Matt Cutts says April Fools

[katherinez]

I assume Matt Cutts is playing April Fools on us with his "hacked site." Pretty funny Matt - you had me for a minute!

[Robert Charlton]

I assume Matt Cutts is playing April Fools on us with his "hacked site."

Could be hackers playing April Fools on Matt... It's hard to tell. Certainly a great bit of viral marketing, if that's what it is. ;)

Ditto with the Adsense ads on WebmasterWorld. ;) :(

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 6:14 am (utc) on April 1, 2007]

[reseller]

I would say its the work of hackers. Matt has just updated WP yesterday on his blog and there could be a security "hole" within the new version of WP.

All Matt Cutts pages are defaced. Try this search on Google:

webmasterworld site:www.mattcutts.com [google.com]

Click on any of Matt Blog's pages and you see its defaced. Don't think that Matt will do such a thing.

As to Adsense ads on WebmasterWorld, I think they look GREAT :-)

[edited by: reseller at 7:51 am (utc) on April 1, 2007]

[moftary]

nah i think it's the hackers that are playing april fool with matt :)
and i wish if those adsense ads is an april fool as well!

[Tourz]

how about G's new Toilet Internet Service... ha

[bts111]

Adsense on webmasterworld, toilet wifi, french hacking... I am confused or maybe just a fool... lol

[mattg3]

Within sixty minutes, the Access Node's crack team of Plumbing Hardware Dispatchers (PHDs) should have your internet connection up and running.

[google.com...]

Hope there is a patent for this.

[reseller]

Folks!

AdSense on WebmasterWorld means more revenues.

More revenues means more to spend on WebmasterWorld developements work to take our community to the next level.

Is that so bad?

[M_Bison]

let's not forget the gmail paper.

[moftary]

Is that so bad?

am a fan of adsense (aren't we all?) but it's just that some of us might get used to the clean adfree look of WWW, yes? Also the integration is very bad with the default ads colors.

Adsense on webmasterworld, toilet wifi, french hacking... I am confused or maybe just a fool... lol

yes too much for us in one day!

I started a separate thread for that toilet fool :)
[webmasterworld.com...]

[SEOPTI]

One word, linkbait :)

[mojomike]

seems like shoemoney is in on the joke also, his site has an issue LOL

[theBear]

ROTFLMBFBAO

Props to the Dark Ones.

Matt what else could I say?

[Cirilo007]

I wonder why does it take Matt & shoemoney so long to fix their websites. Maybe they are still sleeping and recovering from a hot saturday night, or those hackers did some serious damages...

[natural number]

It looks legit to me. I wish these hackers had more respect for private property rights. Aside from that, aren't they afraid Google is going to use the long arm of the law to catch them? Matt is their Chief Spam Fighter.

[skipfactor]

His feeds are still up. His last post "Site acting weird" on the 31st says he's away from computer until late Monday.

How about some video ads Brett? ;)

[zeus]

Get FREE breakthrough broadband with Google TiSP (BETA). this must be a april fools

[apicalsoft]

Get FREE breakthrough broadband with Google TiSP (BETA). this must be a april fools
---------
I've applied the TiSP, and now Matt Cutts is in my bathroom and working on the TiSP setting up. After that we will talk about how to get my website back to no.1

[tflight]

I would say that in Matt's case it is a joke and not real. I did a site: query in Google on his site, found some pre-existing internal pages from his site. Then look at the HTTP headers returned when fetching those pages.

The pages are giving a 302 redirect back to the /blog/index.html. 302=temporary redirect. If it really was someone trying to do damage they were being very polite using a 302 redirect and not a 301 redirect. The 302 works perfectly in this situation by telling the search engines that there is a new page in place of the old, but ignore that new page for now since it won't be there for very long.

That setup also allows him to just drop in the /blog/index.html file where there was just a /blog/index.php file, then build a new .httaccess file for the 302 redirect.... that makes things really easy to quickly change back later.

My $.02 guess.

[hvacdirect]

Its a site wide 302 redirect, all pages in fact, no 404 is given for non-existant pages.

Should be interesting to see what's indexed for the site after this little joke is over.

[rj87uk]

Matts blog has been Hacked by the dark seo team and matt has hacked the dark seo team's site too... all just an April joke?

[CainIV]

If it really was someone trying to do damage they were being very polite using a 302 redirect and not a 301 redirect.

Quite the opposite, if someone wanted to do damage they would use a 302 temporary redirect to the page instead of a 301.

Looks like a legit hack to me....

[Fiver]

these guys again? really?
good grief.

[activeco]

It's really great fight. He indeed striked back.
But look at his title:

"I HATE SEOOOO!"

!

And he's tracking visitors there too!
[xiti.com...]

[tflight]

Quite the opposite, if someone wanted to do damage they would use a 302 temporary redirect

I'm talking about 302 redirect within the same domain. This to me (an April Fools joke) seems like a classic case for a 302 redirect. You want to keep all of your old pages indexed, so you wouldn't want to use a 301 (permanent) from all of your pages to the new joke page. A 302 (temporary) redirect will let the search engines to know "I'm sending users to this new page for now, but don't do anything since it won't be like this for long and the redirect will go away soon."

Googlers in the past have talked about using a 302 redirect if for example you have a page on your site that is getting tons of digg/slashdot traffic to redirect from a dynamic URL to a static. You take the content of the popular dynamic page, put up a new temporary static page, and then 302 redirect to the new URL.

A 301 redirect from each page to the new (hacked/joke) page would cause more of an issue. Googlers have said in the past that tons of 301 redirects to one on-domain page can look suspicious.

I seem to recall an example too where someone asked Google about how to deal with your site if you know you are going to have a period of downtime... for an upgrade or other situation... It was suggested a sitewide 302 redirect to a page explaining the upgrade would work best for the search engines since they would see the redirect as temporary, ignoring whatever they find on the temporary page.

[tflight]

It's really great fight. He indeed striked back.

I really like what was stuffed into the source code there too. :)

[Cirilo007]

If you look at the source, you'll see some french comments in it. I doubt Matt would code in french... Plus, the text written on Matt's website "nous sommes le proprietaire de toi" is not correct french.

[activeco]

If you check the site in archive, you'll see the same html beginning tag. The guys are French (domain uses oxyd.fr nameservers) and maybe they use some slang.

BTW, on cattscon he recognized his site being hacked, but didn't mention possible revenge.

[Robert Charlton]

It's really great fight. He indeed striked back.

Defaced by Matt! I ownz you, Dark seo team!

Well, however it started, it's turning into a helluva link baiting experiment. ;)

[activeco]

It's surely not my intention to repeat all of Matt's comments, but the last one is a good one:

scary. some data centers showing pages dropped for mattcutts.com already. man our crawl is fast. ironic if i have to file for reinclusion