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Google is Breaking the Internet

jeremypalmer.com

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Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#251

Post by josephjrobison »

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…

Are you not able to simply ignore bad links because when you did that years ago, people would just pump and dump thousands of links to see what stuck?

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#253

Post by aaronwall »

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.

Affiliate marketer & spammer are not natural synonyms.

Some entities might try to say it is six of one & a half dozen of the other, http://www.seobook.com/brand-vs-affiliate-vs-spam but those same entities do not view their own affiliate marketing efforts as spam, even when they are pure spam http://www.seobook.com/google-lends-a-helping-hand

Look at the cloaked affiliate YouTube links to iTunes on music videos. And Google has invested in Viglink, RetailMeNot, etc.

In addition to those types of investments, it was Google's ad programs which funded entities like Mahalo & eHow.

There are zero affiliates which have made as much off affiliate marketing as Google has.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#254

Post by aaronwall »

mike_hearn wrote: post #195
jroseattle wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 r…

Your thesis would be true if Google didn't have monopoly marketshare & continue buying default (search / browser) placements in other software.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#255

Post by ryan-allen »

macoughl wrote: post #218
nivla wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 levie…

Sounds like a classic Bait and Switch, albeit a good 10 year long one on Google's behalf.

They needed to provide a useful service to begin with to get the traction (good search algorithms for the web-that-is), but now that they are the incumbent, it is more in their interests to penalise website owners and force them to buy ads.

It's sad, but it's normal monopolist behaviour.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#256

Post by PavlovsCat »

moultano wrote: post #196
PavlovsCat wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That IS a better theory that "I frequently get emails from random people on the internet who ask all sorts of insanely idiotic things", indeed.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#257

Post by zenbowman »

lingben wrote: post #22
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, this does not address whatsoever the point being brought up. And in case you missed it, I will try to cite it as clearly as possible here: This is a case where google wants people to mold the internet according to what their current incarnation of their algorithm says the way it should be. Rather than google trying to mold its algorithm to understand the internet, natural links vs. spams, and their respective a…

> The model (google's algo) should fit reality. Rather than forcing reality to fit the model.

It is impossible for Google to exist at its current scale and not influence the Internet.

The tiger is born out of adaptation to the jungle, but in time, the jungle too will adapt to the tiger.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#258

Post by walshemj »

javajosh wrote: post #80

Are there any documented cases of a black hat attacking a site by linking to it too much? This would seem to be a difficult attack to thwart.

Yep spoke to some one (major banded publisher) last year that accentually did it to themselves.

You can also get a site dinged by doing UGC spamm against you - again I have seen that an helped a major publisher get the penalty lifted

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#259

Post by lugg »

jonknee wrote: post #236
lugg wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But that is my point what counts as legitimate advertising? Who decides whether a link is non passing advertising or not. Google is the gatekeeper here. They get to decide what links are "advertising" and what are naughty naughty black hat so. Are you saying that if the seo guys labeled their spam links as advertising it would be legit and google would just ignore the links?

Now they are telling you how you should advertise as wellas which adworks are allowed to sell you links. Want to try some viral marketing where you dont tell the user it was advertising - just brand awareness and a link back? Oops no that's trying to mess with Page rank were going to flag your site.

Its ludicrous.

Look I know they're not out to hit the good guys and the spammy tactics of bh seo peeps is gross as hell but I dont think you can really draw a definite line here without collateral damage being inflicted which is what I think this article was trying to point out.

Re: Google is Breaking the Internet

#260

Post by gkya »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #92
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?

Yes, we work to avoid this sort of attack when designing our ranking algorithms.

For most of your comments are getting greyed out, I might think that there is some other people that'd back my words.

You're Google employee, right? You lot have gone quite cheeky nowadays. You're exploiting the monopoly you hold in the search market, to make people adhere to your standards, instead of adhering the standards the internet community naturally generates. I'd suggest Google engineers to go develop better algorithms instead of telling the internet off.

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