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Matt if you read hackernews. This is bullshit. Spam links should count for 0 value not negative value.
FYI, he does (or did, no comments in a few years): https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=MattCutts
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Matt_Cutts
and he is quite active
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Besides, it seems to me that these "problems" are only really thought of as problems by the type of people who put "search engine" in the title of their blog. Or anyone who runs an online business...? Let's say you're a small ecommerce site, your site is growing, your blog is gaining readership as it's become a great resource. One of your nasty competitors who doesn't like that your rankings are going up for all this…
I don't understand why the quality of the blog should have anything to do with the search results that link to the ecommerce site. Just because your site should show up in the ranking for "reset color scheme Samsung monitor" doesn't mean it should show up in the ranking for "buy samsung monitor". To the extent google is conflating the positive signals for the first with the second, that's a bug in their algorithm tha…
Specific (edit: off site, on site should remain important) anchor text should eventually and ideally be worthless, as then results won't be based around who got the most links that say "buy Samsung monitor" pointing at their site. I think that is a slow train coming though.
The amazing thing is that this is news. Of course competitors can trash your organic rankings -- and it's a lot easier for them to trash you than it is to promote themselves. I'm glad Google is slowly coming around to admitting that this house of mirrors has some flaws. The more information publishers get about this, the better choices we can make in content selection.
Edit: After reading the comments at the end of the story, magicalist is right. The story is wrong, Google made this change a lot longer than a week ago, it isn't actually news.
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I completely get you from a human level. From a business level google's job is to sell ads, it sell ads by providing valuable search results 'for free', and one part of the intrinsic quality of the search results is that they are 'good' in the sense that you describe. Aside from that google really doesnt owe anyone anything, if tomorrow google found that showing small businesses search results negatively affected the…
I'm speaking from a user level. If I'm a user and Google isn't showing me the best results, it's not doing its job for its users. If Google doesn't have users, its ad space isn't worth anything, and its business model ceases to exist. Google is the epitome of a consumer web business model. They sell users. So yes, they have to have buyers, but their most important job is to have users to sell.
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> Nonsense; that is Google's one and only job. Why? You're not paying them to list your website. Meanwhile I am paying them, in ad impressions, to look at your listing. If you want reliable returns, buy an ad instead. EDIT: What I am trying to say is, it doesn't matter to me if I see "Jack's Pastries" or "Jill's Pastries" in my search results. Your livelihood is not Google's responsibility, unless you buy ad space fr…
Their job is to show the best results for a given search query. If my website is the best but it doesn't appear at the top because a competitor has attacked it, Google isn't doing its job.
Those 1 out of 1000 good sites that were penalized do mean that "Google isn't doing its job" in that its job is never complete, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't the right choice to make for its users (while it then tries to refine new signals to get a better set of results).
The crap filtered out can vastly outweigh the good results (temporarily?) lost, depending on the good sites that were filtered out. Yes, it sucks, but false positives always come with this type of filtering.
Also, remember that "best" is itself just a confluence of signals, and that the guy next to you may very well disagree with you for any particular "best" choice.
The amazing thing is that this is news. Of course competitors can trash your organic rankings -- and it's a lot easier for them to trash you than it is to promote themselves. I'm glad Google is slowly coming around to admitting that this house of mirrors has some flaws. The more information publishers get about this, the better choices we can make in content selection.
What is news here is not that negative SEO exists. It is that Google has been forced to admit that it is a real issue. Edit: After reading the comments at the end of the story, magicalist is right. The story is wrong, Google made this change a lot longer than a week ago, it isn't actually news.
The more people use negative SEO and their victims use Google's tools to disavow it, the worse Bing's results get.
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"The PageRank algorithm seems broken to me." Imagine thinking that the "honor system" would actually not be gamed! Pagerank was designed a long time ago and suffers from a way of thinking that academics such as Page and Brin have. The same thing happened with email once the cat got out of the bag on that. Or on craigslist.org - Bottom line is not anticipating what would happen when widespread use of a product occurs…
Well the cure is pretty simple. You can apply pagerank in to calculate the reputation of each site and then multiply that number with the value of the outgoing link, using normal page rank. How do you get the reputation information? Well you need a network of creators, people, so that you can capture the social interactions between them.
The amazing thing is that this is news. Of course competitors can trash your organic rankings -- and it's a lot easier for them to trash you than it is to promote themselves. I'm glad Google is slowly coming around to admitting that this house of mirrors has some flaws. The more information publishers get about this, the better choices we can make in content selection.
It's not Google's job to make sure every webmaster has a "fair shot" at rankings. It's their job to make sure the best results appear when I search for something. In Google's eyes, having false negatives is worth not having false positives, and that's just the reality of the web. Besides, it seems to me that these "problems" are only really thought of as problems by the type of people who put "search engine" in the t…
If the answer is b), which I suspect it might due to reading some comments here citing fiverr examples, then allowing negative SEO is decreasing the quality of search results.
Also, my guess is where the damage is really done is w/ long tail searches. That's when I almost always encounter random, irrelevant, spammy sites - when I search for something very specific in Google.