
The Matt Cutts Debunking Flowchart - tristanperry
http://searchengineland.com/the-matt-cutts-debunking-flowchart-79152
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Matt_Cutts
I love that Danny Sullivan put an explicit "Is it on Hacker News?" question on
the flowchart. :)

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e1ven
The best part of that is where it's placed in the chart-

It implies that the users of HN a subset of the overall nutjob population, but
one worth addressing at least ;)

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DaveMebs
Actually, it implies the opposite.

If someone who is not a nutjob is spouting the theory it will get debunked,
regardless of placement on Hacker News. If Hacker News were in the nutjob
category, it would be irrelevant in the flowchart. The chart would simply
point from "repeated by a nutjob"->"Am I bored?"

Hacker News only takes effect if a nutjob's theory winds up on Hacker News,
which based on the chart, is more akin to "Are they a nutjob?"->"No" (but not
quite the same). So, while something does not need to be on Hacker News to be
debunked, placement on Hacker News will result in a theory being debunked.
Thus, the article implies that Hacker News is a community made up of people
who are expressly not nutjobs.

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ez77
To me the chart simply considers HNers influential nutjobs.

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ssharp
Matt Cutts must now debunk the myth of the "Matt Cutts Debunking Flowchart",
per the "Matt Cutts Debunking Flowchart".

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ableal
Double check. Assuming it's true, etc., it goes to "let PR handle it" ;-).

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whimsy
... Assuming he does not consider Danny Sullivan a nutjob. ;-)

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j_baker
Just out of curiosity, what are the outrageous claims that have come up?

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Matt_Cutts
Here are the claims I can think of in the last few days:

\- Claiming that your email newsletter's Gmail reputation affects your
ranking: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2600933> I did a full debunk
here: <http://goo.gl/6A8f9>

\- Claiming that Hacker News was penalized by Panda:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595704> I did a full debunk here:
<http://goo.gl/7Tw9o>

\- There was an SEO blog that had a headline "Google Copying Bing's Image
Results? Google Cheating Bing?" at <http://www.seroundtable.com/google-
indexing-bing-13477.html> when in fact it was just images on bing.net and Bing
neglected to have a robots.txt file. We have a policy against search results
in search results, so we were happy to remove the images in less than a day.
The SEO blogger changed the headline to be less sensational.

\- Oh, one more debunk: [http://allthingsd.com/20110527/google-no-government-
investig...](http://allthingsd.com/20110527/google-no-government-
investigations-have-not-frozen-our-manual-search-tweaks/) The webspam team
continues to take manual action to remove spam in the same way that we have
for the last decade.

Those are the four debunks that come to mind from the last week or so. Sigh.

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yoast
So much for debunking the fact that you don't do much debunking, I guess? :)

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swah
From his videos, it would appear as if Matt Cutts is a Nice Guy. Can anyone
confirm this?

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dfield
Matt is an incredibly nice guy.

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akat
Just curious...What tool was used to create this flowchart?

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windsurfer
Based on the quick shadows, manually-placed arrows, and PNG metadata I would
say Inkscape.

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sullivandanny
SnagIt Editor. Not the best choice, but it's what I had :)

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windsurfer
Neat! I didn't know it was so powerful.

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DaveMebs
It is interesting to note that it is impossible for a theory spouted by
nutjobs to be true in this flowchart. A non-nutjob must endorse a theory
before it enters the realm of possibly true. Danny must have an incredibly low
opinion of conspiracy theorists and a high opinion of Google's practices. ;)

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rbarooah
This chart makes it look as though Matt's fine as long as they're no worse
than Bing. Somehow I doubt it's as simple as that.

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catshirt
i'm going to go ahead and make the assumption that this is not actually how
matt deduces problems.

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rbarooah
I thought I said that!

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rhizome
-5 points for frame-breaking.

