[harrystone]

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.

[adventured]

How is it obvious that what happened to Metafilter isn't right? I'm inclined to be sympathetic when any non-spammy site is hit by a Google penalty, but what's the basis used for determining that Metafilter is deserving of a particularly high ranking above where it's at right now?

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.

[mbrubeck]

It's not just that MetaFilter's own ranking has dropped. If that were the case, then you might argue that it was just the algorithm doing its job.

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.

[adventured]

Excellent point. I didn't put together the link designation with the likelihood that Google had put Metafilter into a spam penalty box. I simply hadn't considered that a possibility given Metafilter's reputation.

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.

[jshen]

How do you know there is a penalty in place?

[mbrubeck]

Because Google has emailed other sites' publishers, telling them they were penalized for links from MetaFilter:

https://medium.com/technology-musings/941d15ec96f0

[FfejL]

That's a reasonable argument against Google announcing what needs to be done. It's no argument at all against someone from Google contacting Matt Haughey directly, and telling him.

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.

[guyzero]

Cutts said on his Twitter feed that he's talked to Haughey.

[scriptproof]

I guess what Matt said to Haughey: your site looks like a content farm, lot of posts have poor content, filled with lots of links, none of them have backlinks so it was hit by Panda. Even if there is a lot of good pages on the site according to someones, it is enough to have also a lot of shallow pages to get caught.

[personZ]

Obviously, what happened to metafilter isn't right.

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.

[Consultant32452]

If Google et. al. can manually punish you, they should be able to manually un-punish you also. That this feature doesn't exist is a serious design flaw. A human being should always be able to look at a site and say, "Nope, you're good." and let you be ranked naturally again.

[jshen]

How would they decide which sites to manually look at? Surely they can't look at all of them.

[Consultant32452]

Presumably by a mechanism similar to how they would decide which sites to manually look at when doing manual punishments.

[arg01]

But the successful bad actors are more noticeable because they are near the top of the search while those you have to unpunish are hard to find.

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.