Matt Cutts, Google's former head of web spam team, joins SEO company

I'm going to assume this isn't an April Fool's joke and express my revulsion at the thought of moving from an anti spam team to an industry whose sole purpose is to push results I don't want to see higher in the search results list - in effect creating and evangelizing spam.

As April 1 pranks go, this is a great one. Totally deadpan, plausible language, no obvious giveaways except for the overall absurdity.

> Error establishing a database connection

maybe they should hire the head of engineering too while they are at it.

It must be noted that due to the unexpectedness and questionable nature of this move combined with his April 1st start date there is some speculation on Twitter that this is an early April Fools gag. Although Matt has been on leave from Google and his last blog post is about him reducing social media use which is mentioned in the article.

This could just be a scammy link building technique - release fake news relevant to the SEO industry in order to get links from high authority SEO sites, in order to increase rankings of your SEO consulting firm. The proximity to April 1st doesn't help...