Pando wrote an article named After Google bought Nest, it removed one of the company’s biggest competitors from search results showing how Vivint was removed from Google shortly after Google acquired Nest.
Matt Cutts, Google's head of search spam called this "silly," in a Hacker News
thread. In fact, he said the reason they were removed was because they
participated in guest blog link spamming. Matt said, Google penalized
them in November 2013, well before they acquired Nest in January 2014.
Here is Matt's response:
It's
a shame that Pando's inquiry didn'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.
We took action on vivint.com because it was spamming
with low-quality or spam articles like...[removed, see hacker news for
the links]
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.
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's all.
Matt added:
In
this case, we started dissecting this particular spammy guest blog
posting network in November of 2013, and Google didn't acquire of Nest
until January of 2014. So Vivint was link spamming (and was caught by
the webspam team for spamming) before Google even acquired Nest.
You can then see Matt and the author of the Pando arguing on Twitter:
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