Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, answered a very unique question in his latest Webmaster Help video where a user writes in to ask:

Was there a key moment in your spam fighting career where you made a mistake that you regret, related to spam?

There are at least two mistakes, related to spam, that stick out in Matt’s mind.

Matt Regrets Not Taking Action On Paid Links Sooner

Matt recalls talking to a very well-known SEOs at a search conference in San Jose around 7 years ago where this person basically said that paid links are so common there’s no way to crack down on them.

It was at this moment that Matt realized he had made a mistake by allowing paid links to go too far and become too common on the web. In the early days of spam fighting, around 2005 or 2006, Google became very aggressive in their efforts to crack down on paid links.

At this point we all know paid links are a clear violation of Google’s guidelines, and algorithms are in place to detect them and take action on them. People now stay away from paid links more often than not, but Matt thinks he waited too long before finally taking a strong stand against them.

Matt Regrets Dismissing Initial Complaints Against Content Farms

Another mistake Matt recalls, was when he started getting some internal complaints about content farms. People complained that the websites were bad and offered a horrible user experience.

Matt dismissed the complaints at first because he ended up on one of the sites through performing a search and found that the content was very useful. Matt regrets making the generalization that the whole site offered great content because the one article he landed on happened to be good quality.

Matt says he made the mistake of not listening to user feedback, and later realized the sites people were complaining about were mass creating content and not necessarily trying to solve users’ needs. When he realized what these sites were doing, the Google webspam team did start taking appropriate action, but Matt says they could have done so a lot sooner.

Matt says the webspam team is always looking for user feedback, and looking for ways they can improve on what they’re doing. Even today, when the webspam team takes action against a new kind of spam they ask themselves if they could have taken action earlier than they did. Matt says the work they do is very rewarding, but they’re always thinking of ways things could have been done better.

To hear Matt’s full response in his own words, please see the video below: