I’ve been in SEM in some form or another for about 5 years now, and there’s always been this guy how SEM peeps have a love-hate relationship with. His name is Matt Cutts, and he’s the head of Google’s Webspam Team.

You see, SEMs love him because he drops subtle hints on how Google might indexing content, but they hate him because it’s his personal mission to make sure that people don’t rank for anything they are not absolutely relevant for. The trouble for us SEMs is that we set out to become the most relevant result by using search engines to first convincing the consumer that we’re the most relevant.

It’s all terribly circular, but sometimes life is illogical that way ;)

Anyway, I recently got to meet Matt for a few minutes at Pubcon 2009. I was vlogging the event for NVI, I happen to stumble on Matt, he was super chill, and so I talked him into a quick interview. In this first half, Matt tells us the story of how he got his new haircut.

In this second half of our chat, Matt gets down to business. He discusses what spammers are up to these days, and how their exploiting open-source platforms like WordPress and Drupal to spam the web with dodgy content. He also offers some advice on how to prevent spammers from hacking your site.