
Google undeleted whocalled.us after a front page article on Hacker News - whocalledus
Last week I posted on HN that &#x27;Google deleted whocalled.us for “Pure Spam” and replaced it with spam&#x27; (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9050343).<p>I appreciated reading your thoughts, and it made me feel better because the worst part of it all was feeling like nobody could hear my protests that they made a mistake.<p>I made 8 reconsideration requests, which are messages you send Google to ask for a human to manually review the penalty. All of them were denied with the same automated response.<p>It did not feel like any humans actually read or thought about the situation, so I felt voiceless.<p>As usual, if you make a public scene, a large corporation will often notice, and look closer at that individual&#x27;s issue. I think that&#x27;s what happened in this case.<p>I happened to notice today that whocalled.us was back in Google, and the &quot;Pure Spam&quot; manual action had disappeared. There was no notice or explanation, and it feels like someone at Google saw my post, and quietly fixed it.<p>I thought it was important to notify HN about this.<p>I don&#x27;t know how to feel about this. I already removed AdSense from the site, and gave up on it. From a shortsighted view, I should be happy, and thank Google.<p>But this experience showed me that Google has more power over my website than I do.
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compbio
I saw your previous post and could not find egregious blackhat SEO stuff. The
backlink profile was not too healthy though, with around 250 domains
responsible for over 7000 backlinks. You said you got a spam warning on Google
Webmaster Tools: These penalties are hardly ever permanent.

> As usual, if you make a public scene, a large corporation will often notice,
> and look closer at that individual's issue. I think that's what happened in
> this case.

> I made 8 reconsideration requests .. all of them were denied.

Probably because you did not show a good will effort to clean up your act. At
least you do not tell us what were the contents of these reconsideration
requests. For all we know it was: "Reconsider me!"

From your previous post I gather that you were heavily annoyed with the
unnatural links actions and warnings. Instead of cleaning up your act for
Google you focused on a suggested unnatural link to claim it was all BS.

> As usual, if you make a public scene, a large corporation will often notice,
> and look closer at that individual's issue. I think that's what happened in
> this case.

I do think that the people at Google notice a prominent post on HackerNews.
But I do not think that they manually removed a spam penalty to avoid bad
publicity. If anything: allowing spammy sites in the index without even a slap
on the wrist is not good for publicity at all (and very visible to the users).
I think the pre-set penalty period was over, or a recrawl found a cleaner
site.

> But this experience showed me that Google has more power over my website
> than I do.

Google has more power over their search engine index than you do. You are free
to do whatever you want to do with your website.

I do have a question: The DuckDuckGo widget you had on your site (now changed
to a general link), was that an official widget? Did money exchange hands for
placing such a widget/link on every page of your site? I am wondering why a
site-wide link to a commercial page is not 'nofollow'-ed, and if that may have
brought you unwanted quality guidelines attention.

~~~
jschwartzi
A lot of the "spamminess" comes from practices that were perfectly acceptable
back when Google came out, or which are encouraged by the standards which
define how the Web operates. For example, each phone number in his database
has a specific URL which you can use to access it. Many of these pages have
similar features, being that the whole point of the site is to aggregate
discussions about suspect phone numbers. This is a similar profile to the
"download" sites that have proliferated, except that in this case each URL
links to something useful, where the URLs on the download sites link to
nothing useful.

Further, the whole point of the Web is to link pages together. That Google
penalizes one site author for what other site authors do is a problem with
Google, not a problem with the author. In the previous posting he indicated
that Google asked him to contact the various site authors and ask them to
remove their links. Why should he have to do this?

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adventured
"In the previous posting he indicated that Google asked him to contact the
various site authors and ask them to remove their links. Why should he have to
do this?"

He shouldn't have to do that. It's incompetence on Google's part. The solution
to spammy links, is to drop their value to zero, not to generate a penalty for
the site that is the target of said spammy links. This is a flaw in how Google
has chosen to handle low quality sites and spammy links. The incompetence
aspect is that they failed to be creative enough to find a better solution,
and fell back to using a hammer approach.

~~~
compbio
This used to be the "solution" to spammy links: Drop their value to zero. This
caused an entire eco-system of spammers with the mentality: "I'll just
generate 1000 links without the prospect of a penalty in the hope that 10
links stick. I then bill my client for a 1000 links, since there is no way to
see which links are devalued".

Google's creative solution was to make sure to webmasters that: yes, these
links do hurt your rankings. Instead of linkbuilding and diluting the precious
link-signal, these spammers now offered link-profile-cleaning services
(Mission. F-cking. Accomplished. [http://xkcd.com/810/](http://xkcd.com/810/)
).

~~~
csense
So wait, if you want to take somebody else's website off Google, all you have
to do is make a bunch of spammy links to it?

This is insane.

Spammers should now be linking to a site and then telling the site owners, "If
you want to get your Google rank back, pay us $1000 to take our links down."

~~~
arenaninja
This is a thing, in case you're wondering. At my current job, there was a
spike a week ago with more than 1k spam links. We've no idea where they're
from, or how to disassociate ourselves from it

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adventured
It takes some effort, but you can disavow those links:

[https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en)

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geetee
Fixing mistakes without accepting blame or acknowledging the error always
bothers me. Does it stem from the fear of a lawsuit-happy society, or
embarrassment?

~~~
nostrademons
I suspect that a lawsuit-happy society is a good part of it.

Having been on the other side a few times (the one who quietly fixed an error
without acknowledgement), there are a number of other factors at work as well:

1\. Sometimes, fixing the error is within my power but talking to the customer
is not. For example, when I was at Google, I was an engineer - fixing a bug
was something I could do merely with a code review, but talking to the outside
world was forbidden by company policy, and I didn't even know who the people
were that were authorized to speak to the outside world on company behalf.

2\. Very often, the error is one of several dozen in a bug queue, and you just
want to fix it and move on. Talking to someone - particularly a customer - is
a big mental context switch; it means that 5 _other_ people won't get their
errors fixed at all.

3\. Sometimes the error is a distraction from your normal job duties, you feel
like you can do a good deed by taking 5 minutes of your day to tweak a config
file, but you don't want it to blow up any larger than that, and usually once
a user has your attention they feel free to ask you to fix all their _other_
annoyances. This is a big problem with working on open-source software; I've
never yet had a good deed take less than 5x the amount of time I budgeted for
it, and usually involve a few people mad at me. (I often find out later that
many other people are very appreciative, but the latter never seem to speak
up).

I think the fundamental problem is a mismatch between our expectations as
human beings, which are shaped by millenia of face-to-face interactions, and
the reality of modern society, where we are just a ticket number to a faceless
corporation. Internet companies like Google and Facebook have roughly a
million users per engineer working on the product; Whatsapp has 50 million.
Imagine the scale of insignificance of any one problem; by the numbers, a user
of a consumer product is roughly as consequential as a hair on your head. That
could be why we get such shitty service from basically every major consumer
company out there.

~~~
scottcanoni
This seems likely:

"fixing the error is within my power but talking to the customer is not."

~~~
fenomas
To be fair, "a temporary ban expired automatically" seems equally plausible...

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unabridged
The name appearing on the front page of HN may have changed how many people
were searching for the site and clicking its link, taking it from the spam
bucket to the content bucket.

It may have also changed google's view on which people are searching for and
visiting the site. Before, its search traffic was people searching for phone
numbers, a random cross section of people who get spam phone calls. After, its
a specific name brand being searched for by possibly well connected tech
workers who are logged into google+.

~~~
fenomas
Fair points, yeah. I think this is akin to fitting curves to a single data
point.

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mdesq
There's a possible case to be made that Google should be regulated in some
way, perhaps as a public utility, with requirements for human interaction.
It's unacceptable that they have as much power over the Internet as they do
and still hide behind the facade of a machine.

~~~
warmfuzzykitten
You might make a case for regulation if a) you could show that Google is a
monopoly and b) Google used its monopoly power to shut out competition or
control market pricing. But, at least in the U.S., the former is not true - a
market share of 75% is necessary to establish a per se monopoly - unless the
latter is true, and the latter is patently untrue. "Attract a lot of eyeballs"
is not, thank goodness, grounds for regulation, or Twitter and Facebook would
surely be regulated.

There is no facade. Google search is algorithmically driven, and no one has
ever shown that its algorithms discriminate unfairly.

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chdir
Your experience is scary-pleasant. Perhaps someone should start a peer-
reviewed list : why-google-blacklisted.me where the top voted ones would stand
a chance of getting reviewed by non-bots at Google. In all likelihood, a
situation like this gives nightmares to entrepreneurs on a daily basis.

Edit: Another recent similar incident:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8873149](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8873149)

~~~
lingben
So in essence you want thousands of people to volunteer their time and energy
to do the work that a multi-billion dollar corporation should be doing in the
first place?

"Don't be evil" at this point is a punch line

~~~
chdir
You didn't give an alternate solution?

Someone mentioned here there's a million to 1 user to engineer ratio. As much
as I would want Google to fix the issue, I don't expect that happening anytime
soon. If all of us can collectively help the community fix bugs then why not?
Just like countless other crowdsourced intelligence tools (e.g. wot browser
extension, ad blockers etc.).

~~~
lingben
Isn't it obvious?

The alternative solution is that google takes responsibility for the quality
of their search results and actually pays people to work on it. I know they
like to pretend that everything is automated but we all know it clearly isn't.

And no, they don't need to hire a $300,000 a year engineer to do this work.
You don't need advanced programming knowledge or experience to be able to
judge whether a website has a real case when they submit a reconsideration
request.

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Bahamut
It could also be that someone from Google saw the post and put in a request
for reconsideration on your behalf too. Unfortunately, a perk of working at
Google means that any requests by Google employees get extra consideration (at
least with several issues friends have had to deal with involving Google
taking down videos/channels on YouTube)

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dm2
Isn't it likely that they just made a minor "algorithm" update that fixed the
real reason why your site was penalized?

Maybe they reset your penalty as a "thank you" for bringing it to their
attention?

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solve
Google search is FAR more human-driven than they'll ever admit to - for legal
and PR reasons.

~~~
lingben
I think most people who are even remotely interested in SEO know this to be
true.

~~~
solve
Or remotely familiar with modern machine learning. With a company of that
budget, all important systems ultimately go through a supervised learning
layer. Practically nothing important uses unsupervised learning end-to-end.

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malchow
I am the cofounder of a company that serves as an alternative to AdSense. Get
in touch with me: joe@publir.com.

~~~
lingben
what does this have to do with adsense or its competition?

~~~
pearjuice
OP gave up on AdSense.

