Did Matt Cutts Just Call Himself A Link Spammer?

Yesterday I reported that Google says using keyword rich user names in comments can be considered spammy and against Google's policies, potentially being a link scheme. Of course that caused for a lot of comments from the community but is it fair?

Remember GoogleGuy? GoogleGuy was the Googler who spent years helping webmasters under an unknown alias of GoogleGuy. He posted at WebmasterWorld a lot, but also a lot in comments and other areas. Later, we learned GoogleGuy was really Matt Cutts. What happened to GoogleGuy, well, he stop posting years ago.

His last post was in 2008 on this thread and has not posted since. You can see GoogleGuys profile over here.

Note, the name is kind of a keyword rich name for Google, the profile does link to google.com.



Now we know GoogleGuy didn't go around with the intent of boosting Google.com's link profile, so the intent was not there.

But we also know that back in the day, it was common place to use aliases instead of real names.
So why go so strong against people who still are old school?
Is Matt calling himself, aka GoogleGuy, a link spammer?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Google+.

Update: To be clear, I don't think Matt Cutts is a link spammer. The purpose of this post is to convey most of link spam is about the intent of the link and anchor text. Matt's intent with GoogleGuy was not about spamming Google, obviously.

by Barry Schwartz