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Google is Breaking the Internet

jeremypalmer.com

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Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#51

Post by milesf »

My solution has been to recommend friend and family to switch to http://DuckDuckGo.com (or just http://ddg.gg)

This may seem to be an impossible task, but in days not too long ago people switched search providers often. I went from the curated links of Yahoo, to Lycos, to AltaVista, to Webcrawler, to Google, and now DDG.

Google got a lot of mileage out of my in my mind with their motto "Don't be Evil", because I had some trust for them. I don't trust them anymore, and I regularly explain to others why they should no longer trust them either.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#52

Post by the_watcher »

>> webmasters are going out of their way to control the flow of page rank from their site to other sites.

I agree with 90% of this piece. But this particular comment isn't new. Webmasters have been looking to control flow of PageRank since they learned what it was.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#53

Post by jamesbritt »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #40
lingben wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matt, this does not address whatsoever the point being brought up. And in case you missed it, I will try to cite it as clearly as possible here: This is a case where google wants people to mold the internet according to what their current incarnation of their algorithm says the way it should be. Rather than google trying to mold its algorithm to understand the internet, natural links vs. spams, and their respective a…

It's not just Google that recommends to avoid link spamming. For example, at http://www.seroundtable.com/bing-links-knowledge-18535.html you can read where Bing said "You should never know in advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from. If you do, that’s the wrong path." When SEOs break the quality guidelines of all major search engines (not just Google), then they might need to do some work to clean things u…

When SEOs break the quality guidelines of all major search engines (not just Google), then they might need to do some work to clean things up if they get caught.

This still seems to be missing the point.

As I understand it, sites that are not doing anything in the realm of SEO can get penalized because of the actions of people outside of their control.

If the wrong sorts of sites (however defined), sites outside my control, are linking to my site, why am I penalized, and why should the burden be placed on me to go fix it?

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#54

Post by DenisM »

sbierwagen wrote: post #2

Jeremy Palmer is a SEO marketer, who also appears to be doing some scammy affiliate thing. Google considers his links low quality because they are low quality.

Consider the argument the author is making, rather than addressing his person. The argument is:

The tail named Google is wagging the dog named Internet by sending thousands of web masters on a wild goose chase of policing sites outside their direct control, essentially the entire internet. It's a giant waste of human capital, and it only exists due to Google's dominant market position and their willingness to solve problems of their search algorithm at the expense of the third parties.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#55

Post by vezzy-fnord »

milesf wrote: post #51

My solution has been to recommend friend and family to switch to http://DuckDuckGo.com (or just http://ddg.gg ) This may seem to be an impossible task, but in days not too long ago people switched search providers often. I went from the curated links of Yahoo, to Lycos, to AltaVista, to Webcrawler, to Google, and now DDG. Google got a lot of mileage out of my in my mind with their motto "Don't be Evil", because I had…

https://startpage.com and https://ixquick.com are the alternatives I use.

The former only proxies queries from Google, whereas the latter works on multiple engines.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#56

Post by unfunco »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #5

I talked about this phenomenon recently on This Week in Google with Leo Laporte and Gina Trapani: http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-google/248 Skip to 4:15 in to listen to the discussion. Note that there are two different things to keep in mind when someone writes in and says "Hey, can you remove this link from your site?" Situation #1 is by far the most common. If a site gets dinged for linkspam and works to clean up…

Matt, what's to stop people creating a website (or multiple websites) filled with spammy links pointing to their competitors websites, thereby reducing the weighting of a competitor in Google's pagerank algorithm. Is there protection against that sort of activity?

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#57

Post by anon1385 »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #43
ForHackernews wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you read the original post closely, it's clear that this is a site asking for a link to be removed--the quoted email isn't from Google. Did you read the article? The reason that site is asking for the links to be taken down is that they believe (apparently based on feedback from the Webmaster Tools) that it will please the Google Gods. Spammy links and irrational fear of spammy links are both unnatural linking b…

"Spammy links ... are both unnatural linking behaviors that result when sites are more concerned with pleasing search engine algorithms" ForHackernews, we say in our quality guidelines to "Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines." If the SEO whose email was quoted in the article had followed that advice, they wouldn't be in the position of trying to clean up spammy links after getting caught spamming.

>ForHackernews, we say in our quality guidelines to "Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines."

The problem with that is that it's not true (in my admittedly very limited experience). I used to believe that until I created a small website and found it wasn't getting listed in Google and I had to try and guess why and carefully read the rules.

Making pages primarily for users means you unthinkingly do things like having duplicate content on multiple pages/subdomains/sites or linking to a site that reviewed your product after you gave them a free sample (a paid link).

I'm sure to any even vaguely experienced webdev they know not to do these kinds of things (use canonical links, nofollow and all that jazz). Somebody just throwing a few pages together who has no experience in this stuff easily falls foul of the rules. The rules may seem obvious to people who understand how search engines work. If you have never heard of pagerank and don't have an understanding of how search engines work and how people try to game and spam search engines, the rules are not obvious at all and certainly the rules are not the same as the natural behaviour of somebody creating a legitimate site with the users in mind.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#58

Post by Matt_Cutts »

buro9 wrote: post #42
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #5

I talked about this phenomenon recently on This Week in Google with Leo Laporte and Gina Trapani: http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-google/248 Skip to 4:15 in to listen to the discussion. Note that there are two different things to keep in mind when someone writes in and says "Hey, can you remove this link from your site?" Situation #1 is by far the most common. If a site gets dinged for linkspam and works to clean up…

I have been complaining of this problem for a few years now and it's getting worse. I now receive several new "link removal" requests per day (I receive many more repeats of old removal requests). Yes, Google isn't sending these so you could argue that Google are not directly to blame. But, the merchants in question who are sending them are doing so because Google has made them believe they are (or will be) subject t…

It's not a huge surprise that some sites which went way too far spamming for links will sometimes go overboard when it's necessary to clean the spammy links up.

The main thing I'd recommend for a site owner who gets a fairly large number of link removal requests is to ask "Do these requests indicate a larger issue with my site?" For example, if you run a forum and it's trivially easy for blackhat SEOs to register for your forum and drop a link on the user profile page, then that's a loophole that you probably want to close.

But if the links actually look organic to you or you're confident that your site is high-quality or doesn't have those sorts of loopholes, you can safely ignore these requests unless you're feeling helpful.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#59

Post by jamesbritt »

jonknee wrote: post #38
lingben wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matt, this does not address whatsoever the point being brought up. And in case you missed it, I will try to cite it as clearly as possible here: This is a case where google wants people to mold the internet according to what their current incarnation of their algorithm says the way it should be. Rather than google trying to mold its algorithm to understand the internet, natural links vs. spams, and their respective a…

> Google here is saying that all links from this site are suspect, even when the link in question is 100% valid, quality and relevant. I read the article and didn't see any mention of what site the link was on or even what site it was linking to. It's impossible to say if it was legitimately spammy or not, but either way Google never asked him to do anything. Someone who didn't know about the Link Disavow Tool decide…

Someone who didn't know about the Link Disavow Tool decided on their own to email him about taking the link down.

FTFA:

"In short, the email was a request to remove links from our site to their site. We linked to this company on our own accord, with no prior solicitation, because we felt it would be useful to our site visitors, which is generally why people link to things on the Internet."

"Apparently Google convinced them, via their Webmaster Tools portal, that the link looked 'unnatural', and that they should use the Link Disavow Tool to discredit the link. Furthermore, they thought it necessary to contact us to manually remove the link, which is something I’m not going to do (out of principle)."

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#60

Post by simon_vetter »

ronnier wrote: post #35
greenyoda wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn't you challenge the takedown notice as being fraudulent? As far as I know, DMCA does not prohibit linking to web pages; it's only about hosting someone else's copyrighted content on your site (or maybe posting links to pirated content).

I just don't have time to deal with it. Removing it was the quickest way possible for me to resolve the issue and not have my account closed.

and, if they're abusing the DMCA like others have said, you're giving in to FUD, which is exactly what they want.
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