioning one is interesting…