private blog network, old SEO trick where you have multiple websites that appear separate but are owned by the same person and link back to each other to boost SEO. Google bans the practice but all these huge media companies get away with it. If a small fry did it all their sites would be removed from Google

at their scale, I wouldn't be surprised if they had multiple people on Google Search team bribed. They'd lose billions if they actually got the penalties they deserve

This comes across as conspiracy theorish, but sadly isn't if you consider Thumbtack/Nest? getting penalties & reversals within a week. Maybe it was a coincidence that they had GV investments? When a non-affiliated site gets penalized, Jon Mueller and Gary Illyes say "we can't 100% explain the algorithm's ranking decisions. Just publish more quality content", but when a GV company gets hit, Google acts quickly in rectifying the penalty.

The same for eBay's massive organic penalty after they published a case study showing that pausing their paid ads didn't hurt their business.

Bribes most likely tied to stock, perhaps in part part "vesting" only at future date.