I think Matt and Google are getting an unfair rap on this. Google provided a search engine that worked better than any other so people started using it. People are still using it because it's still better than the others. It's not a monopoly. You can use another search engine if you want to.
The site that emailed to get a link taken down employed an SEO agency to improve their rankings and they created a bunch of spammy links to try to manipulate Google into ranking that site higher than others that probably deserve to rank higher due to their content. If Google did nothing about it we would get some crappy search results.
Also, if you read what Matt Cutts is saying, it implies that if they only had a few unnatural links then they wouldn't have received a webmaster tools warning telling them they had spammy links. They got the warning because their link profile suggested that it was obvious they had been trying to manipulate rankings, not because they had one or two iffy ones.
It's likely that the site then blanket emailed anything and everything that they weren't sure about to get the links taken down. Is it Google's fault that this is how the site decided to deal with the warning? Should Google just make it really easy for them by saying, "OK you disavowed those crappy links, you're off the hook now"? If the consequences are so weak and short-lived, where is the deterrent effect? No, Google doesn't own the internet but they own Google and the site is just trying to provide users with the most relevant results to their searches.
Re, the nofollow aspect. Google didn't "force" sites into using the nofollow attribute by scaring them into thinking that their rankings would drop. Nofollow was in place before there was any notion that who you linked to could harm you. Sites like Wikipedia and others were only too happy to add nofollow to links because it put spammers off from crapifying their sites.
No, they aren't. Google is using FUD to scare sites into requesting links be removed that they never built on legitimate sites. No one can possibly guess which links an individual Googler will think "might" be paid. I assure you they guess wrong most of the time.
As Google penalizes the best writers and blogs, one of two things happens:
1) Entire sites are being nofollowed - removing links to deserving sites.
2) The site refused to nofollow, so they stay penalized with PR0 no matter how good the site may be or how high the PR once was.
The end result will be that even more black hat spammy MFA sites will rank. Sites that deserved to be written about and linked to will drop and be invisible.
It is high time people stop defending Google when they are destroying small businesses and costing much needed jobs. Now Cutts has declared war on bloggers who often make a living writing.
Google wants to destroy any site that enables advertisers and businesses to connect with sites where their target audience already is by forcing publishers to decide whether they want to risk losing organic traffic and being branded with a scarlet PR0 or to nofollow everything they ever write.
Nofollow = NOT TRUSTED. We do not invest time writing about anything we do not trust. (On the VERY rare occasion we do we do not link to them.) We do not publish content that does not fit our audience.
Every link is a potential risk. Nofollowing links may damage the sites we link to so what is a writer who already cares about what they write about supposed to do?
Google has a monopoly on search because the wealthy elite who own the media handed it to them. People use it because in many cases they do not even know there is an alternative. Many use whatever is installed on their computers without even having any idea what it even is.
People who are trying to clean up unnatural links penalties are not SEO experts. They rely on tools to tell them what links to remove. These tools are not very accurate. I've had them flag DMOZ, Best of the Web, and Business2Community as "toxic". Finally many remove and/or disavow every link in desperation.
How does all that disavowing affect search results and individual sites? How many verify that requests to remove organically given links are from the actual site and not their unethical competitor. (Hint: almost none.)
Many businesses fail waiting for recovery. Others get penalties lifted, but having removed links they no longer get any traffic.
"Google didn't "force" sites into using the nofollow attribute by scaring them into thinking that their rankings would drop." YES, they most certainly DID!
Lots of misinformation in this post. It is almost hard to pick a spot to start.
>Google provided a search engine that worked better than any other so people started using it.<
While at the beginning this may have been true, over time that search engine has grown more parasitic in terms of things like scrape-n-displace knowledge graph results, AdWords ads on branded keyword terms where ads with junk bundleware rank above official sites, etc.
http://blog.brandverity.com/2738/software-bundlers-target-br...
>People are still using it because it's still better than the others.<
Care to explain why Google is spending over a billion Dollars a year buying default search placement in other browsers like iOS & Mozilla Firefox? Any thoughts on the Flash security updates which hit other browsers and bundle Chrome's web browser in with it? Or how about the Android contracts with default search placement (and other forms of) bundling baked into them?
Google is spending well over a billion Dollars a year on the thesis that your thesis is wrong.
>It's not a monopoly.<
The hell it's not. At least if we use any of the standard definitions.
>You can use another search engine if you want to.<
And while an informed individual may choose to, the majority of people are driven by default settings which are purchased, as per the above.
>The site that emailed to get a link taken down employed an SEO agency to improve their rankings and they created a bunch of spammy links to try to manipulate Google into ranking that site higher than others that probably deserve to rank higher due to their content.<
Are you suggesting there are not false positives, or that competitors do not buy links to torch their competitors? Either such assertion is simply untrue.
>They got the warning because their link profile suggested that it was obvious they had been trying to manipulate rankings, not because they had one or two iffy ones.<
The second they there presumes a competitor didn't do them for it. Only a person ignorant of the field of SEO would presume this to be true in all cases.
>Re, the nofollow aspect. Google didn't "force" sites into using the nofollow attribute by scaring them into thinking that their rankings would drop. Nofollow was in place before there was any notion that who you linked to could harm you. Sites like Wikipedia and others were only too happy to add nofollow to links because it put spammers off from crapifying their sites.<
This is a complete misunderstanding of history, on numerous levels.
Nofollow was introduced as a (ineffective) solution to blog comment spamming. To help aid further/wider adoption, at some point some Googler's even suggested things like pagerank sculpting could be useful, up until some large sites started doing it excessively. They were looking for reasons to justify its widespread use, because Google intended from day one that the tag could then be spread onto paid links & other links they didn't want to count.
And the other level of absolute misunderstanding was that (before Google went on their fearmongering campaign about links) they in the past suggested that you couldn't control who links to you, but you could control who you link to & sites which linked to bad neighborhoods could indeed be penalized for it.
Very rarely is there a comment which is that long & that wrong. Impressive!
it cannot possibly be your responsibility to remove links that other unrelated entities have towards you! (unless it's an obvious link scheme)