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Google is Breaking the Internet

jeremypalmer.com

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Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#151

Post by jonknee »

anon1385 wrote: post #44
jonknee wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were selling links Google isn't that far off...

So you're saying all ads are 'paid links', except I presume Adsense ads. That sounds fair and reasonable.

No, but if you're selling something that transfers PageRank you are (in the eyes of Google) selling links. It's that simple.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/02/a-reminde...

> Selling links (or entire advertorial pages with embedded links) that pass PageRank violates our quality guidelines, and Google does take action on such violations.

It's an easy test: if the advertiser isn't OK with you not transferring PageRank you are selling a link and not advertising. It doesn't matter that it's good content or that it's not spammy (that just makes you the publisher feel OK about it), you're selling links.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#152

Post by dublinben »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #55
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.

Using a proxy for Google does absolutely nothing to avoid their judgements of websites. Startpage will not provide you with URLs that Google has banished. As an example compare the following results for "Game of Thrones S04E06" on each site:

https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=game%20of%20thro... https://startpage.com/do/search?q=game+of+thrones+s04e06 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=game+of+thrones+s04e06

The first two provide mostly spammy results or subtitles. The DDG results are mostly real sites with torrent or streaming copies of the show available. Which search engine do you think is more useful?

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#153

Post by jobu »

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…

If you use Chrome try the Personal Blocklist extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#154

Post by invisible »

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 a particularly odd case where neither situation 1 nor situation 2 seemed to happen. Webmaster tools doesn't indicate that there is anything amiss and the pagerank >= 7. We do almost no promotion of our site and have never done link sharing of any sort.

How am I as an outsider of Google able to discern any information about what's going on in this situation? I assume this isn't a unique case but there is literally 0 information. I'd like to clear this up - not just for me but for the community. I know this may be the wrong place to ask (I'm not sure where the "right" place would be), but would you be willing to contact me? caudill m at gmail

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#155

Post by jonknee »

toddh wrote: post #142
Donzo wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are selling "ads" that transfer PageRank, you are selling links. I do not care that you do this, but you should be aware of what you are doing.

My understanding is selling links is an SEO scam. Are my "ads" a SEO scam or are they real companies to trying to sell real products to real people? How can you conflate the two?

Would your advertisers be fine with you adding nofollow? If so, do that and you're fine. If they aren't fine with nofollow you should realize that the other stuff is window dressing and you're really selling pretty links (which means watch out, Google is looking to penalize you).

Real companies selling real products to real people get in trouble for scuzzy SEO all the time. JC Penny comes to mind. Or RapGenius (though they aren't even selling anything!). It's the techniques used that are the issue, not what is being promoted.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#156

Post by liveoneggs »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #84
buro9 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 diffe…

except when he is disavowed as all the removal emails say they will do.

I've added rel="nofollow" as good-enough when trying to help out people throwing too-far of a net.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#157

Post by liveoneggs »

buro9 wrote: post #83
unfunco wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

they just re-hire the same SEO guy who bought all of the spam links in the first place. :)

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#158

Post by girvo »

magicalist wrote: post #128
noir_lord wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 currentl…

Yes, truly Google's rules held no sway over the SEO world until 2014.

That's not what he's saying, and you know it.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#159

Post by rmrfrmrf »

notsosmart wrote: post #28
jqm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. http://www.newspapergrl.com/affiliate-marketing-training-wit... It's hard to cry when justice is served.

It is really sad that instead of discussing the merit of his argument, we are debating the quality of OP's site. It is ridiculous that I have to police my site for low quality inbound links or risk getting banned (even more so for mom and pop webmasters who are more susceptible to link penalties). Lastly, if you are penalized, try recovering unless you are big brand like Overstock or JCPenney with millions per year i…

> It is really sad that instead of discussing the merit of his argument, we are debating the quality of OP's site.

No it's not, because his argument is making the assumption that his content is high-quality.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#160

Post by xentronium »

anon1385 wrote: post #27
sbierwagen wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've got bad links, just disavow them. Wikipedia has to nofollow links because anybody in the world can add a spammy link to an article. NYT nofollows links because they're old media, and don't understand the web.

People use nofollow because they believe (rightly or wrongly, none of us know for sure since it's a secret) that if you link to a site that later turns out to be a link farm you can be punished for it because it appears to Google that you are part of the paid links scheme. 'Turns out' meaning either it was a link farm all along and you didn't notice, or didn't think it mattered, or because the site got bought/hacked…

> Even if Google isn't penalising you for that today, they may well tomorrow. So using nofollow seems like quite a rational thing to do for any individual site as there isn't any downside as far as I know, only potential benefits.

Breaking internet connectivity is a downside for society as a whole.

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