Google's penalty against The Online Slang Dictionary
onlineslangdictionary.com
onlineslangdictionary.com
In my case I had a forum (remember those!) in support of my software product.
Bots would occasionally create accounts and post links to knockoff handbags and watches. I'd tolerate (and swiftly kill!) them because our users really loved having a place to meet. (This was back in 2011, ironically, reCAPCTAHA landed in 2012)
Unbeknownst to me those links were part of a larger spam network where thousands of low-quality links pointed back to my site, presumably to those fake accounts(?).
When the penalty hit the process of trying to figure out what the heck went wrong and trying to do something about it -- identical.
In short, I've been penalized out of existence because of an obvious and in my humble opinion, easy to identify spam campaign. Sadly Google placed the cleanup burden on me, and try as I did nothing actually helped. The article's mention "hidden" penalties feels...accurate.
I often tell folks when you perform a Google search you're given worse results than you deserve. My site and goodness knows how many others have been placed so far below the fold that if we're not outright killed, we never reach the users and potential we should.
No biggie if the search market were more diverse, sadly, that is simply not the world we live in.
This may be the most relevant synopsis of Google search, that has ever been crafted.
In addition to that, there are a couple of reasons more, why spammers sometimes even actively chase nofollow links. For one, many people believe a certain amount of nofollow links is part of a "healthy" link profile: having 99% follow links might be considered a "bad signal" by Google, because nofollow is just so common, you are expected to have many nofollow links.
I will not judge this theory, but the theory does exist and is followed by some people.
Plus, the fact that it seems Google simply started considering nofollow as a kind of hint, not a decision, did not help the spam situation either.
Regarding whether the nofollow helps with at least avoiding the penalty, even if you are still spammed, nobody knows whether this might work. Google is usually uptight about what it does or does not do.
When nofollow is used for all user generated content they kind of have to take it as no more than a suggestion. Just ignoring UGC when it comes to ranking would throw away too much of the web.
He did, though. He cleaned up his website and deleted all the spam comments. How do you expect him to prevent other websites from linking to his?
The 10 (or so) spam accounts posted about 30 times. The longest lasting survived a weekend, after which I enabled manual account activation. From start to finish the spam issue lasted around 3 weeks. Eventually, I got rid of the forum altogether.
Alas I tried all the usual things, from the disavow tool to Webmaster forums and dozens of site changes, sadly nothing helped. My penalty felt back then and still appears to be, permanent.
It may help to know pre-penalty my rank was quite high, first page for most relevant search terms. (immediately after page 20 or lower, now around page 10).
Ironically, while the rank was nice to have I never actually did anything for it.
I simply built a fast, human first(!), site that inadvertently followed Google's site quality guidelines.
For example, my software generates web forms. One common growth tactic my competitors use is placing a link at the bottom of every form back to the parent site.
Me -- I never did that. I strongly felt that under no circumstance should the output of my software be used as a marketing tool. Sure it may harm growth, but it felt right, and that was enough for me.
Years after my penalty I read just that. Google frowns upon and may penalize sites for using such "widely distributed site links".
My focus was and always has been on user, so of course I'm the one who gets penalized lol.
Anyway, I think the most damning part of the process was not having a reasonable path for knowing what exactly happened and what I could do to help.
If I were crafting legislation that's where I'd start. I can't help that Google has the market-share it does, but it does mean we all have to play within their world.
All I ask is the rules, wherever they are, are fairly, justly, and evenly applied.
For example:
https://www.google.com/search?q=slang+dictionary+%22as+much+...
https://www.google.com/search?q=slang+dictionary+%22squeege%...
For some queries, Online Slang Dictionary even ranks above sites like Stack Exchange or Urban Dictionary. (Usually Urban Dictionary isn't so reputable, but for this sort of query, it's probably pretty relevant.)
What's the evidence here - some anonymous Google employee claimed the site was penalized back in 2013? That is not "hard confirmation" at all. Most likely, the site is not penalized at all. It just doesn't show up as often as Urban Dictionary and sites like english.stackexchange.com, and the operator is angry about that, but it honestly just isn't quite as good as those sites.
“Frequently asked questions
I just did a Google search and your site appeared in the first few results. Does that mean that the penalty has been removed?”
For the queries I linked, I gave a specific example of oneboxes because this is a user interface that's specifically promoting a result as good. If there's any sort of penalty on a site, it's unlikely to be placed in such a UI.
At the end of the day, it isn't entirely visible to us what the Google algorithm is doing. Google does manually blacklist pages that Google considers to be spam - see that searchenginewatch article for some more information. But it doesn't appear that this is happening here.
The Online Slang Dictionary is not being unfairly penalized by Google. It's just not that great of a website.
It is unfortunate that this type of arguments gain a lot of popularity, even among technical readers.
Of course, it is also possible that the complaint is completely justified, and it's just a coincidence that it's written in this conspiracy / paranoia style. Among thousands of consipiracy theories, there's probably some that are actually true. Sorting through them is not something I am interested in doing, though.
At no point does he consider that there is no penalty, his site is just not as useful as competitors and that is why it does not rank highly.
The majority of Google employees don't work on search. Even fewer have access to webspam tools/code, for obvious reasons.
If you just search squeege, Urban Dictionary is #2 and The Online Slang Dictionary is not in the top 10. If you just search "as much use as a chocolate teapot", Urban Dictionary is #5 and Online Slang Dictionary is #9.
I think this is exactly the point of contention: why is Urban Dictionary more popular? The author never says it outright, but appears to believe that it's because of the cumulative effect of this penalty over the last 8 years. This assumption is bolstered by the choice to include a photograph of the ex-googler and owner of Urban Dictionary posing with the person who ran the team instituting the penalties.
Then one day Google decided it didn’t like the site and it disappeared from the results. You could do a site: search and the pages would come up, so they were indexed. But they just didn’t rank anymore. Webmaster Tools was zero help. Showed everything was normal. No errors. No oddities.
The obvious notion is that it got hacked or there was content spam or something like that, but there wasn’t. No commenting system to game. Pages were all static HTML with no ads. Not even JavaScript to screw with.
The regulars kept coming, but with no Google referrals, traffic dwindled. I eventually took it offline since it wasn’t fun anymore.
The Google giveth, and the Google taketh away.
> The search engine, which brands itself as “more of a discovery engine,” allows users to filter the top million websites on the internet out of their search, resulting in a unique set of results and placing an emphasis on content discovery. This approach to search is also designed to combat the impact that aggressive black and grey hat SEO practices have on mainstream search results.[0]
If the owners are around : would you consider adding nojs support? I know it's an edge case request, sorry to be that guy. But then again, "search without top results" is not exactly a concept that will bring you the average web user :)
I'm not sure if there's a real solution though, pretty much every mechanism for solving this has far too many incentives to break it, so that you'd get traffic/clicks/purchases. Just too much money causes the metrics to be gamed.
IMHO, Matt Cutts (when he was at Google) had no incentive to lie to anyone, as he could simply ignore any questions from the website owners who wanted his response.
The fact that Matt actually bothered responding suggests that he was trying to help. He may have failed to help because he just didn't care enough, or ran out of time, or didn't understand what's going on, etc. But referring to his attempt as "lies" tells me a lot about Walter. In particular, it tells me that Walter isn't the type of person I'd like to help. Why bother, if things don't go to his satisfaction, he might just call me a "liar" later.
Walter should have never had to have had the interaction in the first place where Matt has to make the decision to help him because there should have been support avenues and no secret penalties in the first place. That's like blaming the abused.
Both of these steps are highly subjective. Especially the choice of the priors, since they are based on years of unique personal experiences and personal analysis of those experiences.
I would never attempt to change or challenge anyone's prior. I don't know whether human civilization will some day develop a way for people to converge to similar priors, but it's certainly not happening this century, so it won't be relevant to me.
Umm. Yes, he had a paycheck and bonus package as incentive. Performance reviews too.
But as to Walter's attacking on Cutts, that's just someone not willing to put in the work to being a responsible adult. When it comes to Google search, you can't accidentally hurt yourself/your-site unless you're a bull in a China shop. Also, Google's search is really complicated and I can't generalize for his specific situation but it's extremely likely that it was OP's fault for using 'black hat' techniques (either directly or indirectly).
I even understand that there's a ton of actual spammers out there, and it's not scalable to tell each of them "yes, you're really a spammer, you deserve de-ranking, go away". Still, I'd like to see someone at least try to find a better way to fix both problems.
- No details; promise to "leak" details later (but that never happened, and this page seems from ~2013?)
- Emotional language doesn't inspire confidence in reasonable and rational thinking about this, and it doesn't consider the possibility that Cutts was merely mistaken in his email, or mixed things up, or that there is something else not obvious that could explain the email.
- Calls the Google ranking algorithm a "penalty"; that this penalizes pages with quotations and the like is unfortunate, but lifting text from random websites is a a technique spammers use frequently. This is a rather unnuanced way to describe it.
- Even the mysterious "whistleblower" email doesn't strike me as very convincing.
- Insinuation that the site is penalized just because Cutts has ties to UrbanDictionary; which strikes me as unlikely.
Are parts of it true? Probably. The "automated penalty" probably is, but I wouldn't phrase it like that myself. The rest? Meh.
Last update was October 2020.
That he intends to release the whistle-blower mails with full headers suggest that he has confidence that they were sent from Google servers. We'll see, I guess.
Do agree that the language leans a bit too much in the emotional/conspiracy direction. Really doesn't help his case.
- no SSL because there was "no time"? It is trivial to enable SSL on such a simple website.
- the person has no idea how SEO works, I see no mention on noindex, nofollow, disavow or other common thingies to fight penalties.
I don't like google at all, just look at my twitter, but as arp242 said, this doesn't pass the sniff test at all.
Full disclosure, I recently founded a search engine and we are serving our own indexes to fight problems exactly like this.
Edit: Also I just saw it that is actually hilarious -- we'll get that fixed.
That seems like a bad thing to do against the whistleblower, since according to the redacted excerpts the whistleblower was using their Google mail address.
AML and KYC-like regulations for the information monopolies. I think we're heading in that direction, seeing the backlash to Facebook et al.
I wonder if Google will be able to identify that employee.
Put it another way: Sucks for this guy that google seems not to know about dictionaries and the importance of citations; and that whoever placed the manual penalty (assuming there's one) isn't completely well versed on intellectual property law.
Suppose that, again, the solution would be on more competition; it would encourage google to improve on nuances like those.
I strongly suspect that a few Googlers have too much time on their hands. This speaks volumes to Google’s eventual downfall that they can’t keep their employees busy doing more important work.
My second theory it’s tied to Google’s outsourced workforce in India that handles their advertising accounts and the advertising platform. I think those workers are penalizing the sites that don’t respond or buy more advertising. This workforce has too much access to try to manipulate advertising spend.
Also, everyone should know by now that Google counts on brands to buy advertising for their trademarks to keep them as the first result. Otherwise these company names show up as 2-10.
Google knows which sites should be #1 for any given term. These are manually curated.
I was there at the beginning and I wish more than anything we could have saved the web from becoming this mutated monstrosity that is hurting our civilization so badly.
What will they think instead?
I think it was due to comment spam since I didn't moderate the comments and since then the invisible penalty has never gone away. I've given up on trying. people just have to search "garys autoclicker" if they want to find it now, or have it bookmarked. "autoclicker" is pushed all the way back to page 4 for my site now. on bing I am page 2 behind basically autoclicker dot org and every other variation of the TLD
> Q: Can I get banned for using this?
> A: Sure, but don't be stupid and let it alch for you at 1.6 seconds for 100 hours, and I'm sure you will be OK.