"[a few] employees running the show willy-nilly based on personal preference would be a bombshell." - It should be, but no one seemed to care so long as the daily usage stats were showing upward trends and android was selling more and more and all that.

Time and again Matt and the spam team announced changes to the system that would only affect, what was it, 2% of search queries and tricky language like that right? Well, how many people were on the spam team? a dozen? a 100 ?

They pushed changes to "the magical super brain algorithm" - that targeted a small amount of people, several times.

They knew some of these changes were so harsh, they released the disavow tool as an olive branch - but it's half baked. I've submitted dozens of them.

So they, or at least some of them knew they were spam hunting with bazookas instead of scalpels, just like youtube announced with the annotations thing recently ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18540525 )

Things are shifting a bit at the big G it seems, I saw a headline today saying another large walk out is being planned over the censorship / censored version for china / draginfly(?) project - I still wonder if this is the same reason Matt Cutts took a leave of absence - seeing the spam team take an overly hard and unfair approach to things - censoring the search results to an amount that could be considered a bobmshell if it got out - I would love to have heard those internal discussions. No idea, just a gut feeling.

Of course they are smart enough to hide behind carefully crafted statements - and will have all kinds of deniability - much like fbook, it's the magical algorythm not some mean in dark veils censoring results for things they don't like!

Look, some of the censoring over the years I understand - changing all the torrent links to movies that used to dominate - sure, regulation and lawsuit pressure from well funded groups. But some of the "this algo change affects only 2% of results - come on - I know there was hatred for spam - and well funder super smart group of people challenged to destroy it.

However some of the spam was not make google bad, much of what some outfits did was look at what google liked and put in the top 10 - make something similar. Repeat.

Some people did terrible spam I would never do, some of it was harmless.

At least Mr Cutts would occasionally warn people about the impending doom, and sometimes give pre-clues, like stop the press releases before they obliterated large groups of sites.

Thing is, a lot of those sites that were seo'd to the top were actually good sites made to engage the users for those keywords. Google did not just hurt the "evil spammers" - they hurt themselves and their trusting users by removing a lot of good sites with content people were looking for.

It's fine and all - they are a private company. I just wish they would be more transparent and honest about it.

They put a little notice "some results are missing becuase of chilling effects, those bad hollywood censors, cough cough, dmca censoring is wrong, blah blah."

However tons of other results have been censored by a small group of smarty pants and there is no notice posted to visitors, users just assume google is showing the best 80 web site for keywords xyz -

And then there is negative SEO too - in a dozen disavow uploads I have added my suggestion and I think once in a product forums post...

give webmaster tools and option for site owner to say "make it so links don,t count as votes for a site unless approved within the console" - this would be a two fold win - it would stop negative seo attacks, and it would prove that any webmasters trying to game the system with a spam links campaign really did vouch for those 100 site wide links on whatever site that are dofollowed" - or not - because if we did not vouch for them in the webmaster tools, then they would not count against or for our site.

Basically like, nofollow all links unless we checkbox and approve them.

The bad links attacks are seriously lame and they are like a DDOS attack that google encourages at this point.

There is so much that is unfair to good webmasters and to the users of google that trust it. Frankly I am exhausted from wasting time trying to please google and trying to change with the constant algo updates, and disavow updates, and there is no transparency about what is holding some sites down.

Blame the black box magic math thing - but certainly some big G people could explain - but they don't. Everything is purposely left to veiled, broad suggestions. Purposeful lack of transparency, obvious censorship. This is G and you can't deny it.

Oh, the 'without cause' thing - it would be simple to say web site X is being algo penalized for doing spam technique B that was added to the algo in 2015 - well that 'spam' technique was what google liked and was encouraging in 2013 and 2014, so people did B.

There are a few times over the decade I was pretty sure they were tweaking the alogrythm to target things that we were specifically doing - things that were unusual, but were within the guidelines - twice things that Matt mentioned were almost like a "this means you, we see what you are doing, and it's technically not spam by our definition, but we don't like that it can be used to rank up sites, so in order to discourage it's future use by others, we are saying don't make your own PBN, we don't like that"

well - PBN was one of the methods that worked for lots of sites, for a long time after that.

Anyways, it might be a bombshell now that people are thinking about the bigger picture, but the things you say are shocking have basically already all played out right in public. Thing is, not many people were really paying attention to the censor team, er, spam team.

Most people who looked at google things were focused on those press releases, and what the articles said at tech crunch, mashable, etc. Shiny phones, acquisitions, press releases. All that jazz.

It seems to me it's only end of 2018 that people are starting think about what's behind the koolaid everyone has been drinking with their silicon valley glasses, and how they are affecting large groups of other people.

I'm glad to see the world waking up to the damage that censoring big G and Fbook and others can cause.

Sure a lawyer could get into these things and prove them and it could stink, but that would be hard and it would not being the change that I think is really needed.

It's time we got some more transparency and honesty. Its not fair.

It wouldn't hurt google to show webmasters what is holding their sites down - people could take the big G algo and run it on their own portal and they would not be competing with google - the secret sauce for ranking and down ranking is not going to change the fact that google is embedded everywhere already - when other engines copied the results you did not see google disappear while everyone switch their defaults to yahoo and bing.

Apologies for this wall of text, and as I realize I just put too many issues into one rant, this may not convey well the details of these things.