[OGinparadise]

Immunity? There's no immunity (supposedly) inside the Google search algorithm

Almost certain that there is. After a certain internal Google score (?) it appears like no update will penalize you with things like 70% traffic drop out of the blue. Big brands are largely not effected by Google's many updates and even when they buy links etc they are forgiven very fast. Regular sites on the other hand are told generic nonsense as they lose visitors update after update.

[codeka]

Do you have anything to back that claim up? You're on hn every time there's a Google story talking about how they're killing smaller sites, acting monopolistic, violating anti-trust regulations or whatever, what is your motivation?

[charliepinglass]

Not the guy you're asking, but thought I'd answer. This may not be referring to true "immunity", but Matt Cutts did say this around the time Panda was first released:

"And we actually came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side."

http://www.wired.com/business/2011/03/the-panda-that-hates-f...

So there is something that is specifically recorded for well-known sites that likely prevents them from receiving the same treatment as other, smaller sites. And anyone who works in SEO can tell you that not since Vince has it been just about links.

[codeka]

He's referring to a classifier that can tell the "quality" of a site, not the size of the brand.

[OGinparadise]

Google cannot "read" content so in essence it's the size of the brand that matters, unless they suppress it manually via search quality raters.

Brands escape major updates, something we saw especially after Panda. As soon as some major sites were hit, they changed the algorithm. Google does not algorithmically punish certain sites for link buying and other shenanigans. I suspect that after a site reaches a certain level of score (not calling it PR) it's golden. So buying 123456789 comment spam links for "Matt Cutts" on fiver will not do much, but 500 links to mymomscookies.tld will cause them to go to page 10, or dead in the water.

Google doesn't seem to care because small sites don't give them pr problems (Audi and Macys would) and small sites will be forced to advertise, if they want any traffic. Notice the perverse inventive? Cut the free traffic and increase adwords' business.

[arbuge]

It makes sense there would be some kind of immunity. "Immunity" is probably the wrong word - I'd call it common sense. I would think Google has a simple lookup table which always places results like "bmw.com" #1 for query "bmw", "wikipedia.org" #1 for query "wikipedia", etc. irrespective of backlink profiles.

[RBerenguel]

But there's no need to. Such big sources have huge anchor links with this tag, backlinks supporting them and whatnot. It should work organically without even needing a lookup table

[OGinparadise]

Do you have anything to back that claim up?

Yeah, lots of things. Things I mentioned in the comment.

You're on hn every time there's a Google story talking about how they're killing smaller sites, acting monopolistic, violating anti-trust regulations or whatever, what is your motivation?

T-R-U-T-H is a great motivator.