"linking with nofollow set" != "not linking". Repeatedly equivalencing the two does not lend the author much authority.
Google is Breaking the Internet
191–200 of 306 posts
Re: Google is Breaking the Internet
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
Matt - I would be happy to share any details about this specific situation. I removed the links from my post because I find it poor taste to reprint details from personal emails for public consumption. I'm on Twitter @jeremypalmer.
Re: Google is Breaking the Internet
#193Earlier 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…
And there it is again, the point that the author of the article is making . . "Do these requests indicate a larger issue with my site?" When the truth of the matter is that it's Google's issue. Why does the burden of the cost have to be on the publisher? This is the 3rd time someone is pointing this out, and it pretty much showcases "Google"'s attitude on this. At this point the cost of becoming a good source of info…
What are people "pointing out" exactly? This is a ridiculous argument.
If you don't care about what Google's view of the internet looks like, then ignore them, and ignore any emails from people asking you to change things on your site for them. Done. Simple.
This issue crops up because people usually do care what Google's view of the internet is and would like to help make it better. Marking links as nofollow and so on is entirely optional: only people who want useful search engines do it, and others don't care.
Re: Google is Breaking the Internet
#194Reading the comments from Matt Cutts here, I see the worst is ahead of us.
They have taken an environment of sharing, and turned it into a paranoid world of fear-based strategies. It's not all their fault - people are responsible too, crappy marketing works - so it has to be stripped out. They way they did it was to throw out all the babies with all the bathwater.
I think some inside Google get this already, but there's not much they can do short of AI. I'm sure they're working on it.
Disclaimer: I most likely have the most traffic of everyone here (give or take) - Have lived off Google publisher cheques for 10+ years. I realise what they are doing is damn near impossible, and that they are not 'evil' but probably a bit overwhelmed.
Re: Google is Breaking the Internet
#195I 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 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." Matt, this is beyond disingenuous. If Bing or Yahoo responded in the same way, I doubt we would hear a ringing endorsement from Google on the subject. You've indicated in other comments that basically your algorithm is everyone else's problem to deal with. You can use whatever w…
Now now, I think you're the one being disingenuous. Google's algorithm is not "everyone elses problem". If someone doesn't care about what appears on search result pages, they can just ignore everything search engines say: all their guidelines, all their advice, just chuck it out the window. Your website will still work fine.
This blog does not indicate some fundamental breaking of the web. It indicates a guy got a random email from a random website, that he is free to ignore if he wants (and in fact should ignore, because the webmasters in question don't even need to contact him, they can use the disavow tool).
No work to do? No problem!
Re: Google is Breaking the Internet
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and that's exactly my point. The email doesn't mention anything about Google, it just says they are cleaning up their links and if it's not a big deal please delete the links on your site. This isn't uncommon, just like it's not uncommon to get emails soliciting links. The OP has come up with a theory about the backstory and then used that theory to blame Google for ruining the internet (ignoring the fact that th…
Unless you have a better theory, I would call it an educated guess. "They're just being random" is not a better theory, IMHO.
The most likely situation is that the company who sent the letter hired a shady SEO. That SEO did spammy things that got them penalized. They brought in a new SEO to clean up the mess, and that SEO is trying to undo all the damage the previous one caused. They are trying to remove every link they can find since they didn't do the spamming in the first place and don't know which are causing the problem.
Re: Google is Breaking the Internet
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone needs to send a couple of millions DMCA takedown requests from random sources to random targets, to make this problem visible.
Hurting innocents in the pursuit of political reform isn't the way to go.
Several places in the world have shown that to be effective. And that would be real physical harm.
Re: Google is Breaking the Internet
#198What really needs to be changed is Google's algorithms. The number of links to a site may be correlated with content quality and relevance but shouldn't be taken as an indicator of such, since it basically promotes large sites with lots of links - but not too many - while penalising the "less developed" (in terms of linkage) parts of the Internet, the parts that in my experience also tend to have the most interesting and valuable content.
Basing ranking on characteristics of the page content is also going to pose its own problems, since instead of linkfarming, the SEOs will just focus on generating useless content (they are quite good at that already.) Without very strong AI, it's difficult to tell whether the content was there just to spamdex or if it's something that may be equally low-entropy (for example) like tables of useful information. In my mind, even a totally random ranking (not one that changes every search, but maybe ~monthly) would be better than one based on links or page content. At the very least, it would expose many users to more parts of the Internet that they might not otherwise experience if they stayed within the first 1-2 pages of search results (if I'm looking for something that happens to be relatively obscure, I routinely go into the 100th or more page of results, since there is often good content there too!)
I haven't received any such link removal requests (the sites I have a relatively small), but I do not care about SEO that much and if I did receive any my response would basically be "go complain to the search engines, not me."
Re: Google is Breaking the Internet
#199I 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.
Do you have evidence that happens? That sounds very strange.
Re: Google is Breaking the Internet
#200I have website since 2007 and 90% of my visitors is Google visitors. 2 months back i lose 85% of my traffic without any reason. I don't have any message in Google webmaster. Google is applying filters to reduice my traffic on search results. Sometime it go to normal so i receive all my visitors and 2 days after penality comeback. I don't undertand how google works and i am not using any spammy links or other. So google is kelling the web ....