Obviously, what happened to metafilter isn't right.
But it should also be obvious why Google doesn't say what needs to be done to remove a penalty. The sites that should receive a penalty will just use that information to further game the system.
But it should also be obvious why Google doesn't say what needs to be done to remove a penalty. The sites that should receive a penalty will just use that information to further game the system.
The only thing I've seen are a few opinions stating that Metafilter is great. That doesn't make it so to the majority of web users.
But Google has clearly miscategorized MetaFilter as a content farm or linkspam site, and is actively telling other sites that it is penalizing them for outbound links from MetaFilter that it has categorized as spam, even in cases where those links are clearly not spam.
In this case, the algorithm is not doing its job.
Every time I read about this Metafilter situation, I cringe in thinking about how horrible Answers.com is with the abusive tactics they employ now when it comes to displaying content / answers. And yet they remain non-penalized; historically they're one of AdSense's biggest publishers, always found that interesting.
That's what surprises me most in all of this. Why hasn't Cutts picked up the phone, and called Haughey? Haughey's a long-time and well respect Web Dude. He's not a spammer, nor some 'random dude with a site.' Sure seems like a win/win for Google to help MetaFilter out of this jam.
Why is that obvious?
One aspect of these types of stories that seems to get ignored is the value that these sites provide for searchers: Was Metafilter providing a good experience for users? Is their experience worse with the site ranked lower? Is it, perhaps, better?
That is the question that needs to be answered (e.g. what questions brought someone to metafilter? I can honestly say I've never been directed there), not whether MetaFilter is entitled to some set quantity of search traffic per month.
Even if they can easily find them I think the real reason they want to stay away from it is that having such a tool would open a can of worms on the search neutrality side of things. (i.e. we know Google+ is a good actor we should remove link out penalties, we know are largest advertising client is generally a good actor, we should remove penalties from their site). Even if google wasn't tempted to misuse the tool you can easily see it generating a bunch of lawsuits form bad or unlucky actors accusing google of favoritism.