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Comment by redthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Are you at liberty to speculate why those sites may have seen a big dip in Google referrals, or would that be giving away too much of your spam fighting wizardry?

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We can't go into detail about specific signals because we don't want them to be gamed, but we did do a blog post with advice for publishers about this update: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guid...

Huh. Most of those guidelines make sense (but they are so redundant they probably would not pass Panda's tests for readable-content vs keyword-stuffing), but this one stuck me as completely inappropriate, biased, and entering the realm of content manipulation: "Does the article describe both sides of a story?"

A system of rules which are only partially known, leaves the the advantage in the hands of those with access at the top of the barrel. You really think your ranks are so tight that information doesn't leak? And there for create more harm than good?

If the article is untrue, put it in writing. "Matt Cutts says Google doesn't use email as an indicator in search rankings" would kill the story.

You haven't said that, so it leaves me to believe that the article is true. And it is only the method of discovery you dislike.

actually, he has put in writing that the title of the story isn't true. I still think there are reasonable questions that haven't been answered but I'm not sure we'll actually get answers to those.

To be honest, I'm surprised we got this kind of response from Google at all. They generally don't weigh in on SEO theory.

Matt once told me that if I did a bad thing on my site there wasn't a penalty, I just didn't get as many points as I could. Semantics. When he says "there is no correlation between Email and search" I will maybe believe him. Maybe.

Maybe you are too young to remember the Matt Cutts "use no follow on internal links" debacle where he said that was a good idea.

I read the response from Google as Matt's annoyed a minion said something they shouldn't have, and Google's caught with their pants down on what is a pretty scary thought. "Google Reads Your Email And Does Scary S___ With It"

Okay, here you go: Google doesn't use email as an indicator in search rankings.

Realizing not everything Google puts in Patents ends up in search, I think I still don't believe you.

http://www.xyhd.tv/2011/05/industry-news/search-engine-optim...

This patent for "Ranking blog documents" seems to disagree: http://bit.ly/msgrsv

"[0044] References to the blog document by other sources may be a positive indication of the quality of the blog document. For example, content of emails or chat transcripts can contain URLs of blog documents. Email or chat discussions that include references to the blog document is a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document."

Andriy Bihun, the first name on the patent, is still a Google software engineer according to LinkedIn.

That's a good find, but the fact that a Google employee has a patent on using email links to rank blogs doesn't necessarily mean that Google's using it.

Of course you can't because they are so accurate. 70% increase in traffic one month followed by a 80% decrease on the same site. You people have lost touch and keep experimenting live with people's businesses and jobs. Wake up

You people have lost touch and keep experimenting live with people's businesses and jobs.

Not sure who's out of touch here. Is Google really experimenting with people's businesses and jobs, or are they experimenting with their own service on which people have, perhaps foolishly, bet their businesses and jobs?

If their changes are pissing off one segment of their users it may be because they are trying to please another, more profitable, segment of their users.

Jamesbritt - [i]Not sure who's out of touch here. Is Google really experimenting with people's businesses and jobs, or are they experimenting with their own service on which people have, perhaps foolishly, bet their businesses and jobs?

If their changes are pissing off one segment of their users it may be because they are trying to please another, more profitable, segment of their users.[/i]

Fine, all Google has to say is "we will use arbitrary ways of ranking and will support more those that $upport us with adwords" not spew nonsense.

P.S. With 70% market share Google is a monopoly and totally different rules apply.

ps:

  an *italicized* word, or *more than one*.

results in: an italicized word, or more than one.

Thank you very much Groxx.

Matt - If the search team or gmail team are using email engagement as an indicator of a site's reputation or usefulness... or even to grade the quality of email from a site, it's really problematic. This can so easily be exploited to hurt someone else's site. You just create thousands of fake gmail accounts, sign up for your competitor's newsletter with all of them, and then never open any of their emails. Presumably there are already people doing this... and making sure those "fake" account appear as real as possible so Gmail bots can't tell the difference.

To the best of my knowledge, we don't use email reputation in any way in our search rankings.

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