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Ok, if you want a great example of how Google is using black boxes to do social engineering, this is 100% it. The writer doesn't know for certain those things

Ok, if you want a great example of how Google is using black boxes to do social engineering, this is 100% it. The writer doesn't know for certain those things were hurting him, but out of fear their whole marketing strategy changed and now they are going about the business of getting links taken down. Now, you could argue that they should have been more thoughtful about their SEO efforts in the first place, but consider how deeply dysfunctional it is that webmasters are so afraid of Google and Matt Cutts that they are begging each other to take down links they paid for in the first place. There is no scientific proof that any of these links had anything to do with them ranking well or badly or changing their CTR or anything, the author is just assuming it's these things that hurt their Google traffic. Google's ranking policies are now the equivalent of the webmaster boogie man.

walshemj 13y ago
Well from experience site wide paid links will get you dinged hard I know of one household name publication from a major publisher in the UK that had a salesman that thought it would be a good idea to sell links. They where penalised hard by google - and they had to grovel to get back in. Pity that getting burned once didn't make them take our advice on SEO.
magicalist 13y ago
> consider how deeply dysfunctional it is that webmasters are so afraid of Google and Matt Cutts that they are begging each other to take down links they paid for in the first place Wait, how is that dysfunctional? "should have been more thoughtful about their SEO efforts in the first place" implies at least a likelihood that they would want to rescind their earlier actions, which is what they're doing. That seems...functional. I mean, living in fear of only somewhat specified rules likely has other consequences that discourage good behavior in other ways, but the specifics you describe seems like what you'd want to happen[1]. [1] http://xkcd.com/810/ http://xkcd.com/810/

walshemj 13y ago

Well from experience site wide paid links will get you dinged hard I know of one household name publication from a major publisher in the UK that had a salesman that thought it would be a good idea to sell links. They where penalised hard by google - and they had to grovel to get back in. Pity that getting burned once didn't make them take our advice on SEO.

magicalist 13y ago

> consider how deeply dysfunctional it is that webmasters are so afraid of Google and Matt Cutts that they are begging each other to take down links they paid for in the first place Wait, how is that dysfunctional? "should have been more thoughtful about their SEO efforts in the first place" implies at least a likelihood that they would want to rescind their earlier actions, which is what they're doing. That seems...functional. I mean, living in fear of only somewhat specified rules likely has other consequences that discourage good behavior in other ways, but the specifics you describe seems like what you'd want to happen[1]. [1] http://xkcd.com/810/ http://xkcd.com/810/