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!

[reseller]

Is it so easy to deface a site? so easy that even Matt can do it :-)

Whats next?

We Love SEOOOO!
Defaced By Emmy & Ozzie. We ownz you, ......! :-)

[mattg3]

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.

Yeah, he really needs to worry about keeping his pages indexed.

[CainIV]

OMG that is simply funny as heck!

[Miamacs]

All your backlinks are belong to us!

Stole my heart with this line... laughed out loud ( kind of ). Hope they'll make it into a music video with MC Google doing some voices.

Why can't the official PR be something like this.

[AjiNIMC]

Not that funny, lucky seodarkteam, they will get a lot of publicity.

Funniest will be, "Matt cutts buying SEOdarkteam website".

[Quadrille]

I suspect he'll be moving to an in-house blog ...

[AjiNIMC]

I suspect he'll be moving to an in-house blog ...

Then what happens to his Blog PR :)

[Swanson]

Hope he gets banned for spam content - and is the victim of duplicate content penalities, and for good measure gets the "this site may contain spyware" message on the serps.

I expect he will get his "reinclusion" rather faster than the rest of the whole world would do. A test would be to see if he is included within the next 12 months - anything less and it is clear he is using his influence!

Who cares anyway it is a crap piece of ramblings that is irrelevant to our community - have you not noticed that since the total disappearance of Googleguy, Matt has posted mainly useless personal crap on his blog. The direct relationship between the growth of Google and the inverse participation of Google on these forums is scary!

[vincevincevince]

Just a theory... maybe darkseoteam had to let Matt deface their site in return for not being sued out of existance?

[simey]

My theory, just april foolery. Coordinated between MC and the 'black hats'.

[Quadrille]

Hope he gets banned for spam content - and is the victim of duplicate content penalities, and for good measure gets the "this site may contain spyware" message on the serps.

I expect he will get his "reinclusion" rather faster than the rest of the whole world would do. A test would be to see if he is included within the next 12 months - anything less and it is clear he is using his influence!

Oh yeah?

how long do hacked sites usually get penalized for then?

Or are you just feeling a tad spiteful today? ;)

[mattg3]

It's still there. :O

[Liane]

Source code:

<!-- PR9 since 99. MaDD LoVe to e&o. Peace out. -->

;)

[AjiNIMC]

I was getting bored with my new search engine code with Human I so thought of checking matt cutts again.

Matt forgot to remove his google analytics code from the hacked page (may be the hackers were kind enough to leave it there).
_uacct = "UA-52812-1";
urchinTracker();

[crobb305]

Still there, the day after Fool's day.

[texasville]

Will Matt have to file for reinclusion? Will he have to state in the form that he is a spammer to be eligible for reinclusion?...lol..Tune in tomorrow for the conclusion of this hilarious episode.

[crobb305]

Interesting Whois data for darkseoteam.com. If Google or Matt were really involved with that, wouldn't it be fraudulent for them to register a domain under phony names/phone numbers? The domain has been registered for several years. Also do a Google search for "Dark SEO Team", lots of pages and some "open letters" to Matt back in 2006 (page not found now, but still cached). Threadwatch has a post that indicates Matt is aware of this, but is traveling through today. Doesn't sound like a joke to me.

I wonder what the SEO repercussions might be. There is a single link on each page, reciprocating each other.

[conlhan]

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System: The following message was spliced on to this thread from: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3299769.htm [webmasterworld.com] by tedster - 11:37 am on April 2, 2007 (EST -4)

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Having visited Matt Cutts blog yesterday I thought he was playing his usual April fool.

[mattcutts.com...]

But having checked it on April 2....

It looks like the 302 Hijack by the Dark SEO team could be for real.

[nmjudy]

I'm so glad I'm not the only one who thinks it's not a joke! I've been watching this thread as well as other forums scratching my head over the whole thing, feeling like an idiot - because I believe Matt's blog has really been hacked.

I also checked out the cached page of "Dark SEO Team" and read the open letters to Matt. Even though the posts are dated 2006 - they're relevant to what happened to his blog this weekend. Someone is trying to make a point.

As far as the Dark SEO TEAM site being hacked by Matt -don't think THAT happened either. Matt's English is much better than that and doesn't make sense that he would say what it says there.

[Andrea Wasik]

I guess he tricked you all...

[reseller]

Ok. I stand corrected (:(

I though Matt blog was defaced by some dark things. But it seems that it was a kentuckian April Fool's Day! [mattcutts.com] :-)

[marin]

ohhhh! ahhhhh! so funny, matt!

[crobb305]

Yeah, he confirmed it was a joke. But man it sure seemed real. Got me to looking around, and I am not normally THAT gullible. I had fun with it though. What threw me off was the whois info for the "Dark SEO Team" domain.

[Liane]

<!-- PR9 since 99. MaDD LoVe to e&o. Peace out. -->

Should have tipped you off! LOL - e&o = Emily and Oz, his cats! ;)

Tip for next year to those who got a little freaked out:

Matt cannot pass April Fools without pulling some sort of prank ... and its generally pretty good. Personally, I thought last year's prank was better!

[activeco]

I bought it.

[moftary]

I bought it too but still not funny to me :/

could it be that the blog was already hacked but he pretends that its April's fool, or it is just my conspiracy theory? :)