4 ms·

If this would happen to a less popular site, what chances does a site-owner have of getting attention to this problem, and getting it fixed?

by relix 14y ago

WalterGR 14y ago
None. Even if you know people within Google, there's so much fear of allegations of impropriety that employees are too afraid to even ask the appropriate team if there's a possible mistake that they should look at.
drone 14y ago
A similar issue (removed from search results, but remained in index) happened to my site due to a DNS issue last year, and I had to perform some magic steps+ in webmaster tools and we re-appeared in search within a day or so. + no magic, I just don't remember what exactly I had to do.
Matt_Cutts 14y ago
Hey relix, it took an unfortunate chain of corner cases for this to happen, and for this situation it was actually more likely for the corner cases to hit a larger site rather than a less popular site. In general, when a member of the webspam team directly applies a manual webspam action against a site, we also drop a note to the site owner at http://google.com/webmasters/ http://google.com/webmasters/ . That helps the site owner tell whether something is going on with manual spam vs. just algorithmic ranking. Then any site can do a reconsideration request at the same place or post in our webmaster forum at https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters . People like to scrutinize Google, so I've noticed that writing a "Google unfairly penalized me" blog post typically makes its way to us pretty often.
- WalterGR 14y ago
  Hi Matt, That doesn't match my experience. Could you explain the penalty against onlineslangdictionary.com? Showing citations of slang use[1] caused what appears to be an algorithmic penalty. The correlation between showing citations and the presence of a penalty is apparent: http://onlineslangdictionary.com/static/images/panda/overview-charts.png http://onlineslangdictionary.com/static/images/panda/overvie... Missing from those 3 charts is the one showing that citations were once again removed over 120 days ago, yet the penalty remains. It would appear that the algorithmic penalty was turned into a manual penalty. I've followed all procedures including those listed in your comment, without resolution. [1] By citations of slang use, I mean short (1-3 sentence) attributed excerpts of published works, shown within the appropriate definitions, as evidence of the correctness of those definitions. All citations were gathered and posted by hand.
  - Matt_Cutts 14y ago
    Hi Walter, the only manual webspam action I see regarding onlineslangdictionary.com is from several years ago (are you familiar with a company called Web Build Pages or someone named Jim Boykin?), but that no longer applies here. You're affected by a couple algorithms in our general web ranking. The first is our page layout algorithm. See http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layo... or http://searchengineland.com/google-may-penalize-ad-heavy-pages-100601 http://searchengineland.com/google-may-penalize-ad-heavy-pag... for more context on that. In particular, comparing a page like http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/compy http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/compy to a page like http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Pepperazzi&defid=6571433 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Pepperazzi&#3... , your site has much more prominent ads above the fold compared to Urban Dictionary. Your site is also affected by our Panda algorithm. Here's a blog post we wrote to give guidance to sites that are affected by Panda: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guid...
    - Matt_Cutts 14y ago
      P.S. One other quick thing. I saw you sending me tweets, but the tweets looked fairly repetitive, and you hadn't chosen a Twitter avatar. I get a lot of tweets from bots, and this looked fairly close to bot-like to me: https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/315232934040846337/photo/1 https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/315232934040846337/phot... That (plus the fact that the site had no current manual webspam actions, plus the fact that I wasn't sure what you meant by citations) meant that I didn't reply. Hope that helps.
      - WalterGR 14y ago
        Makes sense. All the tweets were by hand. I tried to tweet every weekday but missed some, then eventually gave up. I just didn't know what to do upon getting no feedback from you guys after posting to the Google Webmaster forums, filing reconsideration requests, contacting friends at Google, posting to and commenting on Reddit about it, commenting on HN about it, posting to Facebook, blogging, and tweeting about it, and putting a yellow box at the top of all pages on the site mentioning the penalty and linking to a page with the details. Thanks again for talking with me about this. (I'd still like to hear about Web Build Pages / Jim Boykin and the rest - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5444996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5444996 ...)
- relix 14y ago
  Thanks Matt, that's good to know.
  - Matt_Cutts 14y ago
    You bet. I thought https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5422855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5422855 was a pretty good example of that. I'd never heard of Amy Wilentz, but her blog post made it our way via several channels and made the front page of HN today. Admittedly it was a bad fact to get wrong, but I think it still demonstrates that blogging about Google doing something suboptimally can get a fair amount of attention.

If this would happen to a less popular site, what chances does a site-owner have of getting attention to this problem, and getting it fixed?

by relix 14y ago

If this would happen to a less popular site, what chances does a site-owner have of getting attention to this problem, and getting it fixed?

WalterGR 14y ago

None. Even if you know people within Google, there's so much fear of allegations of impropriety that employees are too afraid to even ask the appropriate team if there's a possible mistake that they should look at.

drone 14y ago

A similar issue (removed from search results, but remained in index) happened to my site due to a DNS issue last year, and I had to perform some magic steps+ in webmaster tools and we re-appeared in search within a day or so. + no magic, I just don't remember what exactly I had to do.

Matt_Cutts 14y ago

Hey relix, it took an unfortunate chain of corner cases for this to happen, and for this situation it was actually more likely for the corner cases to hit a larger site rather than a less popular site. In general, when a member of the webspam team directly applies a manual webspam action against a site, we also drop a note to the site owner at http://google.com/webmasters/ http://google.com/webmasters/ . That helps the site owner tell whether something is going on with manual spam vs. just algorithmic ranking. Then any site can do a reconsideration request at the same place or post in our webmaster forum at https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters . People like to scrutinize Google, so I've noticed that writing a "Google unfairly penalized me" blog post typically makes its way to us pretty often.

WalterGR 14y ago
Hi Matt, That doesn't match my experience. Could you explain the penalty against onlineslangdictionary.com? Showing citations of slang use[1] caused what appears to be an algorithmic penalty. The correlation between showing citations and the presence of a penalty is apparent: http://onlineslangdictionary.com/static/images/panda/overview-charts.png http://onlineslangdictionary.com/static/images/panda/overvie... Missing from those 3 charts is the one showing that citations were once again removed over 120 days ago, yet the penalty remains. It would appear that the algorithmic penalty was turned into a manual penalty. I've followed all procedures including those listed in your comment, without resolution. [1] By citations of slang use, I mean short (1-3 sentence) attributed excerpts of published works, shown within the appropriate definitions, as evidence of the correctness of those definitions. All citations were gathered and posted by hand.
- Matt_Cutts 14y ago
  Hi Walter, the only manual webspam action I see regarding onlineslangdictionary.com is from several years ago (are you familiar with a company called Web Build Pages or someone named Jim Boykin?), but that no longer applies here. You're affected by a couple algorithms in our general web ranking. The first is our page layout algorithm. See http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layo... or http://searchengineland.com/google-may-penalize-ad-heavy-pages-100601 http://searchengineland.com/google-may-penalize-ad-heavy-pag... for more context on that. In particular, comparing a page like http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/compy http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/compy to a page like http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Pepperazzi&defid=6571433 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Pepperazzi&#3... , your site has much more prominent ads above the fold compared to Urban Dictionary. Your site is also affected by our Panda algorithm. Here's a blog post we wrote to give guidance to sites that are affected by Panda: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guid...
  - Matt_Cutts 14y ago
    P.S. One other quick thing. I saw you sending me tweets, but the tweets looked fairly repetitive, and you hadn't chosen a Twitter avatar. I get a lot of tweets from bots, and this looked fairly close to bot-like to me: https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/315232934040846337/photo/1 https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/315232934040846337/phot... That (plus the fact that the site had no current manual webspam actions, plus the fact that I wasn't sure what you meant by citations) meant that I didn't reply. Hope that helps.
    - WalterGR 14y ago
      Makes sense. All the tweets were by hand. I tried to tweet every weekday but missed some, then eventually gave up. I just didn't know what to do upon getting no feedback from you guys after posting to the Google Webmaster forums, filing reconsideration requests, contacting friends at Google, posting to and commenting on Reddit about it, commenting on HN about it, posting to Facebook, blogging, and tweeting about it, and putting a yellow box at the top of all pages on the site mentioning the penalty and linking to a page with the details. Thanks again for talking with me about this. (I'd still like to hear about Web Build Pages / Jim Boykin and the rest - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5444996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5444996 ...)
relix 14y ago
Thanks Matt, that's good to know.
- Matt_Cutts 14y ago
  You bet. I thought https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5422855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5422855 was a pretty good example of that. I'd never heard of Amy Wilentz, but her blog post made it our way via several channels and made the front page of HN today. Admittedly it was a bad fact to get wrong, but I think it still demonstrates that blogging about Google doing something suboptimally can get a fair amount of attention.