How could you prove how a black box algo ranks you?
You can't prove how a black box algo ranks you, but you can do a damn sight more than a throwaway comment accusing Google of cooking their algorithm out of spite.
(Disclaimer: I work for an Alphabet company)
However, they're the only ones that know their ranking algorithm. This means they can tailor their sites for the best possible ranking. It also means they can rewrite the algorithm in ways that better rewards Google (Let's give a boost to sites with the highest traffic, and exponentially drop off the boost as traffic decreases. Oh look, it turns out our own Google.com is quite popular, all of our services are under that domain, and they'll all see higher rankings).
I think you have a reasonable point, but given their prior experience with publicly criticizing Google, they also have a reasonable desire to remain anonymous.
I mean if Google is going to penalise them and risk their search integrity for a quip what's to stop them asking a bud over at HN to see if this account's IP is associated with another?
Infeasible of course but around the same likelyhood of happening
I disagree. It's much easier to identify me by my real name than by asking a third party to analyze server logs to find an IP and match it to users (many of which may be using the same public IP).
Those are the two things I was comparing, not how easy it is to identify someone.
I'm not comfortable with saying any more because, as hackuser says, I'm not risking the last two years of work (we've finally got back up to that level of Google traffic, though fortunately other traffic has grown immensely). I can simply offer this up and let people disregard it to the extent that they're willing to trust a throwaway account. You don't trust it at all, and that's fine.