I really like some of the tools that I use these days. FireFox is one of the best web tools that I have seen come along in a long time. The extensions like Sage that allow you to extend the powers of your browser are great. Sage is an RSS reader btw, and I have a sidebar open with all of the RSS feeds that I monitor every day…it is a great tool and keeps me up to date with very little effort.

One of the Blogs I monitor is that of Matt Cutts, the Google Spam CZar, or whatever his title really is. Matt launced a blog in the past few months and the word spread like wildfire among the webmaster/SEO community. Pretty cool I guess. Google pretty much left commenting on what they were doing to webmasters out until they went public…which is also interesting. But, this brings me to the point of this post (if there is one). Now we have Matt’s blog and he is “kind enough” to let the world in on little tidbits about what Google is doing and what webmasters should or should not do. At least, that is the theory. Are we better off?

Recently, Google started, what appears to be, a pretty significant update to its index and possibly the algos they use to rank pages/sites that they return on their search page. It has been going on for weeks and I know for a fact that many people have seen their sites get smashed in the process. According to Matt Cutts, the WMW coined Jagger update, is a three part deal. I think it will be over a month now that they will be rolling this thing out.

The SEO Forums like Digitalpoint and have seen too many threads to list speculating on when each phase of “Jagger” is being rolled out, completed, halted, side-stepped, etc. I mean, it was bad enough before when someone had to start speculating on PR updates every two minutes, now we have this too?

At the end of the day, I think we are indeed better off having someone and someplace to hear “unofficial” information from Google specifically geared towards webmasters. I don’t know Matt, but anyone who goes out of their way to dress up as Enigo Montoya for Halloween is ok in my book. Maybe I will dress up as Andre when Jeremy and I roll out to Vegas for PubCon and meet up with him.