Do you remember when the Adwords team rolled out the infamous "Forget SEO, for ranking in Google today, try AdWords" back in 2011?
I remember it very well, because - after discovering that ad thanks to a tweet by Ani Lopez - I wrote a raging post on my own website.
Albeit I was seriously concerned that Google was allowing an ad so openly against an entire industry of professionals, at the same time, however, I was convinced that my post would have remained just as the classic rant isolated and eventually shared by some other outraged SEO.
As I wrote my post late in the night, I went to sleep.
The morning after my surprise was huge when, while checking my Twitter, I saw all the tweets sharing and commenting on my post. And my surprise was big when - amongst them - I saw a tweet by Matt asking me to approve a comment he left to my post.
What did happen? We may call it: "Time zone jokes"... it was morning in the West Coast when I hit publish, and it happened that my post went viral, so much that Matt felt the need to he felt the need to intervene and to ask those of Adword to change the tone of that announcement.
A small gesture, we can think ... and, basically, the whole theme could be considered as the classic "SEO Drama", which many other episodes have had over the years.
Still, that gesture by Matt Cutts seemed to me the clearest evidence of his real interest in us SEO.
Ah! And after that, AdWords never released a similar advertisement again.