Matt Cutts, who has not been with Google for a long time now, was asked to comment about alleged action Google took on a site a dozen or so years ago. Matt said he doesn't specifically recommend this case but said in general "In many of the cases I saw, someone assumed that Google took some action in response to them or their site or their comments, when I knew from my position that the action had been percolating for months."
Here are Matt's tweets on this:
Hey, @mattcutts it’s been almost a decade now. We all added some life scars
— Ron Ilan (@ronilan) November 10, 2019
Care to share what exactly “the other side of the story” was?
It’s from a decade ago. After I wrote this: https://t.co/DZd6id8qGF about Totlol.
— Ron Ilan (@ronilan) November 16, 2019
You replied: “@neyne I could feel the bitterness in the post, but there's often two sides to a story.”
(From memory, tweet not available, he channeled @paultoo and said something about being evil)
For example, people often assumed that a change with Google was a deliberate reaction to an immediate stimuli. At least in my experience, changes often took weeks (or more often months) to wend their way through levels of approval, consultation with other groups, potentially PR..
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) November 16, 2019
the specific situation with Totlol, but that's my best estimate of what I was trying to say ten years ago.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) November 16, 2019
Interesting, don't you think?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
