7 ms·

It's a shame that Pando's inquiry didn't make it to me, because the suggestion that Google took action on vivint.com because it was somehow related to Nest is s

It's a shame that Pando's inquiry didn't make it to me, because the suggestion that Google took action on vivint.com because it was somehow related to Nest is silly. As part of a crackdown on a spammy blog posting network, we took action on vivint.com--along with hundreds of other sites at the same time that were attempting to spam search results. We took action on vivint.com because it was spamming with low-quality or spam articles like - https://web.archive.org/web/20130919184930/http://anadesign.info/small-attract-home-buyers.html https://web.archive.org/web/20130919184930/http://anadesign.... for "Alburquerque NM home security system" - http://www.womenspk.com/5-ideas-for-keeping-your-elderly-relatives-better-protected/ http://www.womenspk.com/5-ideas-for-keeping-your-elderly-rel... - http://www.frugalful.com/2013/12/five-surprising-ways-to-save-money-on-your-homes-expenses.html http://www.frugalful.com/2013/12/five-surprising-ways-to-sav... - http://doyoulovewhereyoulive.com/archives/top-10-benefits-of-automating-your-home http://doyoulovewhereyoulive.com/archives/top-10-benefits-of... - http://arch.itect.us/2013/01/17/top-10-benefits-of-automating-your-home/ http://arch.itect.us/2013/01/17/top-10-benefits-of-automatin... and a bunch more links, not to mention 25,000+ links from a site with a paid relationship where the links should have been nofollowed. When we took webspam action, we alerted Vivint via a notice in Webmaster Tools about unnatural links to their site. And when Vivint had done sufficient work to clean up the spammy links, we granted their reconsideration request. This had nothing whatsoever to do with Nest. The webspam team caught Vivint spamming. We held them (along with many other sites using the same spammy guest post network) accountable until they cleaned the spam up. That's all.

BorisMelnik 12y ago
Thank you Matt. Agree, even a quick look from a not-so savvy SEO at their backlink anchor text you can see that they were intentionally building a ton of links. I think the only thing that made it a tad fishy was the timing. It just seemed like the acquisition happened, then the penalty tight after.
- danso 12y ago
  In defense of the OP, the Google spam-punishing procedure is not purely objective or run as an unsupervised automation...it seems that Rap Genius would not have even been discovered had a blogger not made a relatively innocuous inquiry about RG's very public solicitations...which was then upvoted to the top of HN and presumably to Cutts' attention. And then after RG was reinstated, there were complaints that had it not been such a high-profile startup, the Google team would not have reinstated it so quickly (but in the defense of RG, they described and released the source code to the program they used to hunt down the bad links, which made it clear that RG handled the process in a way more efficiently than most other companies might have). So Google's banhammer is wielded by humans with biases...that much is clear...but do we really know the order of cause-and-effect here? Perhaps this suspicious timing was an inadvertent screwup of Vivint's...that is, right after Google's acquisition of Nest, someone on Vivint's marketing team thought, "Oh shit, better step up our back-link game"...and then took it to a level that triggered a Google investigation. That chain of events could also explain the coincidental timing...and also could mean that both Cutts and Vivint's CEO are both telling the honest truth, as far as they know (not all CEOs are privy to the actual workings and details of their marketing teams)
  - Matt_Cutts 12y ago
    In this case, we started dissecting this particular spammy guest blog posting network in November of 2013, and Google didn't acquire of Nest until January of 2014. So Vivint was link spamming (and was caught by the webspam team for spamming) before Google even acquired Nest.
    - gregr401 12y ago
      Unless details of when the due-diligence occurred for the purchase, this point is really moot. I hardly doubt your board decided to drop a cool 3.2B the night before the Nest announcement.
      - skj 12y ago
        They certainly didn't tell the eng staff about it until then.
- Matt_Cutts 12y ago
  The strange thing to me is that when we took action, our notice told Vivint it was for unnatural/spammy links to their site. It's really not hard to find these spammy posts, so I'm not sure where the disconnect happened. Regarding timing, Blekko did a neat site called http://www.spamclock.com/ http://www.spamclock.com/ that claims a million spam pages are created every hour. It's safe to assume that Google algorithmic + manual protections against spam have to operate at that scale. As Del Harvey pointed out in a recent TED talk at http://blog.ted.com/2014/03/19/how-to-keep-240-million-twitter-users-safe-del-harvey-at-ted2014/ http://blog.ted.com/2014/03/19/how-to-keep-240-million-twitt... , "[At Twitter], a one-in-a-million chance happens 500 times a day." And since Google operates on an even bigger scale than the volume of daily tweets, you end up with these sort of occurrences. For example, it's virtually guaranteed that some website's rankings went up today, and they happened to start using AdWords today. Likewise, it's virtually guaranteed that some website's rankings dropped today, and they happened to start using AdWords today. There's no causality there--buying AdWords doesn't help your Google ranking--but to that particular website, it might look like causality even though it's just the law of large numbers. I think the logical fallacy is called "Post hoc, ergo propter hoc"?
  - whoismua 12y ago
    For example, it's virtually guaranteed that some website's rankings went up today, and they happened to start using AdWords today. Likewise, it's virtually guaranteed that some website's rankings dropped today, and they happened to start using AdWords today One thing is for sure though Matt, Adword clicks will almost certainly grow by 20% this quarter and have been growing at least that much since Panda, every quarter. Ad placements plays a role too but surely removing the "free traffic" via penalties and pandas provides them an incentive to pay for traffic. Google has soul their credibility for ad clicks. Another sure thing is that junk from Youtube, Google+, Google Local and other Google properties will be drowning the best pages. So you see why Google has no credibility. This post, 3-4 years ago would have gotten many laughs from HN-ers and serious internet users, now your credibility is in the toilet. You continuous of brand favoritism virtually ensures that your advertisers are rewarded while small mom and pop businesses go kaput.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
8ig8 12y ago
Thanks, Matt. I always appreciate your input here. Your response sounds legit. In general, I still think that G is in an awkward position. Essentially we have to believe that Google, a company whose primary goal is to make money, can effectively police itself and operate on a level playing field. Yet there is a lot of secrecy in the things they do and just like any other company they deserve that right (I guess). I wonder if 'we' can do much else at this point except _trust_ what you are saying.
- btian 12y ago
  Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. There's nothing in the mission statement about making money...
  - camillomiller 12y ago
    Are you joking, right?
    - btian 12y ago
      No. If maximizing next quarter/year's profits is Google's primary goal, then the logical thing will be to slash R&D, cut back on benefits, eliminate CapEx, basically what Mark Hurd did to HP. If you mean Google has to make money to survive in the long term, then that's absolutely true, just as it's true for any other company (Microsoft, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo etc.) I don't see any evidence that Google is more profit centric than any other company.
      - camillomiller 12y ago
        You don't need to be profit centric to insist on a path you think will lead to a greater good. That's enough to scare me, frankly. And, I don't understand why a multimillion public company should be ever trusted just because, well, they say so. Paving the way to hell have always looked great from the outside, you know, because of all the good intentions put towards it.
- 12y ago
dude3 12y ago
Truce.
- Matt_Cutts 12y ago
  Hey dude3, I mentioned this lower in the thread, but we started dissecting this spam link network in November 2013, well before Google even bought Nest.
- dude3 12y ago
  Truce
  - Matt_Cutts 12y ago
    dude3, you know Larry Page doesn't have me on speed dial for companies he's planning to buy, right? No one involved with this webspam action (including me) knew about the Nest acquisition before it was publicly announced.
  - dude3 12y ago
    Truce
DigitalSea 12y ago
Thank you Matt. Right from the man himself. I think we can put this so-called controversy behind us.
- blencdr 12y ago
  Google sometimes seems to be the sacred cow of HN...
r0fl 12y ago
Matt, I have tried reporting a website that buys 100% of its links (I used to work for them and have tons of proof) and is being rewarded with 2.5-3mil hits a day from google and yet no one seems to care! Is there a way to get my point across or do I have to write a blog post that gets picked up by HN to get any action taken?
- Matt_Cutts 12y ago
  Well, the best way to report spam is with our spam report form at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?pli=1 https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?pli=1 because then we can prioritize the report along with other complaints. But you can also post in our webmaster forum at https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters or catch us during webmaster office hours--see https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/office-hours https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/office-h... for the schedule of upcoming office hours. Or catch one of us at a search conference (I'll be at SMX Advanced in Seattle in June and at Google I/O later in June). If none of those work, I often pass on spam reports that people tweet to me (or when they do a blog post and tweet me that link). You can also tweet to @googlewmc (for Google Webmaster Central). Or if you add an email address on your HN profile, I'll drop you a note.
  - r0fl 12y ago
    Thanks Matt, I have tried the first link several times with no luck. I've heard that it's a myth that it actually gets checked but seems that may be wrong :) I will try all the other avenues mentioned and worst case will fly to Seattle to report this site in person. Site that is blatantly spamming is plaintube and is ranking for an insane amount of adult terms. I'll try to get my point across via the methods you described. It would be wrong of me to hijack this thread to get my point across anymore. Thanks for your time.
  - r0fl 12y ago
    Email added in the profile. I would be more than willing to show how you guys are sending millions of hits (daily!) to a site scraping content and buying cheap backlinks. I'm surprised that such tactics work in 2014, and am just as surprised that I got your attention. Hacker news is a powerful place!
Theo_Stirling 12y ago
I have to call bs on Matt's response for two reasons. Digging a bit deeper I found that the bottom two links you mention Matt are both scraped from a site called freshome.com. This raises the question should sites/brands be worried about content that gets scraped and put on low quality sites? That sort of "manipulation" seems quite inorganic. My second question is what about Nest posting on Freshome.com as well found here: http://freshome.com/2011/10/26/greening-your-home-with-a-sexy-and-smart-thermostat/ http://freshome.com/2011/10/26/greening-your-home-with-a-sex... THEN we see the scrapes on the same sites found here: http://doyoulovewhereyoulive.com/archives/greening-your-home-with-a-sexy-and-smart-thermostat http://doyoulovewhereyoulive.com/archives/greening-your-home... http://arch.itect.us/2011/10/26/greening-your-home-with-a-sexy-and-smart-thermostat/ http://arch.itect.us/2011/10/26/greening-your-home-with-a-se... Notice how both NEST articles are found on doyoulovewhereyoulive.com AND arch.itect.us? Case in point, Nest has links from the EXACT SAME SITES and didn't get penalized. This raises a huge red flag. If these links are the reason that Vivint was penalized, I'd love to hear how Nest somehow managed to escape a penalty.
- kbenson 12y ago
  Maybe NEST disavowed the links using the disavow tool? Whatever the reason, raising concern is appropriate, but calling bullshit without all the information is overreaching and inappropriate.
  - camillomiller 12y ago
    The problem is that they won't say. We're here, discussing of a potential violation - voluntary or not - of antitrust laws. All we have is a muddy answer by the lonely marketing gunslinger Google has put in chief of public replies to search issues. How is this possible? Matt is the ultimate super-nice guy, and I think he's sincerely helpful and motivated, but he's nonetheless the keeper of a smoke screen. I think this way of handling (better: brushing off) issues is unacceptable for a giant corporation whose search branch personifies the Web for a way too large amount of users. Google is in a position of monopoly, at least on a cultural basis. Even if they don't exploit their power with evil intentions, they still retain it. They corporate mission may state what they want, but I don't get why that should be enough. It's a Public Company, and nobody should ever be satisfied with answers of the "take our word for it" kind. And that "don't be evil" mantra? I've seen much too shit in the last few years to still believe it's not just an empty marketing motto.
rholdy 12y ago
Great post Matt. Thanks a lot. Vivint is a super shady company in just about every way possible. It's no surprise that they resort to shady SEO. If only Google could get rid of their Doucebag salesman as well...
antr 12y ago
Thank you Matt. I used to be a Pando reader, but in the past months, for some unknown reason, they started publishing vindictive articles. No proper research, random arguments... while seeing themselves as 'true-seekers', in a very Machiavellian way. Now, as a former Pando reader I'm better off not visiting their site.
logicallee 12y ago
Your examples don't strike me as low-quality or spam articles. Maybe if they were in Nature or Science or IEEE Spectrum. I think you should have a wider perspective, plenty of lifestyle sites I go on have poorer-quality articles that I choose to read, and I can certainly see paid relationships which are pretty transparent when I do so (as can most readers). I actually pay money to buy these magazines, and read articles like this (on many different subjects), so it is fair to say that I would pay to read content like this. I found them interesting. I wouldn't have paid to read your comment though, probably because I don't care about SEO. (Not a reflection on your comment.)
arek2 12y ago
I have a website 5000best.com/tools with a ranking of web tools, and I received so far about 40-50 link removal requests. I rejected them all. First I answered to those people, later I stopped answering, because that's waste of my time. The reason of all that nonsense seems to be this article: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/07/new-notifications-about-inbound-links.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/07/new-notif... and notifications in Google Webmaster Tools that tell people that spammy links point to their website, but do not tell them specifically which links Google does not like. I understand that Google uses link data mainly to estimate popularity of a website. I don't understand why so large company, a global monopoly with so large revenue, and so much data gathered, can't figure out which sites are more popular than others without wasting webmasters' time. What's so difficult about that task? Why shift any work burden on website owners? If this task is too difficult, maybe it's time to support the competition, or create a serious competition. Maybe Google does not deserve to be the largest search engine and get all the profits.
- bagosm 12y ago
  Why dont you just "nofollow" the links? Everyone should be happy
  - arek2 12y ago
    I "nofollow" the links. Also that is additional work and unnecessary burden for webmasters.
  - PavlovsCat 12y ago
    Wouldn't that break the whole point of links and page rank? I link to things I genuinely like or find useful. The only things I nofollow are things I bitch about, because I am petty and don't want to give them any google juice. Other than that, a link is an endorsement, and if Google doesn't like me "liking too many things", that's Google's problem for not understanding websites that are the work of love.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  It's actually much worse than that. Plenty of the links that those removal requests are all about were placed by spamming comments, creating millions of bogus accounts across as many services in order to boost PR. That was done automatically. So now, after the penalty hammer comes down the automatically placed junk supposedly has to be manually removed by the website where the spam was posted, usually accompanied by some vaguely threatening words to the effect of 'if you don't comply we'll use the disavow tool'. I wish them good luck and refuse to honour any of these requests, they can disavow until they're blue in the face. See, sending out those vaguely threatening emails is still almost at 0 penalty (it is an automated action) but using the google disavow tool requires a human. Preferably google should add some really nasty captcha or hard to solve puzzle there for every link disavowed.
joelmaharry 12y ago
Matt, it looks like you and Google are clearly in the right here, and in fact you work with a very high degree of integrity as a rule. I really admire the job you're doing. However, there is an inherent conflict of interest, or, at least, the potential for a conflict, when the company that regulates and provides "fair playing field" oversight, Google, is also the company that is fighting competitive, commercial battles on so many fronts because of its many, many forays into paid services and products. Again, this is not a criticism of what you and your Google search brethren are doing – I'm with many people when I say I'm in awe of the job you're doing – but to point out the conflicted business model that Google is pursuing. Best, Joel MaHarry
paulfwalsh 12y ago
I might understand your action if you removed their company from search results when people searched for related keywords. But to remove them when someone searches for their company name is just wrong. You have enough engineers and resource to implement a better solution than to just wipe a company from the Web.
- donbmarks 12y ago
  yes, this is a very good point and should be easy to differentiate between a branded company name versus (emd or other spam profile) also, they continue to sell ads for these branded company searches to other competitors
kaatnbt 12y ago
SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURE. The "spammy links" are just the legal excuse. Why is everyone so blind?
ManyFaces7 12y ago
You flush a company from existence and then offer them zero help in getting their existence reinstated. This is something an asshole would do. But this is par for the course when it comes to small businesses interacting with Google. They don't give a crap about helping. They will gladly take your ad dollars, but anything outside of paying them is seen as an offense that can result in your company being banned. Google is evil. Let there be zero doubts.
atnyc 12y ago
Wait, wait, wait. Didn't your bosses recently complain about the EU directive to protect privacy as being "censorship"? Yet Google feels it has the right to determine what is "low-quality" or "spam" articles in determining web rankings? How's that not "censorship"? Also, do you ban everything that shows up on say, Buzzfeed, since by any measure that's low-quality and spam.

BorisMelnik 12y ago

Thank you Matt. Agree, even a quick look from a not-so savvy SEO at their backlink anchor text you can see that they were intentionally building a ton of links. I think the only thing that made it a tad fishy was the timing. It just seemed like the acquisition happened, then the penalty tight after.

danso 12y ago
In defense of the OP, the Google spam-punishing procedure is not purely objective or run as an unsupervised automation...it seems that Rap Genius would not have even been discovered had a blogger not made a relatively innocuous inquiry about RG's very public solicitations...which was then upvoted to the top of HN and presumably to Cutts' attention. And then after RG was reinstated, there were complaints that had it not been such a high-profile startup, the Google team would not have reinstated it so quickly (but in the defense of RG, they described and released the source code to the program they used to hunt down the bad links, which made it clear that RG handled the process in a way more efficiently than most other companies might have). So Google's banhammer is wielded by humans with biases...that much is clear...but do we really know the order of cause-and-effect here? Perhaps this suspicious timing was an inadvertent screwup of Vivint's...that is, right after Google's acquisition of Nest, someone on Vivint's marketing team thought, "Oh shit, better step up our back-link game"...and then took it to a level that triggered a Google investigation. That chain of events could also explain the coincidental timing...and also could mean that both Cutts and Vivint's CEO are both telling the honest truth, as far as they know (not all CEOs are privy to the actual workings and details of their marketing teams)
- Matt_Cutts 12y ago
  In this case, we started dissecting this particular spammy guest blog posting network in November of 2013, and Google didn't acquire of Nest until January of 2014. So Vivint was link spamming (and was caught by the webspam team for spamming) before Google even acquired Nest.
  - gregr401 12y ago
    Unless details of when the due-diligence occurred for the purchase, this point is really moot. I hardly doubt your board decided to drop a cool 3.2B the night before the Nest announcement.
    - skj 12y ago
      They certainly didn't tell the eng staff about it until then.
Matt_Cutts 12y ago
The strange thing to me is that when we took action, our notice told Vivint it was for unnatural/spammy links to their site. It's really not hard to find these spammy posts, so I'm not sure where the disconnect happened. Regarding timing, Blekko did a neat site called http://www.spamclock.com/ http://www.spamclock.com/ that claims a million spam pages are created every hour. It's safe to assume that Google algorithmic + manual protections against spam have to operate at that scale. As Del Harvey pointed out in a recent TED talk at http://blog.ted.com/2014/03/19/how-to-keep-240-million-twitter-users-safe-del-harvey-at-ted2014/ http://blog.ted.com/2014/03/19/how-to-keep-240-million-twitt... , "[At Twitter], a one-in-a-million chance happens 500 times a day." And since Google operates on an even bigger scale than the volume of daily tweets, you end up with these sort of occurrences. For example, it's virtually guaranteed that some website's rankings went up today, and they happened to start using AdWords today. Likewise, it's virtually guaranteed that some website's rankings dropped today, and they happened to start using AdWords today. There's no causality there--buying AdWords doesn't help your Google ranking--but to that particular website, it might look like causality even though it's just the law of large numbers. I think the logical fallacy is called "Post hoc, ergo propter hoc"?
- whoismua 12y ago
  For example, it's virtually guaranteed that some website's rankings went up today, and they happened to start using AdWords today. Likewise, it's virtually guaranteed that some website's rankings dropped today, and they happened to start using AdWords today One thing is for sure though Matt, Adword clicks will almost certainly grow by 20% this quarter and have been growing at least that much since Panda, every quarter. Ad placements plays a role too but surely removing the "free traffic" via penalties and pandas provides them an incentive to pay for traffic. Google has soul their credibility for ad clicks. Another sure thing is that junk from Youtube, Google+, Google Local and other Google properties will be drowning the best pages. So you see why Google has no credibility. This post, 3-4 years ago would have gotten many laughs from HN-ers and serious internet users, now your credibility is in the toilet. You continuous of brand favoritism virtually ensures that your advertisers are rewarded while small mom and pop businesses go kaput.
- anigbrowl 12y ago

8ig8 12y ago

Thanks, Matt. I always appreciate your input here. Your response sounds legit. In general, I still think that G is in an awkward position. Essentially we have to believe that Google, a company whose primary goal is to make money, can effectively police itself and operate on a level playing field. Yet there is a lot of secrecy in the things they do and just like any other company they deserve that right (I guess). I wonder if 'we' can do much else at this point except _trust_ what you are saying.

btian 12y ago
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. There's nothing in the mission statement about making money...
- camillomiller 12y ago
  Are you joking, right?
  - btian 12y ago
    No. If maximizing next quarter/year's profits is Google's primary goal, then the logical thing will be to slash R&D, cut back on benefits, eliminate CapEx, basically what Mark Hurd did to HP. If you mean Google has to make money to survive in the long term, then that's absolutely true, just as it's true for any other company (Microsoft, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo etc.) I don't see any evidence that Google is more profit centric than any other company.
    - camillomiller 12y ago
      You don't need to be profit centric to insist on a path you think will lead to a greater good. That's enough to scare me, frankly. And, I don't understand why a multimillion public company should be ever trusted just because, well, they say so. Paving the way to hell have always looked great from the outside, you know, because of all the good intentions put towards it.
12y ago

dude3 12y ago

Truce.

Matt_Cutts 12y ago
Hey dude3, I mentioned this lower in the thread, but we started dissecting this spam link network in November 2013, well before Google even bought Nest.
dude3 12y ago
Truce
- Matt_Cutts 12y ago
  dude3, you know Larry Page doesn't have me on speed dial for companies he's planning to buy, right? No one involved with this webspam action (including me) knew about the Nest acquisition before it was publicly announced.
- dude3 12y ago
  Truce

DigitalSea 12y ago

Thank you Matt. Right from the man himself. I think we can put this so-called controversy behind us.

blencdr 12y ago
Google sometimes seems to be the sacred cow of HN...

r0fl 12y ago

Matt, I have tried reporting a website that buys 100% of its links (I used to work for them and have tons of proof) and is being rewarded with 2.5-3mil hits a day from google and yet no one seems to care! Is there a way to get my point across or do I have to write a blog post that gets picked up by HN to get any action taken?

Matt_Cutts 12y ago
Well, the best way to report spam is with our spam report form at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?pli=1 https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?pli=1 because then we can prioritize the report along with other complaints. But you can also post in our webmaster forum at https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/webmasters or catch us during webmaster office hours--see https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/office-hours https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/office-h... for the schedule of upcoming office hours. Or catch one of us at a search conference (I'll be at SMX Advanced in Seattle in June and at Google I/O later in June). If none of those work, I often pass on spam reports that people tweet to me (or when they do a blog post and tweet me that link). You can also tweet to @googlewmc (for Google Webmaster Central). Or if you add an email address on your HN profile, I'll drop you a note.
- r0fl 12y ago
  Thanks Matt, I have tried the first link several times with no luck. I've heard that it's a myth that it actually gets checked but seems that may be wrong :) I will try all the other avenues mentioned and worst case will fly to Seattle to report this site in person. Site that is blatantly spamming is plaintube and is ranking for an insane amount of adult terms. I'll try to get my point across via the methods you described. It would be wrong of me to hijack this thread to get my point across anymore. Thanks for your time.
- r0fl 12y ago
  Email added in the profile. I would be more than willing to show how you guys are sending millions of hits (daily!) to a site scraping content and buying cheap backlinks. I'm surprised that such tactics work in 2014, and am just as surprised that I got your attention. Hacker news is a powerful place!

Theo_Stirling 12y ago

I have to call bs on Matt's response for two reasons. Digging a bit deeper I found that the bottom two links you mention Matt are both scraped from a site called freshome.com. This raises the question should sites/brands be worried about content that gets scraped and put on low quality sites? That sort of "manipulation" seems quite inorganic. My second question is what about Nest posting on Freshome.com as well found here: http://freshome.com/2011/10/26/greening-your-home-with-a-sexy-and-smart-thermostat/ http://freshome.com/2011/10/26/greening-your-home-with-a-sex... THEN we see the scrapes on the same sites found here: http://doyoulovewhereyoulive.com/archives/greening-your-home-with-a-sexy-and-smart-thermostat http://doyoulovewhereyoulive.com/archives/greening-your-home... http://arch.itect.us/2011/10/26/greening-your-home-with-a-sexy-and-smart-thermostat/ http://arch.itect.us/2011/10/26/greening-your-home-with-a-se... Notice how both NEST articles are found on doyoulovewhereyoulive.com AND arch.itect.us? Case in point, Nest has links from the EXACT SAME SITES and didn't get penalized. This raises a huge red flag. If these links are the reason that Vivint was penalized, I'd love to hear how Nest somehow managed to escape a penalty.

kbenson 12y ago
Maybe NEST disavowed the links using the disavow tool? Whatever the reason, raising concern is appropriate, but calling bullshit without all the information is overreaching and inappropriate.
- camillomiller 12y ago
  The problem is that they won't say. We're here, discussing of a potential violation - voluntary or not - of antitrust laws. All we have is a muddy answer by the lonely marketing gunslinger Google has put in chief of public replies to search issues. How is this possible? Matt is the ultimate super-nice guy, and I think he's sincerely helpful and motivated, but he's nonetheless the keeper of a smoke screen. I think this way of handling (better: brushing off) issues is unacceptable for a giant corporation whose search branch personifies the Web for a way too large amount of users. Google is in a position of monopoly, at least on a cultural basis. Even if they don't exploit their power with evil intentions, they still retain it. They corporate mission may state what they want, but I don't get why that should be enough. It's a Public Company, and nobody should ever be satisfied with answers of the "take our word for it" kind. And that "don't be evil" mantra? I've seen much too shit in the last few years to still believe it's not just an empty marketing motto.

rholdy 12y ago

Great post Matt. Thanks a lot. Vivint is a super shady company in just about every way possible. It's no surprise that they resort to shady SEO. If only Google could get rid of their Doucebag salesman as well...

antr 12y ago

Thank you Matt. I used to be a Pando reader, but in the past months, for some unknown reason, they started publishing vindictive articles. No proper research, random arguments... while seeing themselves as 'true-seekers', in a very Machiavellian way. Now, as a former Pando reader I'm better off not visiting their site.

logicallee 12y ago

Your examples don't strike me as low-quality or spam articles. Maybe if they were in Nature or Science or IEEE Spectrum. I think you should have a wider perspective, plenty of lifestyle sites I go on have poorer-quality articles that I choose to read, and I can certainly see paid relationships which are pretty transparent when I do so (as can most readers). I actually pay money to buy these magazines, and read articles like this (on many different subjects), so it is fair to say that I would pay to read content like this. I found them interesting. I wouldn't have paid to read your comment though, probably because I don't care about SEO. (Not a reflection on your comment.)

arek2 12y ago

I have a website 5000best.com/tools with a ranking of web tools, and I received so far about 40-50 link removal requests. I rejected them all. First I answered to those people, later I stopped answering, because that's waste of my time. The reason of all that nonsense seems to be this article: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/07/new-notifications-about-inbound-links.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/07/new-notif... and notifications in Google Webmaster Tools that tell people that spammy links point to their website, but do not tell them specifically which links Google does not like. I understand that Google uses link data mainly to estimate popularity of a website. I don't understand why so large company, a global monopoly with so large revenue, and so much data gathered, can't figure out which sites are more popular than others without wasting webmasters' time. What's so difficult about that task? Why shift any work burden on website owners? If this task is too difficult, maybe it's time to support the competition, or create a serious competition. Maybe Google does not deserve to be the largest search engine and get all the profits.

bagosm 12y ago
Why dont you just "nofollow" the links? Everyone should be happy
- arek2 12y ago
  I "nofollow" the links. Also that is additional work and unnecessary burden for webmasters.
- PavlovsCat 12y ago
  Wouldn't that break the whole point of links and page rank? I link to things I genuinely like or find useful. The only things I nofollow are things I bitch about, because I am petty and don't want to give them any google juice. Other than that, a link is an endorsement, and if Google doesn't like me "liking too many things", that's Google's problem for not understanding websites that are the work of love.
jacquesm 12y ago
It's actually much worse than that. Plenty of the links that those removal requests are all about were placed by spamming comments, creating millions of bogus accounts across as many services in order to boost PR. That was done automatically. So now, after the penalty hammer comes down the automatically placed junk supposedly has to be manually removed by the website where the spam was posted, usually accompanied by some vaguely threatening words to the effect of 'if you don't comply we'll use the disavow tool'. I wish them good luck and refuse to honour any of these requests, they can disavow until they're blue in the face. See, sending out those vaguely threatening emails is still almost at 0 penalty (it is an automated action) but using the google disavow tool requires a human. Preferably google should add some really nasty captcha or hard to solve puzzle there for every link disavowed.

joelmaharry 12y ago

Matt, it looks like you and Google are clearly in the right here, and in fact you work with a very high degree of integrity as a rule. I really admire the job you're doing. However, there is an inherent conflict of interest, or, at least, the potential for a conflict, when the company that regulates and provides "fair playing field" oversight, Google, is also the company that is fighting competitive, commercial battles on so many fronts because of its many, many forays into paid services and products. Again, this is not a criticism of what you and your Google search brethren are doing – I'm with many people when I say I'm in awe of the job you're doing – but to point out the conflicted business model that Google is pursuing. Best, Joel MaHarry

paulfwalsh 12y ago

I might understand your action if you removed their company from search results when people searched for related keywords. But to remove them when someone searches for their company name is just wrong. You have enough engineers and resource to implement a better solution than to just wipe a company from the Web.

donbmarks 12y ago
yes, this is a very good point and should be easy to differentiate between a branded company name versus (emd or other spam profile) also, they continue to sell ads for these branded company searches to other competitors

kaatnbt 12y ago

SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURE. The "spammy links" are just the legal excuse. Why is everyone so blind?

ManyFaces7 12y ago

You flush a company from existence and then offer them zero help in getting their existence reinstated. This is something an asshole would do. But this is par for the course when it comes to small businesses interacting with Google. They don't give a crap about helping. They will gladly take your ad dollars, but anything outside of paying them is seen as an offense that can result in your company being banned. Google is evil. Let there be zero doubts.

atnyc 12y ago

Wait, wait, wait. Didn't your bosses recently complain about the EU directive to protect privacy as being "censorship"? Yet Google feels it has the right to determine what is "low-quality" or "spam" articles in determining web rankings? How's that not "censorship"? Also, do you ban everything that shows up on say, Buzzfeed, since by any measure that's low-quality and spam.