That was quick. Google appears to have already upgraded CultofMac.com in its search results, just a few days after downgrading us.
As we noted yesterday, Cult of Mac was collateral damage in Google’s war on crappy content farms. For some inexplicable reason, we got downgraded when Google tweaked its algorithms last Thursday.
But today we’re back in. We’re on Google News (a very important source of daily traffic) as well as Google’s general search results. However, we still get outranked by some of the scraper sites that steal our content, so not everything’s perfect.
Why we’ve been upgraded, I have no idea. Google’s head of spam, Matt Cutts, tweeted me yesterday, saying Google had likely seen my post and would get it resolved. And Wired.com published a story about us today after speaking to a Google Fellow Amit Singhal. But the changes were already in place early this morning, which makes me think Google is slowly tweaking its algorithm to get better results. I’ve asked Cutts for an explanation, and will post up if/when I get a reply.
I’d like to thank readers for your awesome support. We got some very nice notes in the comments to the last post. Made my day. Thanks guys.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander is an expert on:
Apple and Apple history
Steve Jobs, Jony Ive, Tim Cook and Apple leadership
Apple community
iPhone and iOS
iPad and iPadOS
Mac and macOS
Apple Watch and watchOS
Apple TV and tvOS
AirPods
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
35 responses to “Crisis Over: Google Has Reinstated Cult of Mac”
Good to hear! Google is right to downrank the content farms, and some collateral damage is to be expected. That being said, it’s good to see you guys were reinstated so fast.
It is VERY good to see that CoM was quickly reinstated. Now, if only the benevolent and wise Google will just DOWNGRADE quickly the worst offenders that they missed in the first round, including Demand Media, Ask.com, Answers.com, etc… all of whom are ridiculously bad offenders that are hurting everyone else with superior content.
Can you believe that Google still indexes over 11 million pages of answers.com pages that have “Can you answer this question?” with NO answer, while other sites that have good content are much lower in the Google listings. And the worst part is that the REALLY BAD CONTENT is surrounded by google adsense ads, with the express purpose of boosting revenue to Answers.com (and Google). It’s really quite unbelievable.
What’s worse is that even Ask.com has been promoted on Google results pages. Ask.com is a particularly bad offender because with their new strategy of being a farm of content farms (instead of a search engine), Ask.com is simply filled with links to Answers.com and similarly spammy sites. They bailed on their search engine business because they realized just how lucrative it could be to be a content farm (or farm of farms).
Hard to believe. It does appear that Google is trying to do the right thing. Hopefully, they will address these other big problems quickly because it is significantly hurting all the other “little guys” that got bumped out of the top results by further promoting crap content from Answers.com and Ask.com that are notoriously taking huge advantage of their site age, high page rank, and massive inbound links that were mostly derived through gray/black hat SEO techniques. If Google has intentions of getting it right for users, the hammer will eventually come down on Ask.com and Answers.com.
<3 you COM I check on you all day :-)
FTW! :)
Go CoM! Looking forward to your posts on today’s event :-)
Congrats Khaney. I like your site and I’m glad it’s back in the Google rankings where it belongs.
P.S.
I just picked up the latest issue of Wired today and look forward to reading the Foxxconn article. Thanks for the heads up
“Steal our content” ? Most of the “content” is either stolen from elsewhere or made up from John Brownlee’s commode after he shits in it. You guys make up your own stories (like that “Apple staffer” crap yesterday) to get what’s precious to you – traffic. Google doesn’t downrank you for no reason !
Shut the fuck up idiot, or at least show your real name, you demented troll.
Way to go guys!
Anyhow:
“Just when you thought you were out, they pull you back in!”
Glad you got your position guys, this is one of my favourite sites. Keep up the good work.
I dont think they changed the whole algorithm for this.
Did they change the algorithm or do a little magic whitelisting?……either way it’s very troubling, this power to make someone/something invisible on the web.
See recent NYT article: “Google Faces New Antitrust Charges in Europe.”
Changing tack – I’m looking forward to the $99 pre-paid iPhone one last thing announcement after the iPad 2 snore-fest (I want my, I want my iPad 3).
You may need to create CULTOFANDROID or CULTOFGOOGLE :)
I blame crappy articles by John Brownlee….
For me, Cult of Mac is THE BEST Apple blog out there.
I especially like Leander Kahney’s editorials and John Brownlee reporting all the rumours, which are all part of the fun of being an Apple fan.
I stopped reading all other Apple blogs a long time ago. Waste of time. CoM is all I need. :)
I remember a day, when one of my site was smacked from 110k a day to 10k a day, i can totally understand how bad it feels, years of hardwork goes down the drain before your eyes. I am glad they took notice and put your site up.
So much for google not making manual exceptions. They kill real sites then give instant gratification to faggot mac user sites. Someone with some galls and money has got to sue those sons of bitches, google is shit
It’s great to see that your page was reinstated, seems most likely via whitelisting. What’s unfortunate is that the more I look at the search results returned after the Panda update, the more this update looks like an epic fail. Many authoritative sites have been crushed out of the results under the weight of spammy wordpress blogs that all spin the same content. I guess “pretty presentation” totally trumps long term quality content providers.
Google should allow some way for sites that feel they have been unfairly hammered to request reinclusion – not everyone will be able to get a Matt Cutts intervention.
It’s great news that Google reinstated Cult of Mac although that will not happen to other smaller genuine blogs and websites.. *sigh*