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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.

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> 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?

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