Matt Cutts Has Defeated Black Hat SEO Once And For All

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At long last Peace came to a troubled place Search Engine…..Or so claims Matt Cutts of Google in a recent interview. Cutts also invokes the spirit of link-baiting to make his point:

There’s a fork in the road, and people can think hard about whether they’re optimizing for users or whether they’re optimizing primarily for search engines. And the sort of people who have been doing “new” SEO, or whatever you want to call it — that’s social media optimization, link bait, things that are interesting to people and attract word of mouth and buzz — those sorts of sites naturally attract visitors, attract repeat visitors, attract backlinks, attract lots of discussion. Those sorts of sites are going to benefit as the world goes forward.

Build websites for the users and not for the search engines

That seems to be the gist of the argument as it’s been advanced in the last few years. If you spend all of your time scheming instead of building something usable, you’ll crumble in the long run. Does Google have the technological capability of assessing this sort of qualititative judgment about websites? Cutts says they do, and I have no reason to doubt it. Google has, to me, apparently already incorporated usability data in their algo. They certainly collect enough data to easily make certain assumptions, and that’s not something they’re afraid to do.

I doubt Black Hatters will be too worried about this proclamation from MC the Emcee of Google. There’s more to the interview, so analyze it when you get a chance. If you do read, you’ll see that Matt thinks that Personalized Search is the knockout punch that will tip the balance in the favor of the “good guys”.

Do you think Google has finally defeated Black Hat SEO or is it merely a matter of posturing? Can local search and personalized search defeat spam?

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