Google’s Matt Cutts Gets PubCon South Googley-Eyed

The second day of PubCon South 2009 opened up with Google’s software engineer, Matt Cutts laying down an SEO joke.

Q: Why did the Blackhat SEO spam the innocent blogger?

A: Because the blogger asked for it!

I will give you a moment.

Cutts, primarily Google’s web spam and quality control go-to guy, asked the second hypothetical fireside chat question of the conference:

Q: How do we get past the spam on all of our content? (Referring to social media, blogs, ratings and reviews)

He answered with an official new announcement that left a few googley-eyed over Google.

A: Google Friend Connect

Google Friend Connect is an API that will awaken the social community on your sites and make it happen everywhere. You will be able to integrate all your social accounts and link back comments and to each site or blog. Why is this good? It is easier to leave comments and participate. This doesn’t apply just to blogs, but to forums all sorts of content management systems. Friend Connect is also built in OpenSocial, so it is a completely open and transparent tool. It will encourage more user participation, leading to more comments, more interaction, more content and more pages for Google to rank.

Google Friend Connect presents itself as a button at the bottom of your page asking you to “join the site” and then you can leave a quick comment and ‘Boom!’ it’s on Drupal. You can even use a non-Google account. Cutts urged the room to try it out as a great White Hat tool to create links and increase ranking. He encouraged everyone to try building their own plug-ins for the API that work better than Google’s, insisting modestly that Google are not “plug-ins writers.” Cutts also mentioned that Drupal is a great content management system for adding plug-ins and for your website. He wrapped up with a few quick questions, a coding brain teaser, and more hope that Google may know what they’re doing after all.

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