Ministry of Disinformation Visits SEO Rockstars
February 1st, 2006 by Michael Gray in Google, Grayhat SEO, IPod & Podcasting, SEOIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
On January 31st Google’s top Svengali Matt Cutts visited SEO Rockstars. WebGuerilla (aka Greg Boser) questioned Matt about the “sandboxing” of the domain [linkcondom.com]. Using his super top secret internal google tools (show off) he said it was not an age penalty, there was something else that made it look “wonky”. Yes he actually said wonky, but obviously wasn’t going to reveal the cause of the “wonkyness”. He also stated that there was no hand ban or penalty in effect.
Towards the end of the show he mentioned the WMW robots.txt experiment and the URL removal tool. He also stated that only one person submitted the request. Now I can tell you from direct, first hand, personal experience that statement is 100% incorrect and false. Hopefully he was making a joke that I missed out on, because if that wasn’t the case, my shoulder angel has his arms across his chest and is tapping his foot impatiently. Why distort the truth about something so harmless, what’s the point and what will be gained, and by doing so don’t you hurt your credibility on other fronts?
Something to think about.
Added 2/2/2006: Please see Matt’s comments below.
Sphere It
February 1st, 2006 at 10:11 am
RE: the URL removal tool - it MUST have been a joke, either that or there’s something more serious about it than meets the eye… I have all sorts of ideas crossing my mind now.
February 1st, 2006 at 4:00 pm
I really hope that was the case, the opposite is just an unpleasant path to start down
February 1st, 2006 at 7:37 pm
I’m really confused about it, too because Todd seemed to want to call him on that - I felt some tension in the conversation at that point.
February 2nd, 2006 at 6:11 pm
The point that I tried to make (perhaps not well) is that someone in the SEO world has made a statement like “I knew it didn’t hurt to submit WMW because someone else already had.” In fact, that person was the first (and only, when I checked a while ago) that had done the submission.
Someone else could have done another submit later after I checked, or perhaps the url removal database just logs the first successful entry (although I don’t think that’s true) or maybe I got the database query wrong (although I don’t think that’s true either).
Okay, I just went back and checked my database query. One entry. It could be that the url removal database only tracks the first successful submission, although I haven’t seen that happen before.
Graywolf, why would this be a thing that I wouldn’t be honest about?
February 2nd, 2006 at 7:12 pm
Thanks for clearing up your statement. It seems an incredibly silly thing to not be honest about, which is why is stuck out when you said it twice.
February 3rd, 2006 at 5:12 am
Yup. If you say you submitted it too, I believe you. But I also had someone else look at the db and he concured that only one removal request went all the way into the db. Have you used the url removal tool for anything in the past? Just wondering because I’m curious now..
February 3rd, 2006 at 8:23 am
Nope first time caller.
February 3rd, 2006 at 3:35 pm
Unusually perhaps, I am with Matt on this.
As a regular user of the url removal tool (302s and all that), whilst appreciating that is not what it was designed for, it has proven very useful.
I can see that the first request that goes through need only be the only one logged. There really is no need for them to log futher requests, on which no action is taken if the first is sucessful.
I would guess that very few multiple requests are ever made (legitimately) for removal, defining the requests for the removal of WMW as perfectly legitimate in this case.
February 10th, 2006 at 6:16 pm
The weird thing is that I’ve seen multiple entries for other urls, so I don’t think that it drops submissions on the floor. If I have a large chunk of free time, I might look into it more in the future..
February 10th, 2006 at 6:47 pm
If you’d like me to submit one to help debug it’s not a prob.