You can't prove that. The parent can however make the decision to not hide behind a throwaway account, give their company name, suggest how they found out Google employees were in the audience, document the dates they were ranked highly vs low, tell us what area Google is comically bad in, detail what if any SEO practises they were using at the time. Link the site if nothing else so we can all have a look into back links dodgy practises, archive.org copies.
You can't prove how a black box algo ranks you, but you can do a damn sight more than a throwaway comment accusing Google of cooking their algorithm out of spite.
> The parent can however make the decision to not hide behind a throwaway account
I think you have a reasonable point, but given their prior experience with publicly criticizing Google, they also have a reasonable desire to remain anonymous.
The best way to remain anonymous in this situation to say nothing.
I mean if Google is going to penalise them and risk their search integrity for a quip what's to stop them asking a bud over at HN to see if this account's IP is associated with another?
Infeasible of course but around the same likelyhood of happening
I disagree. It's much easier to identify me by my real name than by asking a third party to analyze server logs to find an IP and match it to users (many of which may be using the same public IP).
I had this happen to me in a different way. I overmarketed an online traffic school for traffic tickets website and Google sent through webmaster tools an email "this website is harmful to the google index" and actually removed the website from Google's organic index and removed listings from links to the site from other sites (like from court websites, etc). The site completely 100% disappeared. I tried to get them to re-list it but they never did so I had to use a different domain. This was a site that had 6+ years behind it. Google does de-list sites.
It was 2014; impressions dropped by over 96% overnight (essentially, you could find it by searching for the site name, nothing else); the dates didn't correlate with an observed algorithm update; no 'Manual Actions' were showing in GWT; the attendee list at the conference was public.
I'm not comfortable with saying any more because, as hackuser says, I'm not risking the last two years of work (we've finally got back up to that level of Google traffic, though fortunately other traffic has grown immensely). I can simply offer this up and let people disregard it to the extent that they're willing to trust a throwaway account. You don't trust it at all, and that's fine.
Exactly - I call BS. Google won't artificially boost search rankings for their own products - in some cases the search folks have told other groups that need to do SEO if their rankings are too low.
Search is their primary business though. I can't see them jeopardizing that by blacklisting a random competitor that poked fun at them in a presentation. It makes no sense.
However, they're the only ones that know their ranking algorithm. This means they can tailor their sites for the best possible ranking. It also means they can rewrite the algorithm in ways that better rewards Google (Let's give a boost to sites with the highest traffic, and exponentially drop off the boost as traffic decreases. Oh look, it turns out our own Google.com is quite popular, all of our services are under that domain, and they'll all see higher rankings).
You can't prove how a black box algo ranks you, but you can do a damn sight more than a throwaway comment accusing Google of cooking their algorithm out of spite.