Okay, here is the link for all you who care.

http://www.igorthetroll.com/images/matt-cutts-evil.jpg

The blog http://evilmattcutts.com/ since has been taken down but, the origanl reference by Barry is still around.

Just in case, for posterity I have uploaded the Evil Mat Cutts pic to my server.

And including it in this comment.

Regards,
Igor

Thank you,
Igor

Google a 207 billion market value company blaming the little Webmaster for earning a few hundred dollars a month to support their passion for journalism.

Pathetic, Pathetic, Pathetic!

Google is stealing candy from children!

There are many professional reviews done on the web every day. Money exchanges hands, and those reviews contribute in a positive way to the web. Relevant links within such content should count just as much as a link posted in any content which is “unpaid”.

As previous commentators have said, why on earth can Google not filter the poor quality, irrelevant content from the quality content, where links are concerned? They are a search engine, it’s the entire reason they exist, isn’t it?

Labelling paid links as ‘bad’ is going to do no one any favours. Nulling links within content that a reader would consider poor quality, or irrelevant, is.

Bottom line: people who write well, and who’s work would otherwise be considered an asset to the web, should not be penalised because they were paid for something.

I am left with only 2 choices at the end of all this. Either Google is not up to the job of proper filtering, or they actively choose to put the blame on the webmaster, and paid content. Which is it?

Google by taking away the only income that the bloggers can earn is constraining and squashing the voice of the people.

Bloggers are in the forefront of journalism they are the voice of the underprivileged and underrepresented minoroties.

Through Google a blogger post can be discovered and read, so new information can surface to light!

If Google wants to keep its results relevent it has tons of ways of doing it! There are many filter technologies available that can be used to filter our the junk, and detect relevency without penalizing bloggers for paid links.

@Matt Cutts, since when Google has become an authority on a topic? Google is nothing more than a search engine! A search engine is used for search not to claim authority.

If one needs to know an authority on a particular subject they can refer to WikiPedia and other industry resources that use human editors to scrutenize the author’s publication.

Matt, are you guys not working on Knol to enable you to identify authority?

Googling for brain surgery and finding Igor The Frankenstein as the first result for brain surgery and going there to make an appoitment is not going to happen!

What would happen if Jason Calacanis decided to turn Mahalo into a viable tagspace, and divided up 50% of Mahalo equity ($50M) between those people who used it.

What would happen if there was also revenue sharing involved?

Employees and shareholders seem to be allowed to influence search results, Matt does it all the time from his personal blog.

Paid links are bad but clean affiliate links are ok? How can Google tell whether there is a backend script that is picking up referral data?
I know affiliate sites that use clean linking and work by referrer currently.

What would happen if Amazon or Ebay had used clean links from the outset?

What if someone sells links but adds parameters to them for more accurate referral tracking?

What happens if someone offers clean PPC links that pass juice?

What is the difference between a linking scheme that affects pagerank and what both Technorati and Wordpress.com do with tagspace?
How about answers.com and their autolinking plugin?

I try to keep my arguments focused on issues that directly affect my future business plans, which are certainly intended to make me more than $20 per hour writing paid posts.

The paid posts I have written up until now have had some additional strategic value, or were just useful enough for my audience to be worth writing about anyway.

You think Google gives a rats’ ass about ethics? Paid links threaten Google’s business model. It’s that simple. And if you’re pissed about the inability to make money selling links which, in general, make very little money compared to other types of revenue streams, you need to either quit the online marketing racket or find a better monetization scheme, because if you care that much about your TLA or PPP you aren’t making alot of dough.

Stop banging your head against the wall – which leads you nowhere – and focus on taking control of your own destiny and on making insane amounts of cash instead of worry about someone else’s company. Selling links will never make you rich.