Escaping Google's manual reputation penalty and resuming business as usual

[xnx]

The images are too small for me to make out the search terms. It seems like they're casino and crypto related? The whole category is a cess pit. I'm not sure there's any such thing as good rankings in that area. My concern for quality of search results from Google in this category is close to zero.

[joecool1029]

> My concern for quality of search results from Google in this category is close to zero.

This thinking is the problem.

I'm not sure the best answer is to manually penalize some of the regular players. More will fill their place and it only incentivizes churn and burn behavior.

In short, what I mean to say is you take out big established institutions you consider shady but people are searching for, those people will still seek out even shadier new players to fit their need. It makes them even less safe.

[daft_pink]

I don’t quite understand why they don’t just let trusted users manually rate search results and feed that through AI to determine ranking penalties similar but not exactly like Kagi.

[summerlight]

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/9281931?hl=en

They're already doing that with paid quality raters. I suppose your question is about opening this up more widely, but that's basically giving those spammers a tool to directly influence the ranking, which is going to be even worse.

[tensor]

Probably because they prefer a ranking order that promotes sites with more of their ads or some such, and/or causes users to spend more time going through results looking at more ads.

[Nasrudith]

For one because it would be quite abusable. Get a user account to trusted status and then sell it. This is in addition to any scalability issues.

[webdoodle]

For the same reason Twitter, Facebook and other anti-social media companies fired there Trust and Safety teams. The parasitic elite can't trust hoomans to not turn on them and promote sites and ideas that they consider dangerous to there rule. This is the reason A.I. has risen in prominence, and is clearly biased when talking about the class war.

[Inviz]

My newish e-commerce website was removed from google.crawling is fine, no penalties. Then google removed website link from my business profile, because it’s not in search results. Any tips what to do next?

[greenchair]

geo location trick is absolutely fascinating!

[Nextgrid]

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?

[Tomte]

> Techopedia started life as a solid tech site. Now, it’s a front for gambling and crypto. When it was penalized, it experienced a massive crash in traffic and rankings.

Google actually did something to improve search!

[julianeon]

But with that kind of money stream behind it, the mouse can go back to his investors and purchase a tiny mouse jetpack (or whatever the SEO equivalent is) to gain an advantage. If the cat learns to swat that, he'll come back with a toy car. Google is fairly active but eventually they give up: the mouse is a lot more motivated to get his cheese than the cat is to get the mouse. Google can penalize them 10 times in a row, but the 11th time, they win - and they essentially have the bankroll for infinite attempts.

[nothercastle]

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]

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

[hinkley]

It’s getting harder and harder for me to find real answers on Google. For a little while DDG was doing okay but they seem to be just as bad if not worse now.

[jaronilan]

OT: earlier this year I wrote a short fictional story about SEO….

https://github.com/jaronilan/stories/blob/main/Duplicitous.p...

[arjvik]

Wow, love the story, still processing it

[throwaway743]

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.

[pyr0hu]

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

[mavamaarten]

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.

[hinkley]

Web hosting site I worked for had way too much of its traffic from Google spidering. Vanity URLs make them hit you like a ton of bricks. If you throttle them it reduces your score. If you 429 them that seems to be even worse. Canonical URLs don’t really save you, because they have to load the response to see they’ve already visited (just saves your score not traffic), caching can help somewhat, but if your static pages meant for bots differ too much from the real page then that’s the worst offense of all. So you need internal caching and at the end of the day you just have to scale up to deal with their bullshit. Given that Google sells cloud services, this now looks like a protection racket. Would be a shame if something happened to your website…

[echelon]

Call your representative and tell them you believe Google is behaving in anti-competitive, trust like behavior.