Matt Cutts Feels Pain of a Search Engine Penalty

graywolf on Thu, 2006-11-02 20:38.

Rumours & Scandal

8 comments

Today Matt Cutts got to feel the bitter sting of a search engine algorthym classifying him as bad guy.

Matt was doing a review of a new search engine compete.com and here's what he had to say

What added value does Compete provide? Well, the search results have little icons beside them for things like spyware/phishing, coupon codes, and how popular the site is. How accurate is the spyware/phishing data? Well, for my site, I get a warning exclamation point and this message:

Use caution in providing any personal information or downloading software on mattcutts.com.

I’m not a spyware/phishing site, and my site has been around for over a year. So with a sample size of one, how accurate is that data? Not very.

I'm pretty confident in agreeing that Matt's not running any spyware or phishing scams, but hey it sure does suck when a search engine algo incorrectly classifies you as one of the "bad guys" doesn't it? It would probably really be bad if it was popular search engine that lot's of people used and you were running your business on ... just something to think about ...

Comments

Matt Links To Spyware

Earl on Thu, 2006-11-02 21:01.

There is a few guys and one guy in particular that uses Matts blog to spread spyware.
If he ran a spyware/virus check on the people that added comments to his blog he would be very suprised i am sure.
So its not that he hosts it but he links to bad enviroments so the warning was partly accurate.

the newest IE identified one

seobook on Thu, 2006-11-02 21:02.

the newest IE identified one of my sites as a phishing site when all it had on it was a search box

LOL

Amit Patel on Thu, 2006-11-02 22:09.

Three thumbs up.

Do we all have to avoid

fantomaster on Thu, 2006-11-02 23:02.

getting links from Matt, now? :)

Thank goodness this would NEVER happen to Google. Ever.

I'm sure i've seen something

SEOblackhat on Thu, 2006-11-02 23:11.

I'm sure i've seen something like this before. . .

Didn't Google do the same thing to pussy.org a few weeks back?

Only instead of 1 year, the site has been around for 11 years and it was Google saying to all the referrals that "badware" was on the site. Instead of hitting a percent of 8k users a day, it hit close to 400k.

I agree - better chcks and balances are DEFINATELY needed on all these "reporting" sites. There is no accountability and that needs to change.

Not quite the same

johnweb on Fri, 2006-11-03 00:21.

Matt got a comment on his blog from the search engine, so I imagine if he wanted to get his site's description changed it wouldn't be a problem.

A real person who get's penalized by google would either:

1) 99.9999% of the time, not be told anything, and be left to guess and try to figure it out.

2) 0.0001% of the time get a vauge message on their webmaster console saying to review the webmaster guidelines.

And they definately would not have the power to get someone from said engine to read much less respond to their complaint as google doesn't have an email address.