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Escaping Google's manual reputation penalty and resuming business as usual

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Re: Escaping Google's manual reputation penalty and resuming business as usual

#11

Post by throwaway743 »

So sick of dealing with Google, between this, the play store, admob, etc. They'll punish you for the slightest things, have zero meaningful customer service/means of recourse, and in many cases don't have a way to even reach out to customer service (admob's email option is visible but throws an error every time you click it). Not to mention, they try to steer you towards their useless "community forums" that sre filled with "diamond users" who just spam copy/paste responses.

If your business depends on their services, you're fucked if you slip up in the smallest way. Have fun trying to get ahold of anyone who can help, unless you're lucky and have a friend who works there.

Side note, they're going to further penalize apps based on performance/ANRs, yet they haven't fixed the issue of admob's banner ads causing performance issues.

It just feels awful. We need more options that can actually help small businesses, not hurt or threaten them.

Re: Escaping Google's manual reputation penalty and resuming business as usual

#12

Post by [deleted] »

wkat4242 wrote: post #6
nothercastle wrote: post #5

Just goes to show you how far behind the SEO scammers Google is. Despite being bigger and wealthier Google simply can’t catch the more nimble SEO scammers

I'm pretty sure Google is milking them now by just selling ad words, they no longer care about the search results, just how much money they make

[deleted]

Re: Escaping Google's manual reputation penalty and resuming business as usual

#15

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway743 wrote: post #11

So sick of dealing with Google, between this, the play store, admob, etc. They'll punish you for the slightest things, have zero meaningful customer service/means of recourse, and in many cases don't have a way to even reach out to customer service (admob's email option is visible but throws an error every time you click it). Not to mention, they try to steer you towards their useless "community forums" that sre fill…

[deleted]

Re: Escaping Google's manual reputation penalty and resuming business as usual

#16

Post by arresin »

wkat4242 wrote: post #6
nothercastle wrote: post #5

Just goes to show you how far behind the SEO scammers Google is. Despite being bigger and wealthier Google simply can’t catch the more nimble SEO scammers

I'm pretty sure Google is milking them now by just selling ad words, they no longer care about the search results, just how much money they make

Also SEO provides at least something for the long tail. My belief is that the algorithm is able to predict what looks like “content” to a broad consumer base. Then the fatter the tail gets the more they manually tweak the results (like editors doing publishing).

Re: Escaping Google's manual reputation penalty and resuming business as usual

#17

Post by mavamaarten »

throwaway743 wrote: post #11

So sick of dealing with Google, between this, the play store, admob, etc. They'll punish you for the slightest things, have zero meaningful customer service/means of recourse, and in many cases don't have a way to even reach out to customer service (admob's email option is visible but throws an error every time you click it). Not to mention, they try to steer you towards their useless "community forums" that sre fill…

Yup. Dealing with Google often gives me strong "I'm being held hostage" vibes.

Our apps have been rejected from the Play Store for bogus reasons multiple times. Sometimes it's an easy fix (aka just release the same update but with higher version number - to get another bot or human to take a look), sometimes it takes a week, sometimes we've had to pull strings and had to escalate our issue through a contact at Google. But if you're a small fish, they will absolutely let you rot.

Re: Escaping Google's manual reputation penalty and resuming business as usual

#18

Post by Drakim »

wkat4242 wrote: post #6
nothercastle wrote: post #5

Just goes to show you how far behind the SEO scammers Google is. Despite being bigger and wealthier Google simply can’t catch the more nimble SEO scammers

I'm pretty sure Google is milking them now by just selling ad words, they no longer care about the search results, just how much money they make

What you are saying sounds like hyperbole, but all it takes is for the management within google to blindly chase metrics and they end up doing exactly that.

Re: Escaping Google's manual reputation penalty and resuming business as usual

#19

Post by Nextgrid »

greenchair wrote: post #10

geo location trick is absolutely fascinating!

And also absolutely trivial to detect automatically. The fact that Google doesn't do it proves they don't give a shit about improving search quality beyond superficial efforts whose main objective is just to make it look like they do. Maybe the fact that most spam sites have Google Analytics & Ads has something to do with it?

Re: Escaping Google's manual reputation penalty and resuming business as usual

#20

Post by Nextgrid »

Drakim wrote: post #18
wkat4242 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure Google is milking them now by just selling ad words, they no longer care about the search results, just how much money they make

What you are saying sounds like hyperbole, but all it takes is for the management within google to blindly chase metrics and they end up doing exactly that.

That's the point - willingly saying that they promote spam sites to milk ad revenue could land them in antitrust trouble. But all they have to so is merely not do anything that would downrank said spam sites, and the outcome is exactly the same yet they are now legally in the clear and can just blame incompetence for the (totally predictable) outcome.
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