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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.

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.
  - rasz_pl 12y ago
    So in other words you got interested in Nest competition in the middle of Google-Nest acquisition negotiations?
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

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.
- rasz_pl 12y ago
  So in other words you got interested in Nest competition in the middle of Google-Nest acquisition negotiations?

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