A week ago, Google’s Matt Cutts published an article on his blog about the creation of AutoSEO, and he announced that this new venture would use the SEO.Ninja domain name. I shared the news about SEO.Ninja, and I mentioned that it was likely an April Fools Day joke from Cutts.
As you can see from the tweet just posted by Cutts and embedded below, AutoSEO “was an April Fool’s joke.”
Just updated http://t.co/Nc8jy0ToIE & https://t.co/DfyLr6iU4J to make it super-clear that "AutoSEO" was an April Fool's joke.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) April 7, 2015
I knew that Matt Cutts was listed as the registrant of SEO.Ninja since September of 2014, according to DomainTools. When I first saw that, I wasn’t sure if someone was playing a prank on him by naming him the registrant or if he actually owned the domain name. It appears that he did and still does own SEO.Ninja.
I am pretty sure there are people who would pay a premium to own the SEO.Ninja domain name. I am also pretty sure the domain name is worth significantly more now than before due to all the backlinks pointing to it after Cutts’ announcement. It will be interesting to see if Cutts keeps his April Fools messaging on SEO.Ninja in perpetuity or if he does something else with it.
Extremely hilarious. Not. As long as one likes to jump when the Google baron – on a permanent sabbatical – says so.
Nothing funny about how Google has scrapped a decade of established SEO practices and now demands web masters to present content ‘just for Google.’ E.g. disregarding robots.txt directives and demanding that they are unblocked for linked resources.