[HN Gopher] Escaping Google's Manual Reputation Penalty and Resu...
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Escaping Google's Manual Reputation Penalty and Resuming Business
as Usual
Author : fueloil
Score : 70 points
Date : 2024-12-21 14:24 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (recleudo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (recleudo.com)
| fueloil wrote:
| Finixio/Clickout Media's websites, including Techopedia,
| ReadWrite, and Business2Community, suffered significant traffic
| and ranking losses following Google's December 2, 2024, algorithm
| update, likely due to manual penalties for site reputation abuse.
| In response, Finixio employed redirects and cloaking techniques
| to swiftly restore operations, demonstrating the resilience and
| adaptability of sophisticated parasite SEO strategies in evading
| even severe penalties.
| jaronilan wrote:
| OT: earlier this year I wrote a short fictional story about
| SEO....
|
| https://github.com/jaronilan/stories/blob/main/Duplicitous.p...
| arjvik wrote:
| Wow, love the story, still processing it
| nothercastle wrote:
| Just goes to show you how far behind the SEO scammers Google is.
| Despite being bigger and wealthier Google simply can't catch the
| more nimble SEO scammers
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Google is milking them now by just selling ad
| words, they no longer care about the search results, just how
| much money they make
| bn-l wrote:
| Also SEO provides at least something for the long tail. My
| belief is that the algorithm is able to predict what looks
| like "content" to a broad consumer base. Then the fatter the
| tail gets the more they manually tweak the results (like
| editors doing publishing).
| Drakim wrote:
| What you are saying sounds like hyperbole, but all it takes
| is for the management within google to blindly chase metrics
| and they end up doing exactly that.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| That's the point - willingly saying that they promote spam
| sites to milk ad revenue could land them in antitrust
| trouble. But all they have to so is merely _not_ do
| anything that would downrank said spam sites, and the
| outcome is exactly the same yet they are now legally in the
| clear and can just blame incompetence for the (totally
| predictable) outcome.
| bootloop wrote:
| I mean that is exactly what each and every Google team
| does. There is no decision being made without having the
| data "supporting" it.
|
| But every graph can be shown nicely and things which are
| common sense don't need a metric to proof it.
| greenchair wrote:
| geo location trick is absolutely fascinating!
| Nextgrid wrote:
| And also absolutely trivial to detect automatically. The fact
| that Google doesn't do it proves they don't give a shit about
| improving search quality beyond superficial efforts whose main
| objective is just to make it look like they do. Maybe the fact
| that most spam sites have Google Analytics & Ads has something
| to do with it?
| throwaway743 wrote:
| So sick of dealing with Google, between this, the play store,
| admob, etc. They'll punish you for the slightest things, have
| zero meaningful customer service/means of recourse, and in many
| cases don't have a way to even reach out to customer service
| (admob's email option is visible but throws an error every time
| you click it). Not to mention, they try to steer you towards
| their useless "community forums" that sre filled with "diamond
| users" who just spam copy/paste responses.
|
| If your business depends on their services, you're fucked if you
| slip up in the smallest way. Have fun trying to get ahold of
| anyone who can help, unless you're lucky and have a friend who
| works there.
|
| Side note, they're going to further penalize apps based on
| performance/ANRs, yet they haven't fixed the issue of admob's
| banner ads causing performance issues.
|
| It just feels awful. We need more options that can actually help
| small businesses, not hurt or threaten them.
| mavamaarten wrote:
| Yup. Dealing with Google often gives me strong "I'm being held
| hostage" vibes.
|
| Our apps have been rejected from the Play Store for bogus
| reasons multiple times. Sometimes it's an easy fix (aka just
| release the same update but with higher version number - to get
| another bot or human to take a look), sometimes it takes a
| week, sometimes we've had to pull strings and had to escalate
| our issue through a contact at Google. But if you're a small
| fish, they will absolutely let you rot.
| pyr0hu wrote:
| Can agree. We are awaiting for a response on our DUNs number.
| They said we have to provide a DUNS number, which we have, and
| it has to be exactly 9 characters long. Ours is 10. Apple
| accepts it, Google does not. Even the DUNS lookup site only
| finds our company using the 10 characters number.
|
| Google gives no response just extended the deadline until they
| remove our account for not providing the DUNs number.
|
| Funny thing is that our number starts with a zero so
| theoretically it could be 9 characters long but the official
| lookup requires the 0 prefix
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(page generated 2024-12-21 18:00 UTC)