I cannot believe I am writing this but Gizmodo published a story last week named Yes, Google Uses Its Power to Quash Ideas It Doesn’t Like—I Know Because It Happened to Me. The story was mostly about how Google uses their power to bully reporters, etc. The story has an update to it but I am not covering that part of it…

The part that stands out is the part around that Google said +1s impact search rankings. Here is that part:

Let me take you back to this confusion, which is to be blamed directly on Google and their pushy marketing people around Google+. In August 2011, Wired published a story suggesting Google+ was tied to ranking. Google’s chairman suggested it as well in February 2013. Matt Cutts did say at conference it is not used but did say that authorship is a good signal, which can be confusing for users.

Matt Cutts then in August 2013 clarified +1s are not used for rankings and then later in the year Stone Temple Consulting did a study that confirmed what Matt Cutts said.

So what I think we have here are a bunch of pushy Googlers trying to push publishers to add the +1 buttons to their sites back then. There was a ton of confusion, likely done on purpose, by a group of Googlers, to push +1 buttons on large publisher web sites.

In terms of Googlers being bullies to reporters… I write negative things about Google all the time and I never felt bullied by Google for doing so. Of course, I heard from them from time to time when they were not happy but they never pressured me to update or change any of my stories.

Forum discussion at Black Hat World.