After Google bought Nest, it removed company’s biggest competitors from results

It&#x27;s a shame that Pando&#x27;s inquiry didn&#x27;t make it to me, because the suggestion that Google took action on vivint.com because it was somehow related to Nest is silly. As part of a crackdown on a spammy blog posting network, we took action on vivint.com--along with hundreds of other sites at the same time that were attempting to spam search results.<p>We took action on vivint.com because it was spamming with low-quality or spam articles like<p>- <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130919184930/http://anadesign.info/small-attract-home-buyers.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20130919184930&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;anadesign....</a> for &quot;Alburquerque NM home security system&quot;<p>- <a href="http://www.womenspk.com/5-ideas-for-keeping-your-elderly-relatives-better-protected/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.womenspk.com&#x2F;5-ideas-for-keeping-your-elderly-rel...</a><p>- <a href="http://www.frugalful.com/2013/12/five-surprising-ways-to-save-money-on-your-homes-expenses.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.frugalful.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;12&#x2F;five-surprising-ways-to-sav...</a><p>- <a href="http://doyoulovewhereyoulive.com/archives/top-10-benefits-of-automating-your-home" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;doyoulovewhereyoulive.com&#x2F;archives&#x2F;top-10-benefits-of...</a><p>- <a href="http://arch.itect.us/2013/01/17/top-10-benefits-of-automating-your-home/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arch.itect.us&#x2F;2013&#x2F;01&#x2F;17&#x2F;top-10-benefits-of-automatin...</a><p>and a bunch more links, not to mention 25,000+ links from a site with a paid relationship where the links should have been nofollowed.<p>When we took webspam action, we alerted Vivint via a notice in Webmaster Tools about unnatural links to their site. And when Vivint had done sufficient work to clean up the spammy links, we granted their reconsideration request. This had nothing whatsoever to do with Nest. The webspam team caught Vivint spamming. We held them (along with many other sites using the same spammy guest post network) accountable until they cleaned the spam up. That&#x27;s all.

This is misleading. The article cites a single company that inadvertently violated Google&#x27;s rules by failing to mark paid links. This seems to be part of the ongoing saga of companies making errors, sometimes honest, and being penalized.<p>Is the company even a major player in the smart thermostat space? It&#x27;s not even listed in this market analysis from last fall: <a href="http://cleantechnica.com/2013/11/14/honeywell-leads-smart-thermostat-leaderboard/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cleantechnica.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;11&#x2F;14&#x2F;honeywell-leads-smart-th...</a>.<p>It looks more like a competitor in the home automation systems space that sells smart thermostats mainly as part of a more comprehensive system.<p>Given the absence of action against any of their more major competitors, this seems like a coincidence.

Here&#x27;s another thing that Google&#x27;s alleged dirty-tricks obscured: Vivint&#x27;s Wikipedia entry including its fairly lengthy &quot;Legal Issues&quot; section:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivint" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Vivint</a><p>According to that section, Vivint has made settlement&#x2F;voluntary compliance agreements with, or been penalized by the states of Kansas, Ohio, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Arkansas, Washington, Louisiana, South Carolina, Minnesota, Tennessee, California, and Oregon upon accusations of fraud and deceptive practices.<p>Holy shit...Google has even more power than we had yet imagined! Talk about Pando burying the lede here.<p>Edit: Holy, <i>holy</i> shit: it appears that even <i>Wikipedia itself</i> is on the scam. At the very top of Vivint&#x27;s Wikipedia entry, some Wikipedian&#x2F;Nest-boardmember has placed a banner warning stating:<p>&gt; <i>This article appears to be written like an advertisement. Please help improve it by rewriting promotional content from a neutral point of view and removing any inappropriate external links. (March 2014)</i><p>So a company that Google has wiped out from the search results also, within a few months later, has its Wikipedia entry vandalized by the Wikipedia Cabal to make it look like an advertisement for Vivint, as if Vivint or someone friendly to the company would ever break the rules on Wikipedia. Surely this is a conspiracy to end all conspiracies.

No real comment on the issue at hand, but I&#x27;ve been targeted by Vivint&#x27;s door to door sales team on one occasion. It was a very pushy salesman that started to ask security related questions despite my insitence for him to leave. Once I managed to gen rid of him I found a dozen plus other similar accounts of pushy and deceitful selling practices in my area. Serves them well I would say.

Highly doubt that this was anything but a coincidence. Even if you don&#x27;t think it was, the Nest deal most likely took more than 2 weeks to close, and it&#x27;d be crazy for Google to take such deliberate and egregious actions before then.

Vivint is more of an ADT competitor. They are a security&#x2F;automation company with monthly fee model.<p>It is clear they have spent alot of money buying links from their profile, but so has ADT.<p>A more fitting question would be why ADT hasn&#x27;t also been penalized.

This actually makes sense. Does it matter when they started dissecting links? What matters is when they de indexed. Why rapgenius was given break so early? Does Google think people will not know just because they don&#x27;t have billion dollar in their pocket? lol. Here is my version of story: Board decided to purchase nest and naturally they looked at competitors. They send the message down to webspam team and asked them to check their linking profile and if anything is against the guidelines, take their ass down.<p>You know there are laws but prosecutors decide whether to file charges or not or a police decide whether to pull over or not if the car is driving 8-9mph more than the speed limit. Be polite to them, you can get away or get less penalty. Show aggression to them, you will get charged for much more things than you were initially approached for. Sometimes you dont even know what that means. Once I got a traffic citation after making a wrong U-turn and since I was &quot;showing attitude&quot;, I got citation for having foreign materials on my liscense plate?? LOL<p>Of course attitude= money in this context

I&#x27;m sorry, but I wasn&#x27;t aware Nest HAD competitors. Not only that, Vivint was violating the rules and got punished accordingly for it.<p>“And, as they say, there’s no greater place to hide a dead body than on the second page of Google’s search results.” is a massively inflammatory statement.

I hate government intervention in these matters, I really do. But in the case of Google I feel that their search results should be walled off from any other business interests. They have so much influence over the discovered internet that maybe its time to separate search from their other business interests.<p>Page and Brin were geniuses in realizing early that search was the golden ring to reach for. They deserve their billions for bringing this amazing service to us; but now with shareholders muddying the waters I don&#x27;t think this should be leveraged for other business efforts.

There&#x27;s a potentially nasty lawsuit waiting to happen there if Vivint has solid tracking&#x2F;referral records, since the standard in civil trials is only &#x27;preponderance of the evidence.&#x27;

Say what you want about how Google handles penalties but I think it is silly to suggest that Google has acted any differently in this case than to the vast majority of sites out there who receive penalties, but don&#x27;t have friends in high places to expedite the process of having the penalty lifted.

&quot;one of the&quot;

Hmm sorry to say so but Vivint does have several court orders for missleading information.<p>I also don&#x27;t see how vivint makes the same products as nest or even making em a competitor... Nest is something that is coming from the future and I can assure you that vivint is not even close in that.<p>Also I don&#x27;t get how Google is supposed to contact every website that puts on a banlist for innapropriate or missleading content...

This is what happens when we let one company get too much power on the web.

And this, children, is how you get an antitrust probe started.

Remember when the standard Google excuse was &quot;it&#x27;s not our fault, it&#x27;s the algorithm&quot;?<p>Now it&#x27;s &quot;what are you gonna do about it?&quot;

I think that these manual actions are likely never to happen to Google properties, but they can easily happen to everyone else. They are opaque and have severe consequences on those that are affected.<p>How are websites selected for manual actions? Does someone get handed a list of sites to check out? Are they selected algorithmically? How are manual actions decided upon (when it is up to humans, it can be very inconsistently applied)? How are the results communicated to those affected (I hear that it is communicated in very vague and unhelpful ways via Webmaster tools)?<p>If one isn&#x27;t friends with Matt Cutts or have deep SV connections (i.e. if I am not RapGenius), how does one get a manual action removed quickly? Apparently it is really really hard if you are not RapGenius.<p>Seriously, these manual actions are scary as hell for those relying on Google to send them traffic. If MF can be seriously harmed by a manual action, no one is safe.

If there is any truth to this article, then things are going to get really bad for Google. This with other recent complaints may prove that Google may be stepping beyond the gray areas of a monopoly. A good lobbying may delay the process but it is inevitable.<p>OT: I don&#x27;t usually complain about votes but the amount of downvotes in this thread is appalling. Anything critical of Google has been downvoted. Ironically, if asked, most people here would be against censorship of any kind, however for many that is valid as long as the opinion stays within their perception. Under the same argument, I can &quot;predict&quot; that this post like other similar ones before is going to flagged off the frontpage. Its starting to get repetitive enough to be no longer ignored. Not sure how the situation can be improved because in reality its very hard to built a community with diverse opinions.