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Comment by WalterGR | Hacker News Reader

Google is incredibly shady. There’s been a manual penalty in place against my website The Online Slang Dictionary (http://onlineslangdictionary.com) for the better part of a decade. I know this because the data suggested it - and then a Google employee confirmed it.

It would be easy to explain it away because Aaron Peckham, owner of Urban Dictionary, worked at Google when Matt Cutts was head of the Web Spam team, and they knew each other. But that’s incredibly circumstantial. I do know that when I confronted Cutts about the penalty here on HN he lied about it - which does lead one to wonder about his motive.

I’ve written in length about the manual penalty here: http://onlineslangdictionary.com/pages/google-panda-penalty/

Edit 0825 Pacific: I have to work. I’ll respond to comments later. You can also reach out directly - contact info is in my profile.

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> I do know that when I confronted Cutts about the penalty here on HN he lied about it

That's an extreme thing to say and crosses into personal attack. The thread you seem to be referring to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5418864) doesn't seem to support what you've said here. At a minimum, you're breaking the site guideline which says: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm not saying your claims about Google and your site are false—I have no idea; it sounds like you have every right to be frustrated. Also, I don't know Matt. But these sorts of accusations ought not to be slung carelessly on HN. Since we're trying to have a site that staves off internet-default outcomes, we all need to be careful about this.

I have experience with these dynamics in the HN context and can tell you that people jump to conclusions all the time about why they were penalized or banned. Their conclusions are almost always wrong and overly dramatized. Frequently they take to the forum to declaim about how badly they were treated, and they always put it in strikingly specific and factual-sounding terms, as if they know for sure. But they don't know for sure; in fact they don't know at all. They've just completely made it up.

The HN context is simpler and has lower stakes than Google. (At least here, people can get factual answers to specific questions if they ask.) But that only strengthens the point: these domains are complicated and the dramatic explanations that people come up with out of frustration are almost always wrong. Of course it's frustrating is Google has penalized your site, but please don't let that boil over into accusations against specific people unless you can strictly demonstrate what you're saying.

I understand. Feel free to kill this thread.

please don't let that boil over into accusations against specific people unless you can strictly demonstrate what you're saying.

I realized that I’m using stronger verbiage here than in the article on my website. I haven’t updated the article in some time. If I recall correctly, it doesn’t contain any evidence/proof that explicitly contradicts specifically what he told me in the linked HN thread. I will update the article, and keep in mind the contents of your comment. Out of legitimate curiosity, at what level in the org chart is it okay to say that someone lied? We can say that the CEO lied. Matt was a senior employee who was also very public: he was the face of Google’s ranking algorithms.

I don't really think in terms like "at what level in the org chart is it okay", but if pressed I guess I'd have to say that it's never ok to say that someone lied when you don't have evidence of that.

Keep in mind that the word "lie" is strong medicine. It implies not only that someone said something untrue but that they deliberately intended to deceive.

I think it's fair to say HN policies around naming and shaming are pretty cut-and-dry in the comment section: that is, unless it's the subject of the article or link by the OP, it's not okay.

So from what I can tell, if someone writes an article about an employee of a company, people can say whatever they like in the comment section - anecdotes as colleagues, stories of similar environments, a mix of facts and claims. The article in question may be mostly heresy, and we've seen in the past this happen with the likes of Bezos, or very public people within our field like Stallman, or founders with questionable morals (see the latest AI controversies, or ads, or hacking, or regulations)..

But as soon as we specifically name someone in the comments, it's considered a witch-hunt. I think this is only true the first time it happens, or prior to them being targeted outside of this community.

Once someone writes a blog post with at least some facts on the subject, or the mainstream media writes about them - suddenly they're fair-game.

dang, we know this isn't going to get any easier to moderate. And I think writing broad, sweeping rules around this won't work. However, could you possibly write a post about it? You've expanded in the comments section in response to my own failure to live up to these standards (sorry again!), which I think was a good amount of information.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23306743

I think it could be good for some community self-reflection, and to see where the line of discourse vs gossip sits today.

It's my intention to collect the moderation comments on various of these perennial topics, cherry-pick the best bits, and turn them into either some essays or perhaps a kind of super-FAQ. That's why I link to old moderation comments using hn.algolia.com; the answers have started to converge in the last few years, and maybe there's a blissful future in which we can simply link to official explanations rather than endlessly reworking them. So yes in principle, though when there will be time for it is another question.

Do you have any evidence at all for these extraordinary claims? Why would Urban Dictionary go to such lengths to suppress a competitor which posed no threat[0]?

I also notice that the homepage hasn't been updated at all for at least 8 years[1]. I suspect this may have had something to do with its decline.

[0]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2004-01-10%202...

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120107121814/http://onlineslan...

I have evidence - it’s in the link. I also have proof, but I’m not comfortable with publishing my communication with the Google employee right now.

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.

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.

Unfortunately I followed the links before reading your comment. I wasted my time - there's no proof of lies or anything here. Just some claims.

Breaking the rules gets you dinged until you fix things. Repeatedly breaking rules results in more permanent dings. Both with search and with Adsense.

You may want to read these posts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9977372

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5419890

Thank you for the links.

When I refer to Matt Cutts lying, I mostly mean his comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5426209

I have no idea what that business is with that company.

I did everything in his comment to address the claimed automated penalties: removed every single ad and every single citation from the site. No changes in ranking at all, after months. I forget how many. 6 months?

That’s because Matt Cutts was lying: there was a manual penalty in place at that time.

I have to say, after reading those posts, Matt is looking more trustworthy than the OP.

Especially considering the definitely-not-a-sock-puppet post by jimboykin [1], an account that was created immediately after this thread and has but a single post on HN.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5476100

I mean part of this issue is that there is no feedback to the website owner, which is shown by the guy only getting a response here on HN.

Like isn't it kind of insane that the top Google search engineer provided customer service to OP, but he couldn't get a response thru a normal channel.

Edit: Is there any way to prove that Google isn't/hasn't unfairly penalized this site?

I'm more willing to suspend Hitchens Razor when a well known defendant has such a long history of doing much worse.

Is there any way to prove that Google isn't/hasn't unfairly penalized this site?

No.

Dude - I went to your side. I looked up a random word - it had a 3 word definition with 12 seconds to interaction, at least a second of blocking content, a pageload time of 25 seconds (!! for three words!), 352 requests! 1.5MB page size, and content farm crap filling out the rest of the page.

I mean, I'm a user of the web, and I hated sites like this.

You score terribly among all major search providers I tried BTW. Your page-speed score was an F.

You have something like 50 redirect chains on a page with three words!!

Some of these chains are 20 items long (ie, 20 redirects). I mean - how does this even happen?

Quick heads up - This is going to rank terribly everywhere.

Yes, google does "penalize" content farms, and they did a big redo a while back to really try to push this type of 99% repeating content off their index. I've no doubt they hit some good sites, yours doesn't look like one at first glance, but even if I just go unlucky there were tons of sites (review sites / how to sites) that just had endless repeating content with very little originality.

How do folks at google even have time to deal with sites like this and these types of complaints "I confronted Matt" etc...

I have no idea what you’re talking about. The site has never had any of that.

Did you go to the right site?

http://onlineslangdictionary.com/

What URLs are you seeing this on? What browser and OS?

I wonder if anyone else can repro what this new user is describing.

No issues rendering in Firefox on Linux.

GET /random-word/ does indeed 302 exactly once.

22 requests, 344.58 KB / 12.62 KB transferred, Finish: 619 ms, DOMContentLoaded: 483 ms, load: 640 ms. Pretty okay.

Be pretty ironic if they went to the Urban Dictionary, it does sound like a plausible UD experience.

> Due to the time suck of fighting Google's penalty, this site is not yet served via SSL

You probably should get onto enabling SSL/TLS as soon as possible. It supposedly effects search engine ranking.

Very true. Due to the penalty, the site gets less and less traffic every year. Enabling SSL/TLS might help a bit, but I have to face facts: the site is dead.

Not to belittle your experience, but it seems this may be a bit of a negative feedback loop. Haven't updated the homepage because "what's the point I'm already punished" etc...

I spent 80 hours a week from when the penalties started in 2011 until I went broke and got outside employment in 2014. I’ve worked on it for years worth of time since then, including updating the home page. (It’s a content site. Updating the home page is a thing, but people come to the site via searches for slang terms, not for the home page...)

There is nothing I can do with the manual penalty in place, and it doesn’t make sense to throw good time after bad. It’s been 9 years since the penalties started and there’s been no improvement since then. Not only is it not healthy to continue banging my head against the wall of Google, since we’re on a site for a startup incubator: it doesn’t make monetary sense.

re: Matt Cutts

I suspect he was the Googleguy from the Webmasterworld.com forums around 2002-2003, when Google (the company) was telling website owners: "trust us, we only need your website data in order to index it and to make it more easily searchable, no foul play here, we're never going to become a portal like Yahoo, we're never going to become your competitors".

Suffice is to say that things didn't turn out that way, and it has always bugged me that the people directly involved in this deception (i.e. people like Matt Cutts) have never even said "we're sorry". They just took their fat pay-checks and vested their shares and they were done.

Are you saying that the only thing that Google did was to deprioritize sites with a lot of citations? Not that they deprioritized your site specifically? This kind of flag would affect every site they crawl. I feel like it's much more likely that it was made to prevent some class of abusers, and you were caught up in the scope of their net.

I mean, every time they make a change in ranking some people get hurt and some people get helped. If this is a universal change and not tied to your domain I have a hard time believing that a team would've added this flag because a former employee makes a competing site with a slightly different model from you.

Are you saying that the only thing that Google did was to deprioritize sites with a lot of citations?

That was the automated penalty. The rest of your comment is correct. The manual penalty came later.

I have a hard time believing that a team would've added this flag because a former employee makes a competing site with a slightly different model from you.

As I said, that’s incredibly circumstantial. I don’t know the motive, cause, etc. I’m not going to publish my communication with the Google employee who informed me about the manual penalty at this time, so what I’ve written in that article is the extent of the public information at this time.

You appear to have roughly the same ranking in both Bing and Google for two words that I tried ("bro", "womp womp"). Do you believe there is also a conspiracy against your website at Microsoft?

Nope.

It’s been 9 years since the penalties started. One could say that the site had taken something of a popularity hit since then.

While this is all very shady, it also seems to be a poor long-term business decision for Google.

"Our revenue and profits have dropped accordingly,which has forced me to cut our staff down to a bare bones team ... the quality of our content and product have dropped"

If CNW is no longer able provide that data because of financial insolvency, then Google no longer has a source they can scrape. This smells like the poor short-term incentives that drive individual roles instead of simply unethical behavior on Google's part.

> If the penalty weren't in place, we would get about double the visitors of that hate site. Given the rise of white nationalism in the West, does it make sense that a single person within Google can destroy a dictionary, while hate sites flourish?

Going to need evidence here. Your post comes off as a bit of a one-man pity party without it.

Yeah that text is... long in the tooth. It was written before all of the deplatformings, when Google was sending tons of traffic to such sites.

Aside from that, I tried to be as neutral as possible. But the site is my life’s work so far - it’s hard to leave emotion out of it.

At this time I’m not going to publish my communication with the Google employee who informed me about the penalty, so if you think it’s a pity party, I’m okay with that. I’d rather that be the case than risk the livelihood of someone who did the right thing.

> I do know that when I confronted Cutts about the penalty here on HN he lied about it - which does lead one to wonder about his motive

The preamble to this post hints of paranoia, but this is where we know for sure. There's no reason to believe Cutts would have any personal knowledge or involvement or motivation, except that he knew another person who might have had some weak interest in maybe doing something. Of course, the poster feels that, having drawn this chain of connections, that he must be right and Cutts must be lying.

The poster feels entitled now to personally attacking a specific well-known search engineer, one who has been active here in the past. This seems like a conduct violation on here or any reasonable discussion site.

There's no reason to believe Cutts would have any personal knowledge

Cutts was the head of the Web Spam team at the time. That team is responsible for penalties.

He and I had an exchange here years ago. The text of his comment implies that he looked up penalties, so he had knowledge: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5426209

This seems like a conduct violation on here or any reasonable discussion site.

If that’s the case, I’m happy to discuss it with dang or another admin.

How did you site rank on other search engines? Do you have evidence it outranked UD on yahoo, etc?

Very unfortunately I don’t have historical ranking data.

I have 20+ years of SEO experience, going back before it was commonly called SEO, before Google even existed. I cut my SEO teeth figuring out how to manipulate AltaVista rankings.

Here, I've marked up a typical content page of yours, showing what's wrong very blatantly. It took about 30 seconds to diagnose the whole site based on the repeating content farm structures and thin content problems.

https://i.imgur.com/k5brlYr.png

That page maybe has 20 or 30 words of quality content on it. That will get you an extreme demotion from Google if you're running a whole site like that in a content farm structure.

Your site was very likely penalized due to low quality, shallow content. Google tagged it as being a content farm. No conspiracy is necessary, it's obvious why it's penalized. Any SEO expert would point out the countless problems in the first few minutes of a discussion with them.

I looked at numerous pages, all were of very low quality, and thin / shallow on content.

On one page I checked there were 471 words, most of which were repeating low value words or from low value segments of the page (eg the "Link to this slang definition" section). Google knows the page is thin on quality content, aka shallow. I found this to hold true across all the pages I checked.

On most of the pages I checked the most frequent non-common words were "definitions" and "include" - ie hyper low value content. Your typical page looks like it might have 50 or fewer words of quality non-repeating content (content unique to just that page, written by a human). That's hundreds of words shy of what it needs to be at an absolute minimum.

The pages all have repeating content farm structures (which were increasingly common 8-12 years ago) with shallow content in those areas of the page, which is something Google sought to clean up around the time you're claiming the penalty occurred, which makes perfect sense.

You built a content farm, with a lot of shallow content pages, Google dramatically changed how it treats those types of sites, and your site most likely got nuked because of it. If you build a content farm structured site, where all the pages have repeating segments and your offset of positive value only consists of dozens of words of quality text on each page, you stand zero chance of getting traffic. That started being true 8-10 years ago as Google updated its algorithms to target content farms, to wipe them out of existence. They killed a billion dollar site, eHow, circa 2010-2011 in the process:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EHow

Thanks for your feedback. It’s quite similar to other feedback I’ve gotten, from non-employees on Google’s webmaster forums.

My site is the only site on the web with legitimate definitions of slang terms and citations of their use and other data. My site offensivest.com is the only large-scale analysis of the vulgarity of text works - using data from the site. Until a couple years ago, it was the only slang thesaurus available without payment on the web. I invite you to check out similar sites to calibrate your sense of whether it’s low or high quality. For example, you could compare my site’s content, ads, and ranking to internetslang.com. https://internetslang.com/DBA-meaning-definition.asp Is representative of the site.

I don’t understand your saying that my site is a content farm. Almost every definition has been hand-edited by me. The citations are all blacked out. In terms of calibration, https://urbanthesaurus.org/ is another good site to look at. It takes its definitions directly from Urban Dictionary.

But fundamentally it boils down to: a Google employee looked it up and told me that there’s a manual penalty against my site.

> It’s quite similar to other feedback I’ve gotten, from volunteers on Google’s webmaster forums.

Then why haven't you corrected the thin content problem? Your site is drowning in content farm structures and thin content.

> My site is the only site on the web with legitimate definitions of slang terms and citations of their use and other data.

What you're saying has nothing to do with the problem. Your pages do not have enough original content on them, they're suffering from an extreme shallow content penalty. If only 5-10% of the words on your pages are original, quality content and the rest is content farm structured words, you are going to get massively penalized for that.

> Almost every definition has been hand-edited by me. The citations are all blacked out. I don’t understand your saying that my site is a content farm.

I'm saying that Google has judged it to be a content farm based on how they rank content and how they look for mass repeating structures on a site's pages vs how much high quality original content is on each page. This isn't complex SEO, this is very, very simple to diagnose. I wasn't joking when I said it took all of 30 seconds to figure out the problem with your site.

If all you have on a given page is 30 to 50 words of original text (text you wrote by hand so to speak), you will not rank, you will not get much traffic. That's SEO 101. Most of your topic page layout consists of repeating structures, such as: the header, the footer, the map, share / tweet / email section, related words, how common is this slang, how vulgar is this slang, link to this slang. That's all of zero or negative value.

One more time: ~95% of your page structure is of zero value for SEO purposes, and the only value on the pages is a few dozen words of original text. It's not enough; it's not even remotely close to being enough. That needs to be hundreds of words ideally, at a minimum.

> But fundamentally it boils down to: a Google employee looked it up and told me that there’s a manual penalty against my site.

That's very clearly not the problem with your site. It's the extremely shallow/thin content stacked against the repeating content farm structures on every page.

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