Perhaps April Fools..................... Definitely not funny!!!!!!! In fact rather wierd prank if you ask me. Certainly he didn't need to draw attention with this whacky excuse of linkbait! Either I am clueless or this is just plain wierd.
The thing that made it look so much like a hack is the part on the black seo blog where it says there are bugs in the algo. That is very much true, as if there were no bugs, then all of my sites would be ranked #1 for every known keyword that is on my sites pages. Wouldn't we all just love that. Traffic would be flowing in non stop and we would need a large amount of servers just to keep up with it.
After further review, I am finally voting. I vote that this is a real hack. We will see who the fools are very soon I guess (probably me). Come on, don't ride the fence, vote now for the fun of it.
The give away is in the shouts, check it out: davenator (resembles Dave Naylor no?) RandomFish (resembles Rand Fishkin no?) Shchoeoe+npMMo (resembles Shoemoney no?) There are probably others, I think Matt is a joker and I have to take my hat off this is a funny as f**k April fools.
I think Matt made the statement about being gone for the weekend as a lead to let us know that he wouldn't be available for contact in the event of having his blog hacked. Also, this could be a frame of the black site so that they can close them down after falsely accusing them of the hack. I don't know. I sure have read a lot and learned a lot in the last 24 hours, but being that this is a fools weekend, I am not sure of the benefits or validity of what I've learned. I should have just turned the PC off until Monday. This isn't ez for noobeez, is it? I cast my vote that this is not a real hack by the black ones.
I am going to go with the truly American on-the-fence answer ... "I believe It could be an April Fools joke, or it could be real." (duh) lolz