For those of you who missed the show Matt Cutts gave on Webmaster Radio. You missed a pretty fun chat. I think I actually had almost as much fun in the chat room as Matt Cutts did on the air. Exception of course would be the one or two pissed off webmasters who were upset because their site was outranked by some spam pages. Infact one stood out as being insistently persistent on spamming the chatroom to find out “is it worth the effort to report the spam pages that out rank me?�? To a person that obviously is putting a TON of work into trying to personally ask Matt Cutts this question, I can’t help but ask, “wouldn’t it be easier just to fill out the Google’s quick n’ easy report site form?�? That aside, the chat was great and so was the interview.

Unfortunately I didn’t get any of my questions asked, but that could of been because they were a little too direct and hard hitting. Ok, so they weren’t hard hitting from a PR point of view or even a digging for secret information aspect, but they were intended to hopefully stomp out a few big rumors that have been circulating way too long for their own good. For Instance, How much actual affect does Page Rank have on the SERPS? Perhaps now we will never know.

Either way I’d have to say the interview was a success even though it went off topic quite a bit. Matt seemed to really harp on subdomain spam although never said Google planned on doing anything about it. I guess you’re safe for another day about.com. :) They weren’t too willing to let me post a transcript on my site, so I didn’t harp on the issue, but I will tell you about what I thought the highlights were. Matt did dispel some rumors around the sandbox and it’s relationship to a domain’s age. He said in a PR man’s round about way not to look too deeply into Google’s Patent. He concluded that there are other factors that put sites into the sandbox, and age wasn’t one of the important ones. This tells me two things. One, there is a sandbox effect. Two, the reasons for a site being put into the sandbox aren’t what we think. Perhaps in his next interview he will be willing to indulge in that topic more.