Re:Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetW...
by jasonwatkinspdx on Monday August 10, 2020 @11:11AM
(#24110103)
Just to save everyone the effort, the closest thing to evidence amid that blog post's many wild allegations is that the pandas update changes around citations hurt the site's google flow. This isn't surprising. That hit a lot of low quality websites that were essentially arbitraging google to aggregate content duplicated elsewhere on the web. I worked for a similar business with considerably more traffic. We didn't interpret it as some directed conspiracy against us. We knew from day 1 that's a risk of developing such a site, and why original content still matters a great deal. We adapted and moved on.
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 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.