Matt And Aaron Scuffle At Sphinn

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Aaron Wall, like a lot of SEOs, is upset about Google’s new paid links policy. So he posted a very well-thought out post on the state of SEO at Blogoscoped that also included some harsh statements for Google. Matt Cutts responded on his blog with a poll, asking readers if he should respond or not That was November 14.

On November 19, after several other people weighed in, Cutts enlightened the universe with his take on the real issue:

My takeaway advice for anyone in a similar situation is “Don’t mix your blackhat networks with your whitehat sites.”

I for one appreciate this response. While I don’t always agree with Google’s policies, I do want my websites to indexed by the search engine. Therefore, I try to follow its policies or risk being de-indexed. This just makes sense. If you do have blackhat websites, or websites that you promote using blackhat techniques, then keep them separate from your other websites. That way, if you get penalized on your blackhat websites then your whitehat sites won’t get penalized. I can’t argue with good old-fashioned common sense.