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Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

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Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#141

Post by WalterGR »

rozab wrote: post #132
WalterGR wrote: post #113

Google is incredibly shady. There’s been a manual penalty in place against my website The Online Slang Dictionary ( http://onlineslangdictionary.com ) for the better part of a decade. I know this because the data suggested it - and then a Google employee confirmed it. It would be easy to explain it away because Aaron Peckham, owner of Urban Dictionary, worked at Google when Matt Cutts was head of the Web Spam team, a…

Do you have any evidence at all for these extraordinary claims? Why would Urban Dictionary go to such lengths to suppress a competitor which posed no threat[0]? I also notice that the homepage hasn't been updated at all for at least 8 years[1]. I suspect this may have had something to do with its decline. [0]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2004-01-10%202... [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120107121…

I have evidence - it’s in the link. I also have proof, but I’m not comfortable with publishing my communication with the Google employee right now.

I have no idea why the penalty is in place. What I describe is “incredibly circumstantial.”

You say that my site poses no threat. Is that because it hasn’t seen traffic growth or become popular? The site is no threat exactly because the penalty is in place and has been for almost a decade. That’s a long time for a website. Traffic growth was very healthy before all of this.

The home page has been updated more recently than that, but you’re right that it still has the same page structure. With the manual penalty in place, it doesn’t matter how often I update the skin of the site or the home page text: the site is dead.

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#142

Post by throwaway2048 »

techntoke wrote: post #131
throwaway2048 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also similar problems with all those companies too, not sure why you think that is some kind of defence of Google.

Because those companies are ignored while everyone jumps aboard the Google hate train, and if anything is going to be done to fix it then those changes need to be applied equally to all companies at the same time. Otherwise it does more harm than good.

People complain about the actions of all those companies quite regularly, Google isn't a victim here.

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#143

Post by WalterGR »

flutterdude420 wrote: post #139
WalterGR wrote: post #113

Google is incredibly shady. There’s been a manual penalty in place against my website The Online Slang Dictionary ( http://onlineslangdictionary.com ) for the better part of a decade. I know this because the data suggested it - and then a Google employee confirmed it. It would be easy to explain it away because Aaron Peckham, owner of Urban Dictionary, worked at Google when Matt Cutts was head of the Web Spam team, a…

> If the penalty weren't in place, we would get about double the visitors of that hate site. Given the rise of white nationalism in the West, does it make sense that a single person within Google can destroy a dictionary, while hate sites flourish? Going to need evidence here. Your post comes off as a bit of a one-man pity party without it.

Yeah that text is... long in the tooth. It was written before all of the deplatformings, when Google was sending tons of traffic to such sites.

Aside from that, I tried to be as neutral as possible. But the site is my life’s work so far - it’s hard to leave emotion out of it.

At this time I’m not going to publish my communication with the Google employee who informed me about the penalty, so if you think it’s a pity party, I’m okay with that. I’d rather that be the case than risk the livelihood of someone who did the right thing.

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#144

Post by daveed »

WalterGR wrote: post #113

Google is incredibly shady. There’s been a manual penalty in place against my website The Online Slang Dictionary ( http://onlineslangdictionary.com ) for the better part of a decade. I know this because the data suggested it - and then a Google employee confirmed it. It would be easy to explain it away because Aaron Peckham, owner of Urban Dictionary, worked at Google when Matt Cutts was head of the Web Spam team, a…

Are you saying that the only thing that Google did was to deprioritize sites with a lot of citations? Not that they deprioritized your site specifically? This kind of flag would affect every site they crawl. I feel like it's much more likely that it was made to prevent some class of abusers, and you were caught up in the scope of their net.

I mean, every time they make a change in ranking some people get hurt and some people get helped. If this is a universal change and not tied to your domain I have a hard time believing that a team would've added this flag because a former employee makes a competing site with a slightly different model from you.

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#145

Post by paganel »

WalterGR wrote: post #113

Google is incredibly shady. There’s been a manual penalty in place against my website The Online Slang Dictionary ( http://onlineslangdictionary.com ) for the better part of a decade. I know this because the data suggested it - and then a Google employee confirmed it. It would be easy to explain it away because Aaron Peckham, owner of Urban Dictionary, worked at Google when Matt Cutts was head of the Web Spam team, a…

re: Matt Cutts

I suspect he was the Googleguy from the Webmasterworld.com forums around 2002-2003, when Google (the company) was telling website owners: "trust us, we only need your website data in order to index it and to make it more easily searchable, no foul play here, we're never going to become a portal like Yahoo, we're never going to become your competitors".

Suffice is to say that things didn't turn out that way, and it has always bugged me that the people directly involved in this deception (i.e. people like Matt Cutts) have never even said "we're sorry". They just took their fat pay-checks and vested their shares and they were done.

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#146

Post by WalterGR »

daveed wrote: post #144
WalterGR wrote: post #113

Google is incredibly shady. There’s been a manual penalty in place against my website The Online Slang Dictionary ( http://onlineslangdictionary.com ) for the better part of a decade. I know this because the data suggested it - and then a Google employee confirmed it. It would be easy to explain it away because Aaron Peckham, owner of Urban Dictionary, worked at Google when Matt Cutts was head of the Web Spam team, a…

Are you saying that the only thing that Google did was to deprioritize sites with a lot of citations? Not that they deprioritized your site specifically? This kind of flag would affect every site they crawl. I feel like it's much more likely that it was made to prevent some class of abusers, and you were caught up in the scope of their net. I mean, every time they make a change in ranking some people get hurt and som…

Are you saying that the only thing that Google did was to deprioritize sites with a lot of citations?

That was the automated penalty. The rest of your comment is correct. The manual penalty came later.

I have a hard time believing that a team would've added this flag because a former employee makes a competing site with a slightly different model from you.

As I said, that’s incredibly circumstantial. I don’t know the motive, cause, etc. I’m not going to publish my communication with the Google employee who informed me about the manual penalty at this time, so what I’ve written in that article is the extent of the public information at this time.

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#147

Post by jtxx »

dunnock wrote: post #7

You would not expect of such big business to behave in a different way. What we consumers can do is to try to use alternative services where we can, e.g. I am happy with using Firefox instead of Chrome

same + duckduckgo & protonmail

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#148

Post by mthoms »

scoopertrooper wrote: post #110
wombatmobile wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right on, Jeff8. And when Teddyh says "simple numbers like a dollar amount can’t be copyrighted" he's ignoring the fact that google isn't just copying dollar amounts. Google's copying a data set which establishes a dollar amount as a net worth of a particular person. That's a database. The only difficulty for CNW will be coming up with the money, time, and emotional energy to achieve a result in court over as many ye…

The mere fact that he compiled the database isn't sufficient to qualify for copyright protection. He'll have to show that he used a sufficient level of creativity to arrive at the numbers he displayed. Based on his testimony, I suspect he'd have a reasonable case to argue, but he'd have to show that his researchers carefully weighed different sources and made other judgements for each individual celebrity rather than…

The article says they employed a number of researchers to come up with the numbers.

I don't think property records (or any other publicly available information) would be enough to come up with an accurate figure in an automated fashion. So, there's some educated guesses (aka "informed estimations") going on and therefore a form of "creativity" (IMHO).

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#149

Post by pwinnski »

tyingq wrote: post #104

Doesn't this behavior eventually hurt Google? If there's no incentive for third parties to collate, verify, and organize facts...eventually there isn't anyone to scrape. And the facts go stale.

Whether it will hurt them before the heat-death of the universe is an open question.

On an internet populated entirely by 100 people, it wouldn't take long for shady practices to hurt shady companies. On the internet we have, in which there seems to be an unending supply of people falling over themselves in their eagerness to see their content--any content--displayed on Google's pages for free, the "eventually" in your sentence is doing quite a lot of work.

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#150

Post by badwolf »

WalterGR wrote: post #130
someperson wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Due to the time suck of fighting Google's penalty, this site is not yet served via SSL You probably should get onto enabling SSL/TLS as soon as possible. It supposedly effects search engine ranking.

Very true. Due to the penalty, the site gets less and less traffic every year. Enabling SSL/TLS might help a bit, but I have to face facts: the site is dead.

Not to belittle your experience, but it seems this may be a bit of a negative feedback loop. Haven't updated the homepage because "what's the point I'm already punished" etc...
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