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Google is Breaking the Internet

jeremypalmer.com

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Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#81

Post by higherpurpose »

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…

But in this case they didn't spam. The op's site linked naturally to that site, and that site's admin got a message from Google that the op's link is unnatural (when it was natural).

That's what's wrong with this picture. The link was perfectly valid and yet Google recommended that site's admin to disavow the natural link, simply because Google's algorithm isn't good enough to see what's natural and what isn't. So his suggestion is: if it's not good enough, then don't recommend the wrong stuff to people.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#82

Post by whoismua »

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…

Sure you did Matt, we're also seeing how the only good link as far as Google is concerned is an Adwords one. Can you stop insulting our intelligence, we see how every quarter your Adwords is increasing by double digits as web publishers are going broke.

All Google roads and products lead to ad clicks and Adwords. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#83

Post by buro9 »

unfunco wrote: post #56
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?

There is no protection against this from a publisher perspective.

The vast majority of link removal requests I've received do not come from an email address that matches the destination of the link for which the removal is requested.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#84

Post by Matt_Cutts »

buro9 wrote: post #66
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. It isn't, and never has been. We operate a nursery period ( https://www.lfgss.com/thread9350.html ) in which the actions of new members are both severely restricted and observed by existing members, and all initial cont…

buro9, this is a great example of a well-maintained forum, and as such I agree that you're doing the right thing by ignoring link removal requests.

Unfortunately, if you look at wider area of forums as a whole, a very large fraction of them are unmaintained, unpatched, or otherwise not kept safe from drive-by spamming. There are entire forum spamming software packages that will register spam users for dozens of different forums in order to drop spammy links. You can even lease the spamming software by the month. :(

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#85

Post by higherpurpose »

ronnier wrote: post #15

I own http://ihackernews.com which reformats HackerNews for mobile phones. I had a DMCA takedown notice sent to me on behalf of a website owner who didn't want me linking to their site. My hosting provider gave me 24 hours to remove the link or else they'd cancel my account. The owner of the link claimed that their Google rankings were dropping because my site, iHackernews, linked to their site. With this, they were…

One of the worst decision in Google search history: to base ranking on DMCA's received...

It's bad enough that they have automated the process to allow companies to delete millions of links from Google every year, but to downrank sites is a bit overboard.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#86

Post by Matt_Cutts »

dchuk wrote: post #74
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"You should never know in advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from. If you do, that’s the wrong path." That is an absolutely ridiculous rule of thumb to follow. What exactly is wrong about doing something like: 1) Having a good article on your site about a certain topic 2) Reaching out to other site owners who have similar content and asking them to link to you as an additional resource 3) Getting that lin…

dchuk, that's a direct quote from Bing, not Google: http://www.bing.com/blogs/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/201... It's in the "Links are all I need" section. Here's the full quote:

"While important as a vote of confidence for the content they point to, there is simply so much link spam these days that it’s tough to know where to turn. Obviously buying links is a dead end, and it doesn’t matter how you split this hair: sharing, encouraging, incentivizing, buying – it’s all the same. You want links to surprise you. You should never know in advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from. If you do, that’s the wrong path. Links are part of the bigger picture. You want them, but you want them to be natural. If an engine sees you growing tem naturally, you’re rewarded with rankings. If they see you growing them unnaturally, you’re rewarded with penalties."

If you disagree with that, you'd need to take it up with Bing's webmaster outreach team.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#87

Post by DanBC »

selmnoo wrote: post #67
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…

Hey Matt_Cutts, sorry that this is a little off-topic, I don't really know what would be the correct medium for this... so here I go: could you please kill mypdfmanuals.com from Google hits? I was searching for some instruction manuals (my exactly query was: ), and again and again the top hits were unhelpful mypdfmanuals.com links, which don't even have manuals , they just tell you to go a site where you can get the…

Google web search has a feedback page.

As you can imagine the process is opaque. I have reported some sub-optimal websites and seen a difference a few weeks later. I have no idea if my comment was read by a human let alone whether any action was taken as a result.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#88

Post by whoismua »

dreamfactory2 wrote: post #73
jamesbritt wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Frankly a bit worrying that Matt Cutts doesn't seem to get the fairly straightforward point (to the rest of us) being made here. Or he does and the criticism stands. Either way not so great.

Frankly a bit worrying that Matt Cutts doesn't seem to get the fairly straightforward point

Oh he gets it, it's his job to act like he doesn't and to change the subject "...Ummm...Bing does it too..look I made a video"

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#89

Post by pygy_ »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #78
pygy_ wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A spammy link is a link created on behalf of the target site. In this case the author says he created the link independently, because he thought it would be useful to his users. That's, by definition, a genuine, organic link. I wonder if a link flagged by the disavow tool and confirmed by the user weaken the Google juice of the source site. @MattCutts (or another Googler), is it the case?

"I wonder if a link flagged by the disavow tool and confirmed by the user weaken the Google juice of the source site." We haven't been using disavowed links as a reason not to trust a source site. So it wouldn't weaken the Google juice of the author's/source site if the company that sent the email had just disavowed the link.

Good to know, and thanks for the answer.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#90

Post by Matt_Cutts »

higherpurpose wrote: post #81
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But in this case they didn't spam. The op's site linked naturally to that site, and that site's admin got a message from Google that the op's link is unnatural (when it was natural). That's what's wrong with this picture. The link was perfectly valid and yet Google recommended that site's admin to disavow the natural link, simply because Google's algorithm isn't good enough to see what's natural and what isn't. So hi…

higherpurpose, nowhere in the original article did it say that Google said the link was bad. This was a request from a random site (we don't know which one, since the post dropped that detail), and the op can certainly ignore the link removal request.
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