Matt Cutts of Google. The Google SEO specialist

Matt Cutts is the genius employee (Software Engineer) of the ever popular search engine Google since the year 2000. He is responsible for the quality section of Google and mostly deals with search engine optimization (SEO) guidelines and spamming issues.

He studied for a PhD in "computer graphics and movement tracking" at the University of North Carolina. Surprisingly he never completed his thesis but did manage to obtain a Masters. He has obtained his bachelors degree in "mathematics and computer science" from the University of Kentucky. His importance is such that he had even worked for the Department of Defense.

His word is taken quite seriously in the SEO world and is considered as a celebrity within the community. He always features on SEO programs, conferences, conventions and lectures frequently in how to and avoid spam and maintain good search engine optimization practices.

Both professional and amateur SEO's frequently visit his blog to understand how Google is operating. His lectures are always entertaining and he explains and makes good sense about linking, web spam, Google crawl, page ranks and webmaster-related issues. He listens to webmasters, complaints, maintains his blog on a daily basis and informs optimizers how to use good white-hat SEO techniques. Although he has never publicly acknowledged himself as one of the good guys, it has been said that he is one of the co-architects of Google's search engine technology.

Why would anyone want to prevent their webpages from showing up on Google or the list of searches, otherwise called the "search engine results pages"? It's usually the other way round. Most of the time, webmasters want their pages up on Google in no time. But what if you want to have it removed or you don't want it on Google at all. Matt Cutts tells you how to remove and prevent Google's spiders from indexing your site. Some of the things he talks about includes; do not link to sites, .htaccess, add password to the website for access, add a "robots.txt" file to block crawler access to pages, no index metatag, no follow on individual links and the URL removal tool.

Many webmasters copy and paste other people's works for several reasons. Many webmasters will take other peoples content and make it as if it's theirs. Hard working webmasters and search engines have to battle against the ever increasing phenomena of spam content. Matt Cutts talks on the sensitive and the much discussed issue of Duplicate Content and Paid links to sites.