matt cutts: gadgets, google, and seo

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEONext 30 day challenge: social media/news cleanseFixing "fullpath disclosure" issuesLessons learned from the early days of GoogleMy two favorite books of2014Fun mosaic effect with GoAn investment reading listNew 30 day challenge: "hermit mode"30day challenge wrap-up: writingBuy Viagra online?Thanksgiving turkey hat

ntent-Type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8 https://www.mattcutts.com/blog Thu, 12 Mar 2015 05:26:00+0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1 https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/social-medi--cleanse/ https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/social-media-cleanse/#comments Sun, 01 Mar 201504:40:17 +0000

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/?p=6832

For January 2015, I tried to declutter around the house for 15 minutes a day. We now have a couplerooms that are much cleaner, and I gave away a bunch of magazines.

For February 2015, my 30 day challenge was to go on daily 15 minute walks with my wife. That wasnice.

Lately I've been spending more time than I'd like on social media and reading news sites. So forMarch 2015, I'm going to do a social media and news cleanse. I've done a social media cleanseseveral times before and it's usually quite helpful for getting re-centered.

Here's the steps that I'm taking:

- I'm using the StayFocusd Chrome extension to limit myself to 15 minutes a day of Google News,Twitter, Google+, Hacker News, Techmeme, Nuzzel, Reddit, and Imgur.

- On my R7000 home router I'm using the "block site" functionality for several of these sites. It lookslike the R7000 can block HTTP sites, but not HTTPS.

- On my phone, I'm removing the new tab thumbnails for these sites. I'm also removing some socialmedia apps from my home screen.

I figure that either I'll get some good stuff done, read a lot of books, or die of boredom. I may(rarely) drop a link on social media, but if you see me just hanging out, please remind me to close mytab and move on.

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https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/social-media-cleanse/feed/ 35https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/fixing-full-path-disclosure-vulnerability/https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/fixing-full-path-disclosure-vulnerability/#comments Thu, 19 Feb2015 06:43:12 +0000


Whether you're running a web service or a blog, you should always keep your software fully patchedto prevent attacks and minimize your attack surface. Another smart step is to prevent full path

disclosures. For example, if your blog or service throws an error like

"Warning: require(ABSPATHwp-includes/load.php) [function.require]: failed to open stream: No suchfile or directory in /home/horace/public_html/wp-settings.php on line 21?

then by noting the full pathname from that error, an attacker could reasonably infer that yourusername is "horace" and use that try to guess your password. It's not the end of the world if yourattacker has that information, but why not make an attack as hard as possible?

For WordPress, here's a couple ways to prevent full path disclosure vulnerabilities:

- In a php.ini file, you can add a line like "display_errors = off" (without the quotes).

- In an .htaccess file, you can add a line that says "php_flag display_errors off" (without the quotes).

It sounds like the php.ini approach might be slightly better, because some web hosts run PHP in CGImode which might not allow php_flag or php_value directives in .htaccess files.

After you've made this change, php errors shouldn't be shown to web clients. If you're developinglive code on a PHP installation, that can make debugging slightly less easy. But if you're running(say) a blog, it's probably better to turn off display errors for a little extra protection againstattacking hackers.

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https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/fixing-full-path-disclosure-vulnerability/feed/ 44https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/lessons-from-early-days-of-google/https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/lessons-from-early-days-of-google/#comments Fri, 23 Jan 201520:44:59 +0000


Earlier this month I did a talk at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill about lessonslearned from the early days of Google. The video is now online and watchable, or you can watch it onYouTube:

We did the talk in a pretty large room, and the camera at the back of the room couldn't easily recordme and the slides at the same time. So here are the slides to go along with the talk:

Or you can view the slides at this link.

I believe all the pictures should be covered either by license or fair use (the talk was free), but letme know if you see anything that you believe is problematic. I hope you enjoy the talk!

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https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/lessons-from-early-days-of-google/feed/ 76https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/best-books-of-2014/ https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/best-books--f-2014/#comments Fri, 02 Jan 2015 04:08:34 +0000


I'd like to mention two books that stood out for me in 2014:

Nonfiction: The First 20 Minutes. Gretchen Reynolds is a New York Times columnist who distillshealth and exercise research down to practical, readable advice. I've never dog-eared as many pagesin a book as The First 20 Minutes. Reynolds writes about why you might want to brush your teethstanding on one foot, work out before eating breakfast, and how pickle juice might help with cramps.Should you get a cortisone shot? Does it help to believe in luck? Does long-distance running makeyour knees less healthy? Is chocolate milk a good recovery drink? Read the book and find out.

Whether you're a couch potato or a ultramarathoner, you'll probably learn something interesting andhelpful from Reynolds' book. Reynolds also writes with the easy readability of a seasoned newspapercolumnist, and each chapter ends with bite-sized summaries of what the current scientific researchrecommends. My only nitpick is that I wish Reynolds had included footnotes pointing to the originalresearch for people who want to dig deeper.

Fiction: As I've written before, The Martian describes an astronaut stranded on Mars who needs tofigure out how to survive and get home with minimal supplies. Some of the science gets detailed, butthe book builds to a very successful ending in my opinion.

What was the single best fiction or nonfiction book you read in 2014?

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A few months ago I saw a cool mosaic effect in a Wired ad for CA Technologies. Here's what part ofthe ad looked like:

I liked the ad, so I wondered how they did it. Can you see out how to create a similar effect? Take aminute to figure it out as an exercise.

Here's what I came up with: divide the image into tiles. For each tile, compute an average overallcolor for that tile. Then go back and blend every pixel in that tile with the average color. So if a tileis partly dark and partly blue, the average color is a dark blue, so the blue in that tile becomes evendarker. I like that the effect is pretty simple once you figure out how to do it.

Of course, once I had an idea of how to do it, I wanted to write some code and see whether I couldrecreate the effect. Go has good libraries for handling images and I've been meaning to try Go. Iended up with about 70 lines of moderately-ghastly Go code that did the job.

For this Creative Commons image (thanks Fuelrefuel/Wikimedia Commons!)

I ended up with a photomosaic like this:

As far as I can tell, that's pretty much the same filter that ran in the ad. Here's another example.First, a picture of me:

and here's the resulting mosaic'ed image:

That's all the interesting stuff. You can stop reading now.

This part is boring. Really. No need to keep reading. The code I came up with is really ugly, but thepseudo-code is pretty simple:

- Read the picture into a go image

- Number of horizontal tiles = image_width / desired_tile_width

- Number of vertical tiles = image_height / desired_tile_height

- Loop through tiles with nested vertical and horizontal for loops

- For each tile, loop over the tile's pixels to compute average RGB values

- Loop over the tile's pixels again set new_color = (avg_color+curr_color)/2

- Write the image out as a new picture

That's it! I wanted a quick and dirty test, so I didn't worry about things like the leftover pixels if thetiles didn't evenly divide the image.

Let's see, what else. Things I liked about Go:

- It's super-easy to read and write images, so I could concentrate on the fun stuff.

- I like that documentation like this gives a clear, easy way to set up your environment. The golangtour is great too. And installing Go on Ubuntu is easy: "sudo apt-get install golang" and you're done.

- The language makes a lot of sense to me, in a C kind of way.

Some things didn't make as much sense to me, or at least I need to do more reading:

- My initial program just read a JPEG and wrote it back out, and the output image was considerablydimmer. I was just using default encoding values, so maybe some gamma values got left out, but itwas a little weird. I was expecting read-decode-encode-write to be a no-op.

- When I read the JPEG into an image and tried to write directly to that image, Go gave me an error.That was a little strange. I ended up copying the JPEG to a new image and then I could write.

- In the spirit of just doing stuff without reading the documentation, it seemed like Go images storedtheir At() component colors with 16 bits of range (from 0..65536). But when I wanted to write colorswith Set() it seemed like Go wanted 8 bits in the example I found. So for a while I was casting stuffwith (uint8) and getting totally random bits written into the image. That also generated a fun image:

but it took me a few minutes to figure out what was going on. I'm sure some reading would clearthings up, but.. who cares? I was also doing some weird float arithmetic to compute color averages.This was just quick/dirty code, and I can read more about the nitty gritty later. As soon as I got theeffect I wanted, I rapidly lost interest. I even hard-coded image filenames because I couldn't bebothered to search for go command-line flag info. All in good fun.

- Arrays and slices are cool, but allocating 2D arrays and slices seems a little verbose.

- I like that Go's designers have opinions and enforce them, at least 99% of the time. When you'rehacking ugly code, it was annoying to get the "you didn't use this variable" errors. But I understandthe rationale and it's probably a good idea for writing Real Code that's not intended to be thrownaway.

- I was all set to grouse about go fmt's enforced indentations/spacing, but it actually looks prettyreasonable. Basically, each indent is a tab. Then if you're a 3 or 4 space indent kind of guy, you canconfigure your editor like vim or emacs to change how the tab width is displayed.

Historically, Python is my language of choice to knock out a quick script thing-I love Pythondictionaries. But with Go's speed, support for dictionaries/maps, and capability to do HTTP serversvery easily, I might end up switching to Go. I think I'll use Go for my next little fun project.

Added: Thanks to Tom Madams who whipped a prototype of this filter in video using Shadertoy!

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reading-list/#comments Mon, 01 Dec 2014 07:54:28 +0000


If you've read Scott Adams' financial advice and my financial tips in case you win a startup lottery,then you might be interested in a few more pointers to good resources. Some web pages and books:

- Don't Play the Losers' Game, by Henry Blodget. This is a short, accessible piece that explains whypicking individual stocks on Wall Street is a bad idea for almost anyone.

- Website: the Bogleheads forum. An incredibly smart group of people who like to discuss investing,finance, and money. Their investment philosophy page is pure financial wisdom distilled.

- A Random Walk Down Wall Street, by Burton Malkiel. This book is remarkably readable, though itcan be dense at times. If you believe you can pick individual stocks with enough success to beat adiversified portfolio of low-cost index funds, this is the book you should read to throw a wet blanketon that belief.

- The Lazy Person's Guide to Investing, by Paul B. Farrell. This book will show you how tooutperform the majority of active money managers in just 15 minutes a year. This book is seriouslygood. If I had to recommend only a single book, this book might win: it's a breeze to read, but itimparts nearly as much wisdom as much denser tomes.

- This is a great description of how Google tried to educate and protect its employees beforeGoogle's IPO. You'll get most of the idea from the first page. How can you not love an article where afinancial advisor admits "We work in the most overcompensated industry in the country"?

- The Wall Street Self-Defense Manual, by Henry Blodget. In many ways, this book is a deeperversion of Blodget's article that I linked to above. This book is short, readable, and packed with mostof the advice that you need to know.

- If you're ready to go deeper, consider The Four Pillars of Investing, by William Bernstein. Youmight also check out Bernstein's The Intelligent Asset Allocator.

- Rich Dad, Poor Dad, by Robert Kiyosaki. This book has its flaws, but it's very readable and could begood for teenagers or college students. The book uses stories to discuss the goal of financialindependence via assets that produce money. I grew up in a family focused on academia, so thisbook was a good wake-up call that a lot of people care about money, not just getting a Ph.D.

Money and Wall Street stories, color, and culture

- Realistically, I'd recommend almost anything that Michael Lewis has ever written. His most recentbook is Flash Boys and I enjoyed that story. But I also enjoyed Liar's Poker, The Big Short, andBoomerang.

A few more to consider:

- Perfectly Legal (rich people get away with lots of tax loopholes)

- Confessions of a Tax Collector (a tale from inside the IRS when the IRS had more teeth)

There's also a whole sub-genre of books about rich people:

- Richistan (pretty entertaining)

- The Millionaire Next Door (most millionaires are cheap!)

- Rich Like Them (mostly a bunch of anecdotes from interviews)

Stock Options

- Consider Your Options, by Kaye A. Thomas. If you're joining a startup that offers stock options, Istrongly recommend that you study this book from cover to cover. It can help you avoid a lot oftreacherous mistakes. If you don't put in the time to understand your stock options, you might regretit later. Thomas also has a good book called Capital Gains, Minimal Taxes that covers the mechanicsof a lot of tax issues and logistics for investors.

- I really recommend Consider Your Options as the definitive work, but An Engineer's Guide toSilicon Valley Startups, by Piaw Na is very accessible. This book also covers a wide range of skillsthat you might need if you want to join a startup. Disclosure: I know Piaw from his time at Google.

- I have used Stock Options: An Authoritative Guide to Incentive and Nonqualified Stock Options as areference for at least one complicated situation.

- Want to understand stock options at a basic level? Stock Options for Dummies isn't too bad.

Anti-recommendations

- This won't be popular, but I just don't find John C. Bogle's books very readable. I agree with himabout lots of things, but his books like Don't Count on it! just didn't grab me.

- Hedgehogging, by Barton Biggs. I'm not even going to link to this book-that's how angry this bookmade me. Biggs actually writes stuff like this: "My real theory is that the investment superstars havesome special magic with markets that enables them almost intuitively to do the right things most ofthe time." What hogwash.

Elsewhere in the book (which lists a copyright date of 2006), Biggs quotes someone who accuratelyidentifies the housing bubble: "another bubble is about to burst. Existing home prices have beenrising 7% to 8% a year, financed by Fannie and Freddie." Then Biggs goes on scoff at the guy, like"Look at this dork, predicting a major depression due to a housing bubble in the next three years."The Wikipedia page on Biggs reports that Biggs' hedge fund was blindsided by the subsequentglobal financial crisis. If you want a snapshot of how Wall Street can suck, then you might want toread this book.

- I'm not a big fan of Jim Cramer. If you want to watch Cramer for entertainment that's great, butexercise caution on his advice.

- Beating the Street, by Peter Lynch. I just don't think this book has aged very well. You can pick upmost of what you need from other books. The advice to "invest in what you know" can be good.However, it also risks becoming "invest in what's familiar" instead of doing your homework.

So those are some books and websites that I've liked or disliked. How about you-what books about

investing, money, or finance would you add to the list?

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https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/investing-reading-list/feed/ 44https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/hermit-mode/ https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/hermit-mode/#comments Mon, 01 Dec 2014 05:07:36 +0000


I've been spending more time surfing the web on my laptop than I'd like to. I've also noticed moreemails that lure me into short tasks, but eventually eat up a large chunk of my day.

I'd prefer to be spending more time working on projects, reading, and unplugging. So my new 30day challenge will be to enter a sort of "hermit mode" where I don't spend more than an hour a dayon my laptop. I'm also going to try to say "no" more often. My hope is that if I turn down a fewmeetings for a while, I'll end up working more on projects that I want to tackle. I don't knowwhether that will work, but I'm going to try it. I might still write a few blog posts or say somethingon Twitter, but I want that to be a conscious choice, not just something I back into.

This challenge will be a hard one to judge for success, but my hope is that at the end of the month,I'll be making more active choices about how I spend my time, and tackling more things that I wantto do.

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So how did I do on my 30 day writing challenge? Well, the picture tells the story:

Not too bad! I did miss one day, but here's a secret about 30 day challenges: if you miss a day ortwo, you can just keep doing the challenge for another day or so at the end. Or don't worry about it:you're trying out something new, and you only have to answer to yourself.

What went well this time? Well, I finally wrote down a few things that I've been meaning to publishfor years, from Scott Adams' financial advice to my own hard-won financial tips, and from a pieceabout a level playing field to how to buy viagra online. Some posts were like hairballs that I justneeded to get out of my system.

I also liked my running tips post, my post about dial tone moments, and my tips to protect youraccount security. I even got to pick on active.com for their Active Advantage membership program. Ialso enjoyed loosening up a little bit ("fuck Columbus Day"). It's so much more fun to write when youdon't put as much pressure on yourself.

What didn't go well? Well, I meant to do some journaling, short stories, and private writing, butsomehow this challenge morphed into a public blogging exercise. That's okay. I like that I wrote abunch of new things. I still put too much emphasis on polish (or at least correct spelling/grammar) inmy writing. Part of my goal was to lower my bar a little bit so that I could knock out a quick blogpost whenever the mood strikes. I partly met that goal. Overall, I'm glad that I did this challenge.

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Working in webspam, we sometimes use the phrase "buy Viagra online" as an example of a searchquery that might be spammy. That's why I noticed and remembered the 2013 announcement that

you can officially buy Viagra online.

As this Time article points out, you've actually been able to buy Viagra online through legitimatepharmacy websites for quite some time. In May of 2013, Pfizer announced the process wouldbecome more direct through a collaboration with CVS.

What about "generic Viagra"?

To the best of my knowledge, some patents on Viagra haven't expired in the US. Consequently, ageneric version of Viagra has not yet been approved in the US. So I believe there's no exact thing as"generic viagra" in the United States.

Interestingly, there is a drug called Revatio which is also sildenafil. The patent for Revatio expired in2012 and so there are generic versions of Revatio. Revatio is intended to treat pulmonary arterialhypertension, but your doctor could legally prescribe generic Revatio for an "off label" usage.

It's even more interesting to read about generic Viagra in other countries. For example, Canadainvalidated Pfizer's patent on Viagra, so there is a generic version of Viagra in Canada. Likewise, thepatent on Viagra has expired in many countries in Europe. It also looks like India makes a genericversion of Viagra. However, at least in the US it appears that there's still not a generic version.

What about "herbal Viagra"?

I believe "Viagra" is a brand name, so it's not correct to refer to "herbal Viagra." The term may beinternet slang for wide variety of different things, but it's not Viagra as such. As a result, you shoulddo your research and exercise caution with anything that claims to be "herbal Viagra."

What about Cialis?

As long as I was doing this research, I was curious about the situation with Cialis, which is a similardrug to Viagra. In case you were wondering about how to buy cialis online, you can find officialinformation about that here. It looks like if you get a prescription, then you can order official Cialisfrom legitimate online pharmacies.

If you see something that I got wrong, please let me know.

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Because not every blog post has to be serious:

Special thanks to my friend Amy who crocheted this masterpiece! Amy also works with an awesomegroup of volunteers that crochets dolls for kids fighting cancer and other illnesses.

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matt cutts: gadgets, google, and seo

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