https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9977372

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5419890

Especially considering the definitely-not-a-sock-puppet post by jimboykin [1], an account that was created immediately after this thread and has but a single post on HN.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5476100

Like isn't it kind of insane that the top Google search engineer provided customer service to OP, but he couldn't get a response thru a normal channel.

When I refer to Matt Cutts lying, I mostly mean his comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5426209

I have no idea what that business is with that company.

I did everything in his comment to address the claimed automated penalties: removed every single ad and every single citation from the site. No changes in ranking at all, after months. I forget how many. 6 months?

That’s because Matt Cutts was lying: there was a manual penalty in place at that time.

I have no idea why the penalty is in place. What I describe is “incredibly circumstantial.”

You say that my site poses no threat. Is that because it hasn’t seen traffic growth or become popular? The site is no threat exactly because the penalty is in place and has been for almost a decade. That’s a long time for a website. Traffic growth was very healthy before all of this.

The home page has been updated more recently than that, but you’re right that it still has the same page structure. With the manual penalty in place, it doesn’t matter how often I update the skin of the site or the home page text: the site is dead.

The remaining proof claimed is that a whistleblower told him Matt Cutts implemented a penalty manually. But while our poster is quite willing to share the allegation, they're not willing to share the communication.

There's no proof on offer here.

I'm more willing to suspend Hitchens Razor when a well known defendant has such a long history of doing much worse.

No.