Why do a spoof on off-topic link bait?

I was fascinated with Oatmeal’s (Matthew Inman) story about “Widgets Gone Wild” on the SEOMOZ blog. It will probably be one of the top 10 SEO blog post of 2008 because it brings up some new and interesting questions. I hope Oatmeal’s issue with Google on “Off-Topic Link Bait” will become a hot topic at the upcoming SMX Advanced conference. Perhaps this video will add a little more fuel to the conversation.

Oatmeal created some highly successful widgets that had nothing to do with online dating and in turn ranked #1 for some extremely competitive terms like “online dating”. But Google got wind of what he was doing and torched his site to the ground. So Oatmeal built another site from scratch and used clean SEO tactics this time but Google told him that he was still heading down the wrong path with his off-topic widget bait.

The reason I am so fascinated with this story was that Google used to whole heartedly endorsed link bait before in the past, but now there appears to be different shades of gray of link bait. I hope Google handles this issue carefully, because if not it will hurt creativity on the web.

I wonder if Greg Boser who is moderating the Blow Your Mind Link Building Techniques session can get Matt Cutts to comment on Oatmeal’s issue.

This is not my first spoof video I have oriented towards conferences.

I would like to thank Rand Fishkin for allowing me to use his video from his WhiteBoard Friday interview with Matt Cutts. And James Davidson for the use of the Matt Cutts photo, David Besnette for the voice of Rand Fiskin.

Note: This is only a spoof: as far as I know Matt Cutts is alive and well.

Transcription of the video:

I am Dave Dugdale, And you’re watching, SolarDave TV.

Google spam engineer Matt Cutts was electrocuted on top of the Google’s world headquarters yesterday.

Matt was sent up to fix the 1.6 mega watt solar array and touched the wrong wire.

On the news of Matt Cutts death, Google’s algorithm quickly became unstable and starting producing irrelevant results.

Matt Cutts has talked several times that if he got run over by a bus that Google would still run fine…

Apparently he was wrong.

The search industry is in shock of this news. Danny Sullivan had this to say. “The search community has suffered a great loss, but Oh, oh, oh, why have Google results become so crappy, was Matt’s brain somehow tied into the Google’s main frame?”

Dave Naylor had this too add: “What the f@ck is going on with the stock price, at this level Microsoft can forget Yahoo and instead buy Google!”

Rand Fiskin chimed in with, “Perhaps Matt committed suicide from being Rick Rolled to much.”

So if Matt is gone, and the algorithm has gone to the crapper, are we going to see a shift from white to black hat?

But then again this video really doesn’t have any thing to do with solar.