• Wired/Epicenter, Thursday, March 6, 2008 1:30 PM

Wired magazine's Epicenter blog solicited questions from readers for this quick interview with Matt Cutts, and Google's resident search quality guru spewed answers on everything from the value of SEO, to the future of fee-based Webmaster tools, to the fabled Google Bomb.

When it comes to SEO, Cutts said that its works--to a certain degree. "If done responsibly, [SEO] can be a great thing," Cutts said. "Think of it this way: When you put a resume forward, you want it to be as clean as possible. If the resume is sloppy, you're not going to get interviewed for the job. SEO is sort of like tweaking your resume."

As for Webmaster Tools moving to a tiered or fee-based model, Cutts said he doesn't see it happening. "I'm not going to preclude it, but the more information we give webmasters, the better it is for them, the better it is for Google."

And Cutts relegated Google Bombs to the level of pranks mired in the past. "They're relatively rare and don't really do much harm," Cutts said. "Our main concern was that people might think [the link bombs] represent [Google's] opinions. I wouldn't claim that our fix is 100 percent perfect, but we don't see many."

Read the whole story at Wired/Epicenter »