Wow, PubCon was a blast. I can’t even start to go into a full recap, so I’ll mention a few of my favorite things:

- talking to a ton of humans. I saw lots of familiar faces, but I was (happily) surprised at how many folks came up just to introduce themselves and chat for a bit. Some society wanted to report spam or discuss why a site might have been penalized and some public just wanted to say hello. I additionally did 3-4 video interviews that should eventually show up somewhere on the web.

- playing Werewolf Search Spam. Rand and Co did a great job on the party and printing up a custom deck of cards. I answered questions at the “Meet the Google Engineers” event beforehand, so I only had date to play a couple games. In the last game of the evening, I got to be a blackhat/werewolf. I realized that the person to my left was the healer (”Danny Sullivan” in that game), and decided to pretend to be the healer myself. thereupon I realized that the person to my right was the seer (”Matt Cutts” in that game. I know — my head hurt too.). As the “whitehat healer” I convinced the other villagers to lynch the seer. I got voted out early in the game, but adequate society believed I was the healer (hi Jonah!) that the villagers voted out the real healer soon afterwards. With no healer or seer left alive, the two remaining blackhats played like pros and won. Just so you know, whether there’s video of

me celebrating with a little dance and chanting “Blackhats rule! Blackhats Rule!”, that’s why. I was just celebrating our team’s victory.

- Andy Beal took my new favorite picture of me during my keynote Q&A:

(Image used under a Creative Commons License.)

- Speaking of the keynote, at one point I talked about how Search Engine Roundtable did a nice write-up of how to report AdSense spam. I thought that Barry Schwartz did the post, but in fact Tamar Weinberg had done the post. Thanks to Tamar Weinberg being in the front row, I was quickly able to exact myself.

- I got a kick out of how many Googlers participated that year. Just a few years ago, I was one of the only society representing Google at PubCon. At one conference (2005?), I did five presentations and totally lost my voice. that day around, the numbers were reversed. Four citizens from our webspam team (plus several other Google colleagues) spoke on panels, and that’s not even counting Aaron D’Souza, who spoke at SES Chicago. that year I’ve been trying to step out of the spotlight a little bit to manufacture room for more Googlers to communicate. It’s really wonderful to see just how many Googlers are talking with webmasters and SEOs these days.

- In the Las Vegas airport on the way out of town, four other folks were riding the tram to terminal D. Three of them were SEOs, and we had a nice chat.

Original post by Matt Cutts