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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't look like there is any penalty against The Online Slang Dictionary. Google even one-boxes their site as the preferred answer for some searches!

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.

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When you put "slang dictionary" in the query it's going to significantly boost The Online Slang Dictionary's results, because you've included part of the site's name in the query.

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.

That seems fair. It wouldn't make sense for Google to generally rank The Online Slang Dictionary higher; Urban Dictionary is more popular and algorithms like PageRank would naturally prefer Urban Dictionary. When The Online Slang Dictionary ranks pretty well, but not as high as Urban Dictionary, but if you kinda include its name it ranks higher, that seems like appropriate search results.

> Urban Dictionary is more popular

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.

also, citations would be outgoing references and that is different from being linked TO. The in/out ratio was abused by SEO spammers and so as a result, google came to value sites with more inbound links. Every single word on UD has links to tweet/like/share. If this Walter guy added that feature and gave the site a few typographic finishing touches, who knows? Maybe the auto penalty would be less for having 5700-out/??-in ratio?

Honestly, the whole thing reads as a conspiracy fed by an anonymous (outdated?) source, and the Wikileaks-esque drip of leaks "culminating with full headers!" doubles down on feeling more like a cry for attention/help than an actual argument against (or even proof of) any kind of manual penalty actually being applied.

Yeah, if you hang around HN long enough you'll get the privilege of seeing the man himself lament about the supposed penalty. It's gotten really long in the tooth and it's the same spiel every time.

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.

I did come to the same conclusion, with the complaint itself as my sole source of information.

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.

You are looking for emotional excuses for Google’s uncompetitive behavior.

Agreed. the whole "some pages are ranked lower than what they've earned on their merit." bit seems pretty vague and subjective. Even when you can prove there's a penalty against your website, I don't see any evidence that those penalties are invalid. I agree that it's unfair for Google to not disclose this stuff, but it seems to me that this guy is just hoping Google gets enough bad press that they work with him, but this seems like a bad attitude to take when asking for help.

> fed by an anonymous (outdated?) source

The majority of Google employees don't work on search. Even fewer have access to webspam tools/code, for obvious reasons.

You may have missed this part of the article:

“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?”

The explanation of "Google Juice" given in the article is generally incorrect. Google very often does penalize sites by kicking them out of the index entirely. For example, see https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2013/08/01/what-is-pure-sp... .

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.

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