There’s a humorous meme regarding an interaction between Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Engineer Matt Cutts and a few blackhat SEOs at the Google Dance a few weeks ago.
It starts with a post by Duncan at the Blog Herald making the complaint that something fishy is going on. Matt Cutts posts a very interesting reply on his blog. The complaint was that Google was mingling with people who openly spam Google. As if a spammer would gain some benefit from that? Google is smarter than that and you can read Matt’s post about it just to be sure:
“I was just as surprised as my (2 blackhat, 1 whitehat) visitors to see Larry and Sergey come down the stairwell at 1am. But I always want Larry and Sergey to take webspam seriously, so when they came over to say hello, it was fine with me to prod DaveN into telling stories. If only I‚Äôd known how much more useful info I‚Äôd get! Forget the ‚ÄúSEOs have alcohol, I have a soda‚Äù technique: from now on, I‚Äôm bringing a cardboard cutout of Sergey when I talk to SEOs. I just need a tape player that says ‚ÄúUh huh, tell me more about what you do‚Äù and I‚Äôll just sit back and take notes.”
I’ve always noticed blackhat and search engine conference speakers mingling in the past as well as blackhat SEO’s being invited to MSN’s search champs.
Barry mentioned to me when he took a tour of Yahoo during SES San Jose, it was mostly blackhat SEOs that were invited. At first I really wondered why this would be, an then that old adage comes to mind: keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer.
Update: CNN has an interesting article on Google Dance
Tags: Google Dance, Blackhat SEO, Google
