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Congrats to Matt for trying new stuff! I'm a bit confused, though. I understand that making a video or publishing can help many more people than responding to

Congrats to Matt for trying new stuff! I'm a bit confused, though. I understand that making a video or publishing can help many more people than responding to emails. What I don't get is how you figure out what kinds of videos or other things to publish if you don't have regular contact with people outside of Google. Conferences? It seemed that Cutts was saying instead of talking to normal people, he'd just hang closer to all his good Googley buddies. That he heard about all important stuff through them anyway. I don't know enough about what he does to know if that makes sense, and I'm not sure he meant it to come out that way. Just sounded weird.

Matt_Cutts 14y ago
I went ahead and updated the blog post to explain, but I'll include what I wrote here too. Sorry if I didn't explain that clearly. I still see what people are discussing on SEO blogs and on the Google webmaster forum. I know the most recent trends in how blackhats try to spam Google--that's my primary job, after all. I look through the questions and comments that people send me on Twitter. When I put out a call for webmaster video questions, I use Google Moderator so people can vote up questions that interest them. I keep an eye on what flavors of spam snake oil are being marketing to newbies on various forums ("I know Google pulled apart my last link network, but now try my Social Rank Tout Suite product! It will automate 100% of all of your link building!"). And lots of people at Google keep an eye open themselves and alert me if they see issues. So I feel like I have a pretty good feel for the pulse of what people are talking about; it's just that I lack the time to have one-on-one conversations with every person that emails me.