Aaron Wall published a great interview with Google's Matt Cutts last week. Cutts is one of the more accessible staffers from a major search engine. If you haven't already seen it, it's certainly a worthwhile read. Cutts offers up some interesting bits of information including his views on spam, search engine optimization guarentees, hiring a professional search marketer and even tomato bribery.

Cutts on spam:

To me (and Google), spam is search engine optimization that is outside our quality guidelines--things like hidden text, hidden links, doorway pages filled with gibberish words that do a sneaky JavaScript redirect, and so on.

Cutts on hiring a professional search marketer:

If they've been around for a while, that's a plus. They should be willing to explain what they do, and make the explanation clear enough that you can follow it. There are a lot of great SEOs out there, but if I were hiring one for my most important site, I'd be pretty conservative.

Cutts on ranking the little guys:

At this point, when I go on a trip or visit a street arts fair, I end up writing down 3-4 urls each time, so I can go back to Google and see whether the sites will come up in Google.

Cutts on getting your site reindexed:

If you wish to be reincluded, please correct or remove all pages that are outside our quality guidelines. When you are ready, please submit a reinclusion request at http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py

Read the full interview.