
Google is Breaking the Internet - kposehn
http://jeremypalmer.com/post/86123982870/google-is-breaking-the-internet
======
ronnier
I own [http://ihackernews.com](http://ihackernews.com) which reformats
HackerNews for mobile phones.

I had a DMCA takedown notice sent to me on behalf of a website owner who
didn't want me linking to their site. My hosting provider gave me 24 hours to
remove the link or else they'd cancel my account.

The owner of the link claimed that their Google rankings were dropping because
my site, iHackernews, linked to their site. With this, they were able to force
me to remove it via a DMCA takedown notice.

~~~
greenyoda
Why didn't you challenge the takedown notice as being fraudulent? As far as I
know, DMCA does not prohibit linking to web pages; it's only about hosting
someone else's copyrighted content on your site (or maybe posting links to
pirated content).

~~~
WildUtah
Challenging a DMCA takedown requires you to accept that your whole site will
be taken down for ten days while you wait to have a right to challenge the
takedown. Businesses or projects that have to keep functioning have to comply
with any takedown regardless of its validity because they can't just go out of
business for ten days in order to challenge it.

~~~
greenyoda
Wouldn't temporarily removing the disputed item pending the resolution of the
challenge prevent your entire site from being taken down?

------
Matt_Cutts
I talked about this phenomenon recently on This Week in Google with Leo
Laporte and Gina Trapani: [http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-
google/248](http://twit.tv/show/this-week-in-google/248) Skip to 4:15 in to
listen to the discussion.

Note that there are two different things to keep in mind when someone writes
in and says "Hey, can you remove this link from your site?"

Situation #1 is by far the most common. If a site gets dinged for linkspam and
works to clean up their links, a lot of them send out a bunch of link removal
requests on their own prerogative.

Situation #2 is when Google actually sends a notice to a site for spamming
links and gives a concrete link that we believe is part of the problem. For
example, we might say "we believe site-a.com has a problem with spam or
inorganic links. An example link is site-b.com/spammy-link.html."

The vast majority of the link removal requests that a typical site gets are
for the first type, where a site got tagged for spamming links and now it's
trying hard to clean up any links that could be considered spammy.

If you read the original post closely, it's clear that this is a site asking
for a link to be removed--the quoted email isn't from Google.

~~~
lingben
Matt, this does not address whatsoever the point being brought up. And in case
you missed it, I will try to cite it as clearly as possible here:

This is a case where google wants people to mold the internet according to
what their current incarnation of their algorithm says the way it should be.

Rather than google trying to mold its algorithm to understand the internet,
natural links vs. spams, and their respective authority and value.

Google here is saying that all links from this site are suspect, even when the
link in question is 100% valid, quality and relevant.

Instead of going back to the drawing board and trying to fix the algorithm,
google has discovered that since they are so big now, it is easier to play the
"benevolent" dictator and dictate to the whole internet, how and what they
should be doing.

And to mete out knuckle raps when they get out of line.

Do you see the point now?

The model (google's algo) should fit reality. Rather than forcing reality to
fit the model.

I believe this is what the author is trying to communicate by saying "google
is breaking the internet" \- what he means is that the internet is becoming a
'google' version of itself, rather than what it would naturally be.

~~~
Matt_Cutts
It's not just Google that recommends to avoid link spamming. For example, at
[http://www.seroundtable.com/bing-links-
knowledge-18535.html](http://www.seroundtable.com/bing-links-
knowledge-18535.html) you can read where Bing said "You should never know in
advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from. If you do, that’s the
wrong path."

When SEOs break the quality guidelines of all major search engines (not just
Google), then they might need to do some work to clean things up if they get
caught.

One of the reasons that Google is such a popular search engine is that we do
take spam seriously and we take action to counter spam.

~~~
jamesbritt
_When SEOs break the quality guidelines of all major search engines (not just
Google), then they might need to do some work to clean things up if they get
caught._

This still seems to be missing the point.

As I understand it, sites that are not doing anything in the realm of SEO can
get penalized because of the actions of people outside of their control.

If the wrong sorts of sites (however defined), sites outside my control, are
linking to my site, why am I penalized, and why should the burden be placed on
me to go fix it?

~~~
Matt_Cutts
"If the wrong sorts of sites (however defined), sites outside my control, are
linking to my site, why am I penalized, and why should the burden be placed on
me to go fix it?"

Well, if a website was link spamming then it seems appropriate that the site
should attempt to clean up the spam they made before they can rank well in
Google again. Otherwise it's not fair to the other websites that have been
trying to rank fairly and would like a level playing ground.

In general, if you weren't trying to create spam links, then it's very
unlikely that any of this is an issue for you and the burden isn't on you to
fix it. I made a video about the "what if the wrong sorts of sites link to my
site" question here:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWJUU-g5U_I](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWJUU-g5U_I)

~~~
nivla
>In general, if you weren't trying to create spam links, then it's very
unlikely that any of this is an issue for you and the burden isn't on you to
fix it.

So if Bing wants to rank Bing.com higher than Google.com on the keyword
"Search Engine", all they need to do is to pay link farms to link to Google?

Like everything this could go both ways. If you penalize sites for having
links from link farms, what is stopping your competitors from paying link
farms to link to your website? or worse yet, some link farm owner comes up
with an ingenious idea to hold other websites hostage until they pay up?

It would be more understanding if Google din't have any other resources on
hand to make smart decisions but heck you guys have hands on realtime
experience with most traffics via Google Analytics, Google Adsense and even
DNS. All these resources and can't even distinguish a link farm from a
legitimate site? Doesn't sound believable.

~~~
MitziMoto
> All these resources and can't even distinguish a link farm from a legitimate
> site? Doesn't sound believable.

The Google webspam team seems to prefer psychology over technology to solve
the problem, especially recently. Nearly everything that's come out of Matt
Cutt's mouth in the last 18 months or so has been a scare tactic.

IMO all this does is further encourage the development of "churn and burn"
websites from blackhats who have being penalized in their business plan. So
why should I risk all the time and effort it takes to generate quality web
content when it could all come crashing down because an imperfect and
overzealous algorithm thinks it's spam? Or worse, some intern or non-google
employee doing a manual review wrongly decides the site violates webmaster
guidelines?

~~~
aaronwall
>prefer psychology over technology<

yup.

>Nearly everything that's come out of Matt Cutt's mouth in the last 18 months
or so has been a scare tactic.<

the bizarre thing is the gap in perceptions internal to Google versus
external.
[https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/449008706655510528](https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/449008706655510528)
[https://polldaddy.com/poll/7916680/](https://polldaddy.com/poll/7916680/)

>IMO all this does is further encourage the development of "churn and burn"
websites from blackhats who have being penalized in their business plan.<

Absolutely. churn & burn sites, and then some mixed in parasitic hosting on
sites which are already highly trusted.

------
sbierwagen
Jeremy Palmer is a SEO marketer, who also appears to be doing some scammy
affiliate thing. Google considers his links low quality because they are low
quality.

~~~
anon1385
> Google considers his links low quality because they are.

So what? Why should I have to care that Jeremy Palmer (or any other person) is
linking to my site?

The point of the article is that webmasters are going around trying to get
links to their sites removed because it might get them penalised by Google.
That is not natural or desirable behaviour. Site owners shouldn't have to care
about that. Many have resorted to adding 'nofollow' to all of their own
outbound links for fear of being punished by Google for linking to 'spammy'
sites and appearing to be part of a paid/circular links scheme.

It all sounds very broken to me.

Note: I have no interest in SEO whatsoever, and I only have a single low
traffic web site.

~~~
sbierwagen
If you've got bad links, just disavow them. Wikipedia has to nofollow links
because anybody in the world can add a spammy link to an article. NYT
nofollows links because they're old media, and don't understand the web.

~~~
anon1385
People use nofollow because they believe (rightly or wrongly, none of us know
for sure since it's a secret) that if you link to a site that later turns out
to be a link farm you can be punished for it because it appears to Google that
you are part of the paid links scheme. 'Turns out' meaning either it was a
link farm all along and you didn't notice, or didn't think it mattered, or
because the site got bought/hacked and now is just a link farm. (I'm using
'link farm' in the broadest possible sense here since I'm not familiar with
all the various ways a site can be deemed to be engaging in paid links and I
believe there are quite a few and it's intentionally vague).

Even if Google isn't penalising you for that today, they may well tomorrow. So
using nofollow seems like quite a rational thing to do for any individual site
as there isn't any downside as far as I know, only potential benefits.

Additionally, manually disavowing links hardly seems like a scalable solution.
As somebody with a small website that I spend very little time maintaining, I
don't want to have to regularly be checking some Google console for 'bad
links'that I have to manually disavow to prevent getting delisted.

~~~
xentronium
> Even if Google isn't penalising you for that today, they may well tomorrow.
> So using nofollow seems like quite a rational thing to do for any individual
> site as there isn't any downside as far as I know, only potential benefits.

Breaking internet connectivity is a downside for society as a whole.

------
milesf
My solution has been to recommend friend and family to switch to
[http://DuckDuckGo.com](http://DuckDuckGo.com) (or just
[http://ddg.gg](http://ddg.gg))

This may seem to be an impossible task, but in days not too long ago people
switched search providers often. I went from the curated links of Yahoo, to
Lycos, to AltaVista, to Webcrawler, to Google, and now DDG.

Google got a lot of mileage out of my in my mind with their motto "Don't be
Evil", because I had some trust for them. I don't trust them anymore, and I
regularly explain to others why they should no longer trust them either.

~~~
gcb0
what is the love this crowd has with duckduck?! it is nothing more than bing
with EXTRA ads!

also, it display a retarded "this page uses javascript. click here for the
content" or something, every time i use it from my HTPC with firefox+noscript.

~~~
anonbanker
[https://duckduckgo.com/html/](https://duckduckgo.com/html/) should solve your
htpc's problem.

------
andybak
From my understanding Wikipedia adds nofollow to stop incentivising people
from constantly trying to sneak links into Wikipedia to boost SEO.

 _Any_ ranking system that gave _any_ value to links would suffer this
problem.

nofollow is a necessary evil if you allow untrusted sources to publish content
on your site that contains links. It's a way of saying "I don't vouch for
these links in the same way I vouch for other links on my site".

Sounds pretty reasonable to me.

~~~
ronaldx
The issue here is that a link is not supposed to say "I vouch for this site".

A link is supposed to be a hyperlink.

Google creates a false incentive to link/not link, and then complains when
people link in a way that they don't approve of. This is a problem of Google's
making.

------
franze
is google breaking the internet? naah (well at least not with google search -
G+, google local and the new horrible google maps is a complete other story)

are webmasters breaking the net because they follow SEO worst practices?
definitely.

i wrote this article for techcrunch in 2010
[http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/07/startups-linking-to-your-
co...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/07/startups-linking-to-your-competition-
will-help-you-no-really/) the tl;dr: pagerank is thoughtcancer, if you start
thinking of links as some flow of mystical pagerankjuice you will make bad
decisions, decissions that will hurt your business, your users and in the end
the internet.

the stupid "remove link emails" are just the newest iteration of this
thoughtcancer.

my recommendation stays the same: link to whatever you like and link to
whatever your users like, want or need, oh, and also link to your competition.
but for gods, your sanities and the internets sake: don't do it for any kind
of page/trust/magic-rank or any kind of link/penguin/panda-juices....

my name is franz enzenhofer / i'm the most successful SEO in europe / i do not
care about links

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _the tl;dr: pagerank is thoughtcancer, if you start thinking of links as
> some flow of mystical pagerankjuice you will make bad decisions, decissions
> that will hurt your business, your users and in the end the internet._

Golden. It's not Google who's breaking the Internet; it's the people who try
to game the search engines.

------
jawns
"As a publisher I refuse to nofollow any links, outside of banners and
advertisements. I compel you to do the same."

I believe you mean "implore."

~~~
btown
Be warned, if you refuse to comply, he might link to you _without_ "nofollow"
as punishment!

------
TerraHertz
It appears to me that Google has a long term ambition to become the sole means
of navigating the Internet. Inter-site links are fundamental to topic-related
navigation, as the Internet was originally intended. It appears that Google is
trying to depreciate inter-site linking in general, and skilled PR
misdirection on the topic by a Google employee doesn't reassure.

One has to wonder to what extent the entire phenomenon of link spamming sites
might be a Hegelian Dialectic tactic by Google - ie a manufactured problem,
intended to prompt a 'solution' that is in fact more beneficial to Google's
unstated intent. Are we really to believe that there's no algorithmic solution
to mitigating the link-spamming nuisance?

Another dimension of this same ambition, is the movement to obfuscate URLs in
browser address bars. Traditionally, Web users could copy, save and manipulate
links directly as another means of navigating the Internet and maintaining
their own records of Web places. As browsers progress further in the direction
of eliminating direct user visibility of true URLs, this navigational method
becomes less available. The Google-promoted alternative? Just search via
Google!

As for why Google would want to do this, the obvious answer would be the usual
'money and power'. If Google succeeds in virtually eliminating all
navigational alternatives to Google-searching, they then own the Net. For
instance, if they wanted to make any given web site disappear, they could
simply de-index it. That's a politically very dangerous power. Even if Google
has no political agenda now (a debatable point), given such power they'd be
guaranteed to become political. Power corrupts, etc.

We've been through this before, with a gold ring and a volcano. It's generally
a bad idea to create 'one thing to rule them all', and Google is no exception.

------
jonknee
> Site owners and publishers are now afraid to link to each other because they
> don’t know how Google might respond to that link. For example, Wikipedia and
> the New York Times have added the “nofollow" attribute to most of the links
> outside of their editorial control.

I'm a little confused why he cares about nofollow links--if Google doesn't
"own" the internet, what does nofollow matter? It's certainly better than not
having a link at all.

Furthermore, the "credit" he so desperately wants publishers to receive is
only a thing because of Google Page Rank in the first place.

~~~
Silhouette
_Furthermore, the "credit" he so desperately wants publishers to receive is
only a thing because of Google Page Rank in the first place._

That makes no sense. Citing an original source, such as an article that
inspired your own work or with relevant background for ideas you're building
on, is common courtesy in any field, and it's directly useful to your readers
in the Web case.

Amazing as some people apparently find it, it is still quite possible to
"surf" the web, following links from site to site without relying on a search
engine like Google to find anything interesting or useful. The fact that
Google appear to be promoting policies that could threaten to this alternative
is rather the point here.

~~~
jonknee
> That makes no sense. Citing an original source, such as an article that
> inspired your own work or with relevant background for ideas you're building
> on, is common courtesy in any field, and it's directly useful to your
> readers in the Web case.

The OP is against "nofollow" links which only affect search engines. The links
work just fine in a browser and visitors won't know the difference. Publishers
aren't scared to link, they're just wary of vouching for a site by not using
nofollow.

------
wmkn
There is this omnipotent master somewhere in the cloud. His power is large,
but his ways are unknown. To please the Lord of cloud, strict rules have to be
followed. Rules, that, when not followed, will cause the cloud Lord to strike
you down with vengeance. Unfortunately, the cloud Lord is intentionally vague
about these rules.

Some people have taken upon themselves the task to discover the rules that
please the cloud Lord. In the process these priests have found a large number
of arbitrary rules that have to be followed strictly. Breaking any of these
rules is a reason for the cloud Lord to banish you to the dark corners of his
empire - or so the priests say. For only a small fee the priests will give you
a glimpse of the rule list that might you good standing with the cloud Lord.
It may work, or it may not, because the cloud Lord works in mysterious ways.

~~~
TeMPOraL
The funny thing is that the Cloud Lord wants to set his rules so that if you
do what's right and honest, what is valuable to the world, you will prosper,
yet people constantly try to game the rules, so that the Lord's intentions
cannot be fulfilled.

------
thu
Do I understand correctly that Google will try to punish you (or the other
party) if you host links in exchange of money but that Google is doing it in
its search results ? (And I receive from time to time unsolicited regular
paper mail from Google so that I advertise my enterprise through them.)

Page Rank is a neat idea, but making everyone listening to Google so that Page
Rank remains meaningful is stupid. What do you do if suddenly Google thinks
Twitter or Facebook are to be considered spammy link farms (which would be
true) ? Do you ask everyon to delete their tweets linking to you ?

~~~
Matt_Cutts
Google's ads don't flow PageRank and thus don't affect search engines.

~~~
aaronwall
Do they (along with the personalization aspects of the relevancy algorithms)
boost aggregate awareness & CTR - which in turn further drive rank?

A look at Ask.com's history on a tool like SEMrush makes this line of thinking
rather compelling.

------
toddh
This has happened to me too. A client who bought ads on my site wanted the
links pulled so as not to make Google mad. That Google would think me a
spammer is very very broken.

~~~
jonknee
If you were selling links Google isn't that far off...

~~~
toddh
I'm selling complete ads, that certainly contain links, just like Google does.
They are contained in posts clearly marked as sponsored posts. These are not
link farms, spam, or payed links. Advertising should not be a crime.

~~~
Donzo
If you are selling "ads" that transfer PageRank, you are selling links.

I do not care that you do this, but you should be aware of what you are doing.

~~~
toddh
My understanding is selling links is an SEO scam. Are my "ads" a SEO scam or
are they real companies to trying to sell real products to real people? How
can you conflate the two?

~~~
jonknee
Would your advertisers be fine with you adding nofollow? If so, do that and
you're fine. If they aren't fine with nofollow you should realize that the
other stuff is window dressing and you're really selling pretty links (which
means watch out, Google is looking to penalize you).

Real companies selling real products to real people get in trouble for scuzzy
SEO all the time. JC Penny comes to mind. Or RapGenius (though they aren't
even selling anything!). It's the techniques used that are the issue, not what
is being promoted.

~~~
toddh
Shouldn't we be talking content and not form?

Let's say a reader of mine is searching for a job and my site has a new great
job at Apple. Apple advertises on my site because it attracts a certain kind
of person. Shouldn't that person be shown my ad because it's both timely and
highly relevant?

That the job is on my site is a valuable signal. I don't use an ad service, I
place every single ad and I have done so since the start. I check every single
link. I check every single ad. I personally talk with every single advertiser.

It's not hard for me to imagine an algorithm that does similar sorts of
calculations. Oh, this link goes to apple. I've heard of them before. It's for
a job. Scalability Engineer seems to be a valid occupation. Looks OK to me.

You are saying all such signals have no value and should be filtered by
nofollow?

In actuality I've not given nofollow much thought. I guess I may now. I've
lived by the idea of creating quality content, being honest, and doing a good
job, thinking Google will figure it out. That unfortunately doesn't seem to be
the case.

The irony in this age of targeting and personalization valuable signals are
being lost.

~~~
jonknee
Yes, none of that is problematic. You should just make sure you're not
indiscriminately linking to third parties who pay for the privilege. In your
case nofollow would be very simple and would prevent any damage.

Quality content is awesome and I'm sure your site is great, but Google's
thought process here is that your site's reputation should only be handed on
to sites that earn it organically (e.g. not through their buying it).

It's really for your own benefit, with the way PageRank works your outgoing
links are votes that are as powerful as your page's reputation is good. If you
link to bad sites your page's reputation takes a hit and thus your PageRank
goes down. If I pay you to vouch for me (e.g. link to me) that only means that
I have money. If you vouch for me without any money that's a much better
signal that I have quality content.

------
mixedbit
To support the point from the article. StackOverflow had to put significant
effort to figure out a policy that would allow some links to have a 'nofollow'
attribute but wouldn't impede organic traffic from Google (see a discussion
around this questions:
[http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/51156](http://meta.stackexchange.com/a/51156)).

Such things should be handled automatically by the ranking algorithm. High
quality sites shouldn't need to research what are the ranking algorithm
internals. Today most sites prefer to stay on the safe side and put 'nofollow'
on everything, which is detrimental for original content creators.

------
nso
I run a decent sized discussion forum. I literally get 3 of these emails a
day. I have an auto-reply that goes something along the lines of "Unless you
previously have hired shady companies to do shady SEO for you on the forums,
these links are organic. Do not contact me again regarding this subject."

------
userbinator
What really needs to be changed is Google's algorithms. The number of links to
a site may be correlated with content quality and relevance but shouldn't be
taken as an indicator of such, since it basically promotes large sites with
lots of links - but not too many - while penalising the "less developed" (in
terms of linkage) parts of the Internet, the parts that in my experience also
tend to have the most interesting and valuable content.

Basing ranking on characteristics of the page content is also going to pose
its own problems, since instead of linkfarming, the SEOs will just focus on
generating useless content (they are quite good at that already.) Without very
strong AI, it's difficult to tell whether the content was there just to
spamdex or if it's something that may be equally low-entropy (for example)
like tables of useful information. In my mind, even a totally _random_ ranking
(not one that changes every search, but maybe ~monthly) would be better than
one based on links or page content. At the very least, it would expose many
users to more parts of the Internet that they might not otherwise experience
if they stayed within the first 1-2 pages of search results (if I'm looking
for something that happens to be relatively obscure, I routinely go into the
100th or more page of results, since there is often good content there too!)

I haven't received any such link removal requests (the sites I have a
relatively small), but I do not care about SEO that much and if I did receive
any my response would basically be "go complain to the search engines, not
me."

------
gordaco
This is a distorted variation on Goodhart's law [1], although in a non-
economical environment. In other words, poorly thought incentives generate
poor behaviour (this is not the core of Goodhart's law, but rather a common
consequence). I'm not sure if all the blame for those incentives is on Google,
or SEOs are culprits in some way.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_Law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_Law)

------
alexandros
Interesting that this is coming up again. I'd written an essay on the
fundamental pattern behind what is at play here, it was well received on HN at
the time:

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/28r/is_google_paperclipping_the_web_...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/28r/is_google_paperclipping_the_web_the_perils_of/)

------
soheil
That email is perfectly legitimate. I can see why now someone doesn't want
their website linked from a shady website, that maybe at some point wasn't as
shady. To say Google is "breaking"the Internet is easy to proclaim maybe only
if to get enough attention on HN. He's using the same exact tactic as the one
he is accusing Google of using, namely FUD. How is removing links and placing
nofollow attr on links breaking the Internet exactly? If anything this will
make the Internet more relevant. The opposite doesn't even make sense from the
point of view of Google. They're making money by showing you the most relevant
search results so if the Internet is broken and less relevant no one will be
using their search anymore and they'll lose too.

------
willu
In some regards I agree. The rules are constantly shifting and they are
unevenly enforced in a way that favors large, established sites which is
frustrating for smaller players. Good examples here: [http://nenadseo.com/big-
dogs/](http://nenadseo.com/big-dogs/) At least the person mentioned in this
article received an unnatural link notice. In other cases Google will just
sink your site into oblivion overnight with no explanation or recourse.

At the same time, they have to deal with an entire industry that exists to
exploit the very metrics they rely on to rank results so I don't blame them
for just saying screw it, let's just float up our own content and well-known
brands for every search and call it a day.

------
mcv
I feel the article misrepresents the content of the email:

 _" We have discovered that a company we hired to help promote our website
have used a variety of questionable techniques to secure links to our website.
These links were placed purely for SEO purposes, with the intention of
manipulating search rankings."_

So basically the company hired people who spam links in order to game search
results. Google is totally right in fighting that. The "natural" links on the
author's site are not made by the SEO company, so those links are fine.

The probem is not linking to content you want to link to, the problem is
hiring people to artificially boost your search ranking by spamming links in
places they don't belong.

------
humain2
I have website since 2007 and 90% of my visitors is Google visitors. 2 months
back i lose 85% of my traffic without any reason. I don't have any message in
Google webmaster. Google is applying filters to reduice my traffic on search
results. Sometime it go to normal so i receive all my visitors and 2 days
after penality comeback. I don't undertand how google works and i am not using
any spammy links or other. So google is kelling the web ....

------
cromwellian
Why are being saying 'nofollow' "breaks the internet". First, it's the wrong
terminology, nofollow is an aspect of the Web, not the internet.

Secondly, nofollow applies to crawlers, not human beings. It doesn't even
"break the Web", it has zero impact on an end-user's experience of navigating
links.

What you could say is that excessive "nofollow" breaks PageRank and other
search engines. Less melodramatic and link-baity, but more accurate.

What you could claim is that search algorithms are opinionated and 'mold'
content and link structure across the Web. That would be true, but
unavoidable. It's impossible to have a search engine that would not
editorialize in some respect, and any engine that gained prominence for
sending lots of traffic would quickly be descended upon by people like Jeremy
trying to figure out how to mold content to game the algorithm.

Even if we had some sort of incredible AI based search engine that could
understand meaning and nuance like spam, it might still have an editorial
opinion that people would optimize around.

------
richdougherty
The _nofollow_ attribute is a way for site owners to say "I don't endorse this
link". _nofollow_ is very handy for site owners because it removes the
incentive for users to include spam links in user contributed content.

 _However_ —and I think this is the point of the article—use of _nofollow_
doesn't just disincentivise spam links, it also means that many valid and
useful links no longer contribute to PageRank.

It would be great if we could have a way to allow all to links contribute to
PageRank, but still protect ourself from spam.

Which got me thinking…

At the moment the only options for site owners are to say "yes, I endorse this
link" or "no, I don't endorse this link" (by adding _nofollow_ ). Instead I
could imagine something more fine grained, a system where site owners could
tag specific content within their site as coming from specific users.

Content tagged like this is neither endorsed nor disavowed, instead
responsibility is pushed to the user who wrote the content. In other words
site owners would be able to say something like this to search engines: "this
content is created by user X, don't blame me if it's spammy!".

Smart search engines could use this more fine-grained content ownership
information in their search algorithms. That means they wouldn't need to throw
out _all_ user contributed information on the internet just to protect the
internet from spam.

There are a few challenges, of course. :)

* How to identify users? (Anonymously?) * How to have users endorse content on different sites? * How to work out which users are trustworthy? * Building a PageRank algorithm that incorporates fine-grained trust information.

But it's fun to think about technical solutions.

------
d0ugie
Jeremy: Sing it sister! But do you know what I like even less than
occasionally not seeing eye-to-eye with Webmaster Tools? Link farming.

While I'm not sure I understand your objection to nofollows as a compromise,
have you any alternative methods in mind to improve the web without "breaking"
the internet?

------
pompano
What I have never understood is why google has put so much concentration on
punishing the Websites that receive web spam. Why not balance it and punish
the sites that don't prevent it. Punishing them sites will firstly de-value
the link + push webmasters to actually do something on the other end.
Sometimes it is out of the site owners control because they cannot prevent
that link from being created. The google updates right now encourage negative
SEO because that webmaster has no control of that link creation. If you start
punishing the people who have control and are able to prevent spam then it
makes them focus on being better at moderating that and allowing more relevant
links from blog comments and such.

------
spindritf
Nofollow link to a human user is just as good as a regular, do-follow link.
From reader's perspective this changes nothing so who cares? Game the link
attributes as best as you think you can and let robots figure it out.

They're only breaking their own ranking algo.

------
eddie_catflap
I get a regular drip feed of these requests. Depending on my mood I check the
outgoing link. Usually it's from someone recommending the service or product
that the site asking me to remove the link offers. I've mailed quite a few of
the requestors back. I explain that I've set _all_ links to be nofollow and
that it was a real person that created the link. Only 1 person has ever
understood this. The rest all demanded the link still be removed with varying
degrees of politeness. I just don't think site owners get it and to echo
several comments here perhaps Google could make some clearer instructions
about what they want.

------
znowi
Reading the comments from Matt Cutts here, I see the worst is ahead of us.

~~~
hitchhiker999
They have taken an environment of sharing, and turned it into a paranoid world
of fear-based strategies. It's not all their fault - people are responsible
too, crappy marketing works - so it has to be stripped out. They way they did
it was to throw out all the babies with all the bathwater.

I think some inside Google get this already, but there's not much they can do
short of AI. I'm sure they're working on it.

Disclaimer: I most likely have the most traffic of everyone here (give or
take) - Have lived off Google publisher cheques for 10+ years. I realise what
they are doing is damn near impossible, and that they are not 'evil' but
probably a bit overwhelmed.

------
hrjet
Kudos to the OP for standing their ground and not complying with the request.

Apart from the principles, there is also a practical problem with complying
with such a request. How can one verify that the request is genuine? It could
be a hacked email account from that domain. Or a rogue employee. Or someone
who doesn't have sufficient authority within that company. How is the
recipient of the request going to verify it?

------
kevin_bauer
Maybe we should change <a href="..."> to <google="...">. or insert a google-
search into the href-url!

------
crististm
This post convinced me to replace google.com as my default search engine. It's
better to do that at my own convenience, than to be forced later when the
switch costs become too large.

It's incredible how google shaped my expectation of looks of a search page
results. I was like - WTF is that page? - oh... I've changed my search
engine... Go figure.

------
the_watcher
>> webmasters are going out of their way to control the flow of page rank from
their site to other sites.

I agree with 90% of this piece. But this particular comment isn't new.
Webmasters have been looking to control flow of PageRank since they learned
what it was.

------
caseya
And the Panda 4.0 update rolls out today to shift the topic of conversation.
Well played, Matt. Well played.

[https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/468891756982185985](https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/468891756982185985)

------
peterhunt
false positives happen. let's move on with our lives.

\- a facebooker, working at a google competitor :P

~~~
Istof
the rate of false positives is very important

------
bryan_rasmussen
If sites can make spammy links to another site and google would then hurt the
linked to sites ranking it follows that a profit model would soon arise ->
Make spammy links and charge to have links removed.

Has this been seen? Can anyone show a case?

------
davidgerard
IME, this is pretty much always a spammer trying to get their past comment
spam removed.

So although I acknowledge the general message, the specifics really don't help
the poster's case.

------
pgrote
Matt ...it is clear Google has no way of dealing with search past the no
follow attribute. Is there anything cooking to make search good again without
no follow?

------
drivingmenuts
>As a publisher I refuse to nofollow any links, outside of banners and
advertisements. I compel you to do the same.

No. No, you don't. You implore. If you compel, I rebel.

Also, if someone doesn't want you linking to their site, shouldn't it be more
a case of "Whatever. Your loss."?

It's one thing if you're pointing out fraud, abuse, illegal acts or unethical
behavior (in which case, you'd probably be posting the evidence on your own
site), but if it's a friendly link and they don't want it, don't give it to
them.

~~~
jeremypalmer
Fixed. Updated to "implore".

------
javajosh
Are there any documented cases of a black hat attacking a site by linking to
it too much? This would seem to be a difficult attack to thwart.

~~~
newaccountfool
Have a look at [http://blackhatworld.com](http://blackhatworld.com) its one of
the biggest internet marketing forums, and in between and the guff posts there
is some good ones. Basically you can do all the things the pros advise you not
to do to yourself to your competitor.

------
al2o3cr
"linking with nofollow set" != "not linking". Repeatedly equivalencing the two
does not lend the author much authority.

------
based2
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm)

------
justinngc
Google and Matt will get things right.

We have to acknowledge that Google has been performing up and down the perfect
margin (but not getting it perfectly right), but it is because, presumably,
they are in the last part of the equation to make it all perfect.

The only thing is they can't simply solve it relying only to technology
because search engines deal with people. People are emotional beings, search
engine robots, are, not bring funny, just robots.

Consider this as equation Neo (of the Matrix).

------
jqm
I understand the point.

But you could be friendly and agree to remove the links in questions since
they seem to believe it will harm their business. Not doing so "out of
principal" may effect others as Google believes your links are low
quality.(although it sounds like their SEO company is mostly to blame for
their problems).

~~~
discardorama
Why? Why should anyone remove outbound links simply because the destination
_thinks_ they are harmful? And even worse, if the destination is in fear of
some other _third_ party which _might_ think they are harmful?

In the bad old days of the Internet, web sites would complain if you linked to
them, because they though they had some sort of a right to determine who
linked to them. After court cases, etc. the issue was resolved. And now this.

If Google really thinks that a link is illegitimate, then it should just
ignore it in its algorithm.

Please don't reply to this if you don't fully agree with my points.

~~~
jqm
I explained why in the first post. To be friendly and a generally good person.
Legality was not a reason given so I'm not sure why you feel that's an
argument. In this case, the guy posting the link does have a bad reputation,
which is no doubt the reason for the search ranking hit. His deliberate
posting and refusal to remove it makes him a bit of an ass.

And "Why" one should not behave as an ass is self evident in my mind. But we
may not agree on this as evidenced by your last sentence.

~~~
discardorama
> But we may not agree on this as evidenced by your last sentence.

That was the point of my last sentence: even though I asked that replies be in
agreement, you still chose to reply. It's the same as someone asking "please
don't link to me", but everyone is still free to link. That's the way
discourse works, and that's how linking should work too.

~~~
jqm
hahaha

Ok, I take your very well made point.

------
judk
Mods please fix flame bait title.

------
neurobro
I can't help but wonder why Google thinks links from OP's site are "unnatural"
(assuming they're all natural). E.g. is this a consequence of allowing do-
follow links in comments - and if so, does vigilant moderation make a
difference? Or perhaps an indication that the site was compromised and there
are pages of spam hidden off in a corner somewhere?

~~~
singhabhishek25
I have one Suggestion for Matt Cutts, that instead of penalizing and killing
everyone, why not you are neglecting the bad links automatically and do not
add value to the website for that particular link, which I believe that would
be your step after disavow request. Here everyone is going into trouble and
has to suffer a lot, so it would be better to neglect that link if it looks
unnatural instead of penalizing for the same. Like this there would be no risk
of penalizing wrong website. Website can continue getting traffic from the
link and no one will fear from linking with anyone.

