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Comment by powertower | Hacker News Reader

> You are free to do whatever you want to do with your website.

When you are dealing with a monopoly, which Google has on many large segments of traffic type (i.e., Bing and Yahoo are non-relevant in those segments), you are at the mercy of that monopoly. And hence they have the power over you. Which is often abused by being dismissive towards you.

Google keeps forgetting that the website owners provide the content that Google indexes and monetizes-on to sells ads (via search and other channels), and that they are in a relationship.

Except that relationship is often abused by treating webmasters like they are garbage.

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When you rely on Google for visitors/income, then they have some power over you. Agreed. Google still can't force you to change your website content. If you run Adsense on your site, and Google finds that your website content quality is low, then they will simply stop their contract with you.

That Google abuses their monopoly to be dismissive towards webmasters and treating webmasters like they are garbage is, as it stands, unfounded. Which other search engine has an active webmaster forum, webmaster education and webmaster tools? Which other search engine warns you about spam or technical problems on your sites?

> Google keeps forgetting that the website owners provide the content that Google indexes and monetizes-on to sells ads

Google does not forget this. It just hails quality over making a buck, shown by banning ads on websites that do not conform to the quality guidelines.

I was not referring to anything adsense specific.

On the rest, if you believe that, then you must have been absent for the other million times when an individual was thrown into the garbage bin by Google, and told "you did something wrong (maybe), but we won't tell you what, nor will we ever respond to you again."

> It just hails quality over making a buck, shown by banning ads on websites that do not conform to the quality guidelines.

While this is not true for every category, in my personal experience and in many reported other cases that analysed the traffic sent by Adwords' "partner network" (that Google derives a large part of their profits from) is half made up of auto-generated sites, links farms, and automated fraud clicks, and has been so for the last decade. This, and other shenanigans (like the 500MM pill ad settlement) goes against what you are claiming.

> Which other search engine has an active webmaster forum, webmaster education and webmaster tools? Which other search engine warns you about spam or technical problems on your sites?

Bing has many of those.

> On the rest, if you believe that, then you must have been absent for the other million times when an individual was thrown into the garbage bin by Google, and told "you did something wrong (maybe), but we won't tell you what, nor will we ever respond to you again."

I've seen this a lot (too much). In fact this attitude of "Google sandboxed us and we have no clue why!" is as old as SEO forums. I've helped people fix their on-page and backlink issues. I've submitted successful reconsideration requests. I've made ads cheaper by linking them to higher quality pages. I did not fix this by picking them out of some hypothetical garbage bin. I fixed this by fixing their honest and dishonest mistakes and making them compliant with the quality guidelines.

Here at HN we have hellbanning. Do people get hellbanned by mistake (probably, but hopefully rare). Should we respond to every single person hellbanned, and explain to them what they did wrong, while they continue to be oblivious haters? It is a matter of how you view it I suppose.

I do not think that half-made-up fact is true, but I will not challenge you on this.

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