In it he admits that the site is being penalized for having prominent ads above the fold.
90% or more of Google’s revenue comes from presenting prominent ads above the fold.
How is demoting the organic results of sites that use the same business model that it does not the epitome of anti-competitive behavior?
Yep. And so I removed all advertising from the site for months.
There was absolutely no change in ranking.
Matt Cutts also wrote, "Your site is also affected by our Panda algorithm..."
My website had citations of slang use. By definition citations are 'duplicate content' since they also exist somewhere else.
So I removed all citations from the site for months.
There was absolutely no change in ranking.
The 3 claims Matt Cutts made were:
1. "...the only manual webspam action I see regarding onlineslangdictionary.com is from several years ago (are you familiar with a company called Web Build Pages or someone named Jim Boykin?)..." Wrong. I've never heard of him or his company, I've never worked with anyone involved with SEO, and there was never a change in ranking / site traffic that would suggest that my site had a penalty. Given the very very dim view of SEO practitioners among technically savvy people, I can only assume that his implication ("are you familiar with") was designed to discredit me here.
2. "You're affected by a couple algorithms in our general web ranking. The first is our page layout algorithm... your site has much more prominent ads above the fold compared to Urban Dictionary." Wrong. (As above, I removed all advertising from the site.)
3. "Your site is also affected by our Panda algorithm." Wrong. (As above, I removed all citations from the site.)
I can't say that anything Matt Cutts told me was truthful.
However, Google search is acting on behalf of the users, trying to find them the result that brings them the most value. And everything else equal, that is the one without ads above the fold.