imbo - this is fraud on a global scale [1], it negatively affects millions of users and thousands of webmasters, and content producers that do not publish in walled gardens.

I've watched the changes since there was a 'googleguy' and the 'big update was charted with moon phases'.

Since about the time Page started pushing things around it's gone downhill slowly with more and more censoring and less and less transparency.

Google is still benefiting from public trust that was earned years ago, when it was truly doing lots of good around the world.

The lack of transparency about the censoring is a terrible thing for the knowledge of the planet - an entire generation of people are learning truth about life (and the afterlife) trusting google, and being filled with info from youtube. Even the censoring spam filters in gmail are affecting people's lives in the real world today.

I mentioned some of the issues with users not getting transparent info about their searches being censored in a comment here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21487318 (and how I think more web sites need to put notices about the increased censorship of big G)

It's fraud for the all webmasters as well.

"Make a good site, we'll find it and display it. Don't do any SEO, that's evil - just make good content" - well many of us have spent hundreds of hours making good content and watching others who have less content rank higher.

Is there a blacklist from the time period Matt Cutts was on the spam team and around the time he left?

I heard a rumor that if your site was on one of these 'we caught you' blacklists with a certain googlers name on it - you can't get out of the de-rank jail unless that specific person lets you out.. a shadowban, and public notice to do more work to fix it, and whole while knowing nothing will fix the ranking for that site.

maybe not regardless - but telling webmasters to make disavow lists and spent that stupid amount of time putting them together - and still not putting their sites back into the top 10 (knowing you've crafted the blacklists / shadowbans and tweaked the algo to push them back as well) - that's fraudulent isn't it.

You've made people spend tons of time trying to fix things for google - knowing they were wasting their time and losing money.

I'm guessing the goal was to destroy lives and knock the spirit out of those people who would 'game the google system' - those evil SEO people should be destroyed.

I'm sure there's a valid excuse - the algo changed - we added more manual reviews - we have this stay in your lane thing, this your life your money thing - you have to have all this other info to be legit -

Is that really what the end user needs when they are looking for entertainment sites? No - it's a sneaky way to put down a bunch of sites to raise up the others.

Then a video comes out - some googlers say, well it is okay to hire an SEO company now - don't hire a bad one or it'll penalize you - you should only hire one that says it will take 6 months for you to rank.

So google keeps saying one thing and doing another - then saying another thing and not doing that.

Webmasters should be able to get details about anyone who has 'manually scored' their site.

In some cases it's not just are they looking for what's in the manual - their location in the world, their religion, and other factors, could influence how they feel about a site and it being downranked by someone in the Philippines could have drastic consequences for a webmaster in the states, and for all the users who might enjoy that site from Europe.

So the one big G statement said that NOT being transparent is the best thing so bad actors don't take advantage of knowledge of the system - well I believe you are hurting more good actors and more users by hiding everything.

There's even some recent evidence that telling users why things have been moderated actually leads to less problems: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21513871

[1] InMyBiasedOpinion - and not a lawyer, doctor ymmv yada yada