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Comment by rozab | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any evidence at all for these extraordinary claims? Why would Urban Dictionary go to such lengths to suppress a competitor which posed no threat[0]?

I also notice that the homepage hasn't been updated at all for at least 8 years[1]. I suspect this may have had something to do with its decline.

[0]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2004-01-10%202...

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120107121814/http://onlineslan...

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You may want to read these posts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9977372

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5419890

Thank you for the links.

When I refer to Matt Cutts lying, I mostly mean his comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5426209

I have no idea what that business is with that company.

I did everything in his comment to address the claimed automated penalties: removed every single ad and every single citation from the site. No changes in ranking at all, after months. I forget how many. 6 months?

That’s because Matt Cutts was lying: there was a manual penalty in place at that time.

I have to say, after reading those posts, Matt is looking more trustworthy than the OP.

Especially considering the definitely-not-a-sock-puppet post by jimboykin [1], an account that was created immediately after this thread and has but a single post on HN.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5476100

I mean part of this issue is that there is no feedback to the website owner, which is shown by the guy only getting a response here on HN.

Like isn't it kind of insane that the top Google search engineer provided customer service to OP, but he couldn't get a response thru a normal channel.

I have evidence - it’s in the link. I also have proof, but I’m not comfortable with publishing my communication with the Google employee right now.

I have no idea why the penalty is in place. What I describe is “incredibly circumstantial.”

You say that my site poses no threat. Is that because it hasn’t seen traffic growth or become popular? The site is no threat exactly because the penalty is in place and has been for almost a decade. That’s a long time for a website. Traffic growth was very healthy before all of this.

The home page has been updated more recently than that, but you’re right that it still has the same page structure. With the manual penalty in place, it doesn’t matter how often I update the skin of the site or the home page text: the site is dead.

Just to save everyone the effort, the closest thing to evidence amid that blog post's many wild allegations is that the pandas update changes around citations hurt the site's google flow. This isn't surprising. That hit a lot of low quality websites that were essentially arbitraging google to aggregate content duplicated elsewhere on the web. I worked for a similar business with considerably more traffic. We didn't interpret it as some directed conspiracy against us. We knew from day 1 that's a risk of developing such a site, and why original content still matters a great deal. We adapted and moved on.

The remaining proof claimed is that a whistleblower told him Matt Cutts implemented a penalty manually. But while our poster is quite willing to share the allegation, they're not willing to share the communication.

There's no proof on offer here.

Unfortunately I followed the links before reading your comment. I wasted my time - there's no proof of lies or anything here. Just some claims.

Breaking the rules gets you dinged until you fix things. Repeatedly breaking rules results in more permanent dings. Both with search and with Adsense.

Edit: Is there any way to prove that Google isn't/hasn't unfairly penalized this site?

I'm more willing to suspend Hitchens Razor when a well known defendant has such a long history of doing much worse.

Is there any way to prove that Google isn't/hasn't unfairly penalized this site?

No.

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