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Google is Breaking the Internet

jeremypalmer.com

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Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#91

Post by TeMPOraL »

wmkn wrote: post #41

There is this omnipotent master somewhere in the cloud. His power is large, but his ways are unknown. To please the Lord of cloud, strict rules have to be followed. Rules, that, when not followed, will cause the cloud Lord to strike you down with vengeance. Unfortunately, the cloud Lord is intentionally vague about these rules. Some people have taken upon themselves the task to discover the rules that please the clou…

The funny thing is that the Cloud Lord wants to set his rules so that if you do what's right and honest, what is valuable to the world, you will prosper, yet people constantly try to game the rules, so that the Lord's intentions cannot be fulfilled.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#92

Post by Matt_Cutts »

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?

Yes, we work to avoid this sort of attack when designing our ranking algorithms.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#93

Post by Matt_Cutts »

davemel37 wrote: post #70
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…

"If you’ve done as much work as you can to remove spammy or low-quality links from the web, and are unable to make further progress on getting the links taken down, you can disavow the remaining links. In other words, you can ask Google not to take certain links into account when assessing your site." That's taken straight from Google's webmaster support forums... https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?…

The original article dropped all the specific details like the link and the company that requested it. I'll certainly dig into this specific situation more soon, but I didn't want to pull engineers to look into this specific situation over the weekend.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#94

Post by dchuk »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #86
dchuk wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 ha…

Holy moly man, you were the one who provided that link: "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."

Your statement implies both Google and Bing share the same sentiment.

So now, my question still stands: What about that scenario that I laid out is actually bad/spammy/evil? Why should anyone ever be punished for doing that?

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#95

Post by newaccountfool »

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?

I think this is pretty common, if you want a website to rank. Then rank it as best as you can then smash the other websites with shitty, unnatural links. Pretty good idea actually but if it continues then it creates a really bad environment for search engines.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#96

Post by ggreer »

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…

Could you please tell us your hosting provider and the website that sent the DMCA notice? I'd like to avoid both of them, if I can.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#97

Post by Matt_Cutts »

thu wrote: post #68

Do I understand correctly that Google will try to punish you (or the other party) if you host links in exchange of money but that Google is doing it in its search results ? (And I receive from time to time unsolicited regular paper mail from Google so that I advertise my enterprise through them.) Page Rank is a neat idea, but making everyone listening to Google so that Page Rank remains meaningful is stupid. What do…

Google's ads don't flow PageRank and thus don't affect search engines.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#98

Post by noir_lord »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #90
higherpurpose wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

This is pretty typical of 2014 Google.

To be honest these days I pretty much regard Google as one of the banes of my existence, you guys hold so much power and influence so much of the internet the rest of us have to work around you, I'm currently pulling all our customers off Google Apps for Enterprise for a multitude of reasons (buggy code, broken imap implementations, impossible to get an actual human answer) as well as moving myself away from all Google services (including Android).

I remember when you guys where the good guys.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#99

Post by ForHackernews »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #90
higherpurpose wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> higherpurpose, nowhere in the original article did it say that Google said the link was bad

Yes, it most certainly did!

From the article:

> Apparently Google convinced them, via their [read: Google's] Webmaster Tools portal, that the link looked “unnatural”, and that they should use the [Google] Link Disavow Tool to discredit the link.

(emphasis added)

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#100

Post by gordaco »

This is a distorted variation on Goodhart's law [1], although in a non-economical environment. In other words, poorly thought incentives generate poor behaviour (this is not the core of Goodhart's law, but rather a common consequence). I'm not sure if all the blame for those incentives is on Google, or SEOs are culprits in some way.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_Law

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