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Comment by nikatwork | Hacker News Reader

I sifted through a lot of traffic data, and it must be noted that I saw zero evidence of El Goog manually weighting any results. Everything was 100% above board - they might donkey-punch you, but it was algorithmic and not manual.

I bet MeFi could be fixed in a few months if they hired a real SEO expert, ie someone who understands the underlying ranking algos and not just the usual voodoo bullcrap. The site is probably just tripping a few red flags, it could be something as stupid as an accidental link loop in their dynamic content.

I'll give it to Google, once you find your sin and fix it, your traffic will come back, maybe not 100% but a significant recovery. (Unless you have done something really dumb/blackhat like paid links.)

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> they might donkey-punch you, but it was algorithmic and not manual.

This is not always the case. Look at the Rapgenius event. That was triggered by manual intervention.

>I bet MeFi could be fixed in a few months if they hired a real SEO expert, ie someone who understands the underlying ranking algos

There isn't anyone on the outside that truly understands them because they constantly adjust them to deal with abuse. It is possible that one of these adjustments killed MeFi and it wasn't a recent mistake on MeFi's part.

You are correct that manual penalties can be applied, I worded my previous comment badly. What I mean is they don't appear to "manually" tamper with the result weightings eg by using a whitelist of upweighted domains.

While they can slap a manual -50 penalty on your domain, from memory you are notified of such penalties in Google Analytics so it's not a silent and nefarious manipulation. MeFi should know if they have such a penalty. I also admit that the "get out of jail" process is even more annoying than dealing with an Apple app store rejection.

Webmaster tools, not analytics, and it's buried in a sub menu and has the most confusing text and only gives one example link.

a link loop is a red flag? I guess I am misunderstanding, as that would mean I can't have a "artticles like this <link> <link>" block in my blog, which seems very weird.

A link loop as in a dynamically generated menu structure that creates an endless loop for the crawler, or accidentally makes large numbers of very similar pages with similar URLs, etc. (Yes this can happen legitimately and by accident on retail/commercial sites).

... or one of those plugins that generates fake mails for email-harvesting bots?

I haven't used one of those myself, but yeah that does sound dangerous - however you could just tell the Googlebot to ignore the link in GA and it should be fine. I've seen people do similar things to create infinitely deep directories to screw with evil crawlers, since the Googlebot should obey your directives.

would using rel=canonical protect against this?

You miss the point completely: If Google ads an extra ad you might lose 20% of your traffic even if your rank stays the same. Or if they ad youtube videos on the display, or books, or local or whatever....

So call it manual, algorithmic, display change or whatever, you're f-ed and call moves more of web traffic to its own properties.

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