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Google is Breaking the Internet

jeremypalmer.com

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Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#211

Post by pygy_ »

jonknee wrote: post #120
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?

> 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. Genuine organic links can still be spammy. The OP seems to be a genuine affiliate marketer/spammer, it's not inconceivable that his links aren't treated with a ton of respect.

That's a genuinely good point :-)

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#212

Post by magicalist »

girvo wrote: post #158
magicalist wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's exactly what he's saying.

People have not only been complaining about this since Penguin came out (around two years now), before that they were complaining about the opposite: that Google's arbitrary rules were creating spammy links all over the internet. It's completely ignoring the past to pretend this is some new thing to fit a preconceived narrative.

Most of the SEO folks that seem to come out of the woodwork for these threads would agree with me that "This is pretty typical of 2014 Google" ignores years of them complaining about the exact same thing, except they're just happy to have more people on their side.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#213

Post by greenyoda »

WildUtah wrote: post #113
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).

Challenging a DMCA takedown requires you to accept that your whole site will be taken down for ten days while you wait to have a right to challenge the takedown. Businesses or projects that have to keep functioning have to comply with any takedown regardless of its validity because they can't just go out of business for ten days in order to challenge it.

Wouldn't temporarily removing the disputed item pending the resolution of the challenge prevent your entire site from being taken down?

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#214

Post by us0r »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #58
buro9 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

" "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."

Wouldn't that be like every vBulletin site?

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#215

Post by MitziMoto »

nivla wrote: post #111
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?" Well, if a website was link spamming then it seems appropriate that the site should attempt to clean up the spam they made before they can rank well in Google again. Otherwise it's not fair to the other websites that have been trying to rank fai…

>In general, if you weren't trying to create spam links, then it's very unlikely that any of this is an issue for you and the burden isn't on you to fix it. So if Bing wants to rank Bing.com higher than Google.com on the keyword "Search Engine", all they need to do is to pay link farms to link to Google? Like everything this could go both ways. If you penalize sites for having links from link farms, what is stopping…

> All these resources and can't even distinguish a link farm from a legitimate site? Doesn't sound believable.

The Google webspam team seems to prefer psychology over technology to solve the problem, especially recently. Nearly everything that's come out of Matt Cutt's mouth in the last 18 months or so has been a scare tactic.

IMO all this does is further encourage the development of "churn and burn" websites from blackhats who have being penalized in their business plan. So why should I risk all the time and effort it takes to generate quality web content when it could all come crashing down because an imperfect and overzealous algorithm thinks it's spam? Or worse, some intern or non-google employee doing a manual review wrongly decides the site violates webmaster guidelines?

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#216

Post by grkvlt »

patrickmay wrote: post #135
EGreg wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Matt Cutts is saying, is that as collectively smart as his employer Google is, they aren't able to always figure out if a link is natural and when it's "paid for" as part of linkspam. If they could, they would obviously put that in their algorithm. Matt Cutts' job at Google involves him making tons of videos explaining how the Google algorithm works. It isn't omniscient, and the guidelines show how to work withi…

> Google's customers are its users. No, Google's customers are primarily its advertisers. Optimizing advertising revenue has some overlap with pleasing users, as you note, but if a decision needed to be made between pleasing users and increasing revenue, there's no doubt about which way it would go.

They would choose pleasing the users.

I suppose any company that works out how to increase revenue while upsetting and alienating it's users could possibly implement said ideas. But if you're smart enough to do that, I would guess you would also be pretty successful at the traditional approach of increasing revenue by pleasing your users?

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#217

Post by sillysaurus3 »

J_Darnley wrote: post #197
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When has terrorism been an effective way to invoke change in a democratic society?

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#218

Post by macoughl »

nivla wrote: post #111
Matt_Cutts wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?" Well, if a website was link spamming then it seems appropriate that the site should attempt to clean up the spam they made before they can rank well in Google again. Otherwise it's not fair to the other websites that have been trying to rank fai…

>In general, if you weren't trying to create spam links, then it's very unlikely that any of this is an issue for you and the burden isn't on you to fix it. So if Bing wants to rank Bing.com higher than Google.com on the keyword "Search Engine", all they need to do is to pay link farms to link to Google? Like everything this could go both ways. If you penalize sites for having links from link farms, what is stopping…

>So if Bing wants to rank Bing.com higher than Google.com on the keyword "Search Engine", all they need to do is to pay link farms to link to Google?

During this "crackdown campaign" Google has been on, I have sat in on meetings at large clients where they've pulled sites that are supposedly link farms (according to google) and put together an ad buy on behalf of competitors meant to cause these penalties to be levied and WMT messages to be sent.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#219

Post by freshhawk »

ForHackernews wrote: post #134
EGreg wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Matt Cutts is saying, is that as collectively smart as his employer Google is, they aren't able to always figure out if a link is natural and when it's "paid for" as part of linkspam. If they could, they would obviously put that in their algorithm. Matt Cutts' job at Google involves him making tons of videos explaining how the Google algorithm works. It isn't omniscient, and the guidelines show how to work withi…

> Google's customers are its users. No, Google's customers are its advertisers. They're the ones who pay money to Google. I agree with your general point though, the algorithm isn't perfect and sometimes it goofs. What I think people are having a negative reaction to is Matt Cutts' seemingly obtuse responses, as though he doesn't even understand the issue at hand (Google's actions distorting natural behavior), so he…

The icing on the cake is that Matt Cutts is obviously a very bright and very perceptive person so it's easy to assume that his not understanding is intentional. That would be right out of the PR/Politics "avoiding awkward questions 101" textbook but it's a scummy tactic.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#220

Post by Myrth »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #165
Myrth wrote: post #124

Earlier 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.

The sending itself wouldn't be hurting anyone. The responding parties would have to make a decision to hurt innocents or not, and maybe actually forced to do some due diligence, that is expected of them. And maybe voice out that current requirements make this hard or impossible for them.
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