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Comment by yatacc | Hacker News Reader

Matt Cutts tweets out that Google algorithm had started to work after he was notified about the SEO practices by NYT.

What I dont understand:

1) Since the search results disappeared after it was brought to Google's attention, this was a manual effort. Matt makes it sound as if the automated algorithm removed the offending sites.

2) What is the world does 'started to work' mean ? Was it 'not working' earlier ?

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We were already in the middle of deploying an algorithmic change in how we trust links in our scoring. So between Feb. 1st and Feb. 8th, lots of rankings for the pages in question had already dropped. The author of the NYT article, David Segal, noticed that independently and we confirmed that algorithmic changes had been responsible for those drops. After Segal contacted us, we investigated and ended up taking corrective manual action as well.

My interpretation of the 'started to work' comment was that (they were claiming that) the algorithms had actually begun to detect the badness of the links (based on their structure or whatever) and they were starting to automatically be dispreferred; but that manual intervention had hastened the process.

> What is the world does 'started to work' mean ?

I would assume that 'starting to work' would involve investigating what, exactly, is going on. It probably wouldn't do them much good to start making changes before they understand what's happening and why. But that's only a conjecture on my part.

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