Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google is Breaking the Internet

jeremypalmer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 306 posts

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#231

Post by lugg »

jonknee wrote: post #151
anon1385 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 transf…

This whole thing seems bizarre. Pagerank smells broken to me.

You can't buy links, but you can if you do it from us. What a scam.

If pagerank can't differentiate "blackhat" seo links from organic links it probably needs fixing.

In regards to this article its a bit strange. Reading the email its pretty obvious how it went down:

Company hires dodgy seo company who sets up a bunch of links

Google detects it, sends out warning listing all links to their site

Company mass emails every site owner with links pointing back at them

I don't think they were really asking the links to be removed from the authors site at all, it was aimed at someone completely different. All they had to go by was the referrer and the link.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#232

Post by sillysaurus3 »

crgt wrote: post #225
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party

Colonists objected to the Tea Act because they believed that it violated their rights as Englishmen to "No taxation without representation," that is, be taxed only by their own elected representatives and not by a British parliament in which they were not represented.

Again, and in hopes of a more substantive reply: when has hurting innocents been an effective way to get what you want in a society with political representation for its citizens?

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#233

Post by Myrth »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #232
crgt wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party

Colonists objected to the Tea Act because they believed that it violated their rights as Englishmen to "No taxation without representation," that is, be taxed only by their own elected representatives and not by a British parliament in which they were not represented. Again, and in hopes of a more substantive reply: when has hurting innocents been an effective way to get what you want in a society with political repr…

Ok, how about not fully random sources and targets, but ones that somehow involved in DMCA lobbying and enforcement. That would remove the "innocent" from equation.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#234

Post by SteveGerencser »

magicalist wrote: post #212
girvo wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 woodwor…

For years we begged Google to simply stop counting links they didn't like. These included generic directory link, crappy blog links, article farm links and on and on and on. They claimed to be able to tell what was good and what was bad yet the search results rarely showed that in certain niches.

Then we stared seeing the first indications that real "negative" SEO was possible in certain circumstances and we complained even further. Stop counting links you don't like. Now we are at a point where we see old websites being told to remove or disavow links that may be as many as 10 years old.

Can Matt or Google really stand there and say that it took them 10 YEARS to figure out that not only was that a link that they didn't like, but it was so evil that now it needed to be removed from the internet? The solution has been, and always will be, stop letting things you don't like count as a plus in your algorithm. When in doubt, don't count it.

Instead, we have Google adding thousands of webmasters and site owners as a living part of the algorithm and getting them to remove all those links, plus many they can't see or understand the value of, by the use of fear and scare tactics. Remove these links are we will ruin your website rankings. It doesn't matter if you created or asked for them or not, remove them.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#235

Post by borat4prez »

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, I am the webmaster of http://TeenageMutantNinjaTurtles.com -- before I took the site over, the forum was hacked (~2010) and we were hit with a ton of bad links (posted on our forum and lots of underage adult websites linking to us).

I've been working the past two years, from contacting all the webmasters via WhoIs information, creating unique content on a weekly basis, having a good social media following, and still for the life of us, we cannot get ranked well organically on Google.

Could you personally look into this or give me any advice on resolving this issue because I feel like I've done everything possible and we put a lot of work into the website over the years. I would really appreciate it.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#236

Post by jonknee »

lugg wrote: post #231
jonknee wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 transf…

This whole thing seems bizarre. Pagerank smells broken to me. You can't buy links, but you can if you do it from us. What a scam. If pagerank can't differentiate "blackhat" seo links from organic links it probably needs fixing. In regards to this article its a bit strange. Reading the email its pretty obvious how it went down: Company hires dodgy seo company who sets up a bunch of links Google detects it, sends out w…

> You can't buy links, but you can if you do it from us. What a scam.

You seem to be confusing how Google's advertising work. You can't buy a page rank passing link from Google. Adwords and Adsense ads do not pass PageRank. No legitimate advertising does (for starters because they all want to track visits and send you through redirects, but also because it's usually injected remotely and not part of the page that can send PageRank).

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#237

Post by aaronwall »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #97
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.

Do they (along with the personalization aspects of the relevancy algorithms) boost aggregate awareness & CTR - which in turn further drive rank?

A look at Ask.com's history on a tool like SEMrush makes this line of thinking rather compelling.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#238

Post by jonknee »

toddh wrote: post #166
jonknee wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (thoug…

Shouldn't we be talking content and not form? Let's say a reader of mine is searching for a job and my site has a new great job at Apple. Apple advertises on my site because it attracts a certain kind of person. Shouldn't that person be shown my ad because it's both timely and highly relevant? That the job is on my site is a valuable signal. I don't use an ad service, I place every single ad and I have done so since…

Yes, none of that is problematic. You should just make sure you're not indiscriminately linking to third parties who pay for the privilege. In your case nofollow would be very simple and would prevent any damage.

Quality content is awesome and I'm sure your site is great, but Google's thought process here is that your site's reputation should only be handed on to sites that earn it organically (e.g. not through their buying it).

It's really for your own benefit, with the way PageRank works your outgoing links are votes that are as powerful as your page's reputation is good. If you link to bad sites your page's reputation takes a hit and thus your PageRank goes down. If I pay you to vouch for me (e.g. link to me) that only means that I have money. If you vouch for me without any money that's a much better signal that I have quality content.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#239

Post by aaronwall »

rmrfrmrf wrote: post #122
dreamfactory2 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Put the pitchfork down; he's just giving non-specific answers in response to non-specific situations. For all we know, the two domains in question are `bestquickdietfatloss.com` and `levitracialisfreedietpillscanadamexicoblog.com`, in which case it would be correct of Google to indicate that the author's link is linkspam.

Even if the sites are not relevant, the existence of a link does not mean the site which the link points at was responsible for creating the link. In some cases (especially with website hacking) those who create the spam will link to innocent third parties to create a smokescreen. Google can & does burn some of these "drive by shooting" sites to a crisp.

Check the people who try to drop profile links & comment spam links on your blog and such. Are there any websites which have as many spammy inbound links as YouTube does? How many people does Google allocate to cleaning up YouTube's spammy link profile?

There's another factor in that Google may shift what is considered reasonable over time. A buddy of mine got an unnatural link warning where the link cited was a link that has been in place LONGER THAN GOOGLE HAS EXISTED.

Now consider that some websites are bought & sold, change ownership, etc. ... does it make sense to penalize today for something which happened 10 or 15 years ago?

Another factor is that just by ranking you will pick up some scraper site inbound links you do not want. Many of those sites in various forms or fashion are monetized via Google ads. Google continues to run their ads on many of those aggregation sites, yet you may get an unnatural link penalty for having links from the same sites.

Good enough for Google, NOT good enough for you TM

Post reply on HN