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Are you saying that the only thing that Google did was to deprioritize sites with a lot of citations? Not that they deprioritized your site specifically? This

by daveed 6y ago

Are you saying that the only thing that Google did was to deprioritize sites with a lot of citations? Not that they deprioritized your site specifically? This kind of flag would affect every site they crawl. I feel like it's much more likely that it was made to prevent some class of abusers, and you were caught up in the scope of their net. I mean, every time they make a change in ranking some people get hurt and some people get helped. If this is a universal change and not tied to your domain I have a hard time believing that a team would've added this flag because a former employee makes a competing site with a slightly different model from you.

WalterGR 6y ago
Are you saying that the only thing that Google did was to deprioritize sites with a lot of citations? That was the automated penalty. The rest of your comment is correct. The manual penalty came later. I have a hard time believing that a team would've added this flag because a former employee makes a competing site with a slightly different model from you. As I said, that’s incredibly circumstantial. I don’t know the motive, cause, etc. I’m not going to publish my communication with the Google employee who informed me about the manual penalty at this time, so what I’ve written in that article is the extent of the public information at this time.