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:

Matt added:

You can then see Matt and the author of the Pando arguing on Twitter:

Forum discussion at Hacker News & Twitter.