A few years ago, under their other domain, they accused Microsoft of suppressing them in a ranty blog post.
How?
Because their users couldn't sign up for Microsoft accounts using the tutanuta domain.
But why?
It wasn't Microsoft suppressing them. The fucking morons created an azure tenant validated against the domain. The default setting is to then validate all users with said email against the azure tenant. You can always turn it off but ill advised for security purposes.
I even validated that their tenant exists on azure using that domain.
The devil in the details mean the morons were using the same domain used by public users, for internal corporate usage which is absolutely fucking insecure to the moon.
Nobody should trust these wankers whose first response is to "blame big tech company" instead of understanding basic cybersecurity and internet. Who knows how they even store your emails. There are plenty of other services that I'll trust before the one that runs around for attention like a toddler.
Care to explain why this is so insecure?
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-updat...
It's possible Tuta caught a stray here because they recently changed their name from Tutanota[0], including the domain name. This update has the SEO world up in arms, in fact - the update is still rolling out, nearly two months after it was announced.
I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the Google Search team's offices to learn just how much machine learning is messing with the ability to properly understand intent -> rank content.
E: Semrush shows that they took a nosedive, but not a complete decimation[1].
E2: I take the initial edit back, looks like they got a classifier applied to their site, also known as the "Helpful Content Update":
https://tuta.com/blog/google-search-problem
It's a nasty classifier and not a single site has been reinstated from it[2] since Google began to apply it in Sep 2023.
[0]: https://tuta.com/blog/tutanota-is-now-tuta
[1]: https://i.imgur.com/E9ybteL.png
[2]: https://twitter.com/glenngabe/status/1781679769735545280
I was wondering about the similarity when I saw the headline; I can't imagine why would they do it. Why would they voluntarily destroy their own brand recognition?
> I'd love to be a fly on the wall in the Google Search team's offices to learn just how much machine learning is messing with the ability to properly understand intent -> rank content.
I'm not normally the fan of ML (ab)use, but I think it's unavoidable here: ML worsening result is an unfortunate consequence of them operating in strongly adversarial environment. After all, SEO is just a polite way of calling actively poisoning the search engine rankings.
(Yes, SEO is also making your website legible to crawlers - in the same way advertising is about informing the customers about your offering. That's part of it, but not the part sought by customers of such services, or that makes most money.)
This article goes into much more detail about the issue.
So they deprecated the + operator, and started blathering on about how quotes did "the same thing", which it never did, and never has!
If you want terms to appear as typed, the closest thing to the old + is "verbatim" under "tools" after a search. Verbatim was added back in, after people howled at the loss of the + operator.
Note the + referenced:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040202021515/http://www.google...
You can see that in 2004, Google never aliased terms, the ~ operator was for that.
(Everyone used + for "always include this", for any needed word, for almost 15 years before Google removed it.)
Is one explanation of this just that search was using a data source for relevance that benefitted this website, and now they are not using that? That seems possible, and doesn't require an assumption of malicious intent.
Disclaimer, I work at Google, but not on anything related to this. This is just armchair speculation of an explanation that might fit.
As for reaching a human, my understanding is that Google does not discuss ranking reasons with companies on purpose, in order to prevent bias and gaming of the system.
Pages like “Outlook vs Tuta Mail” “Gmail vs Tuta mail”, “Yahoo vs Tuta Mail”. All with the same rephrased taking points about their product. Then each of those talking points has its own dedicated page, just saying the same thing over and over again.
Want a better rank? Remove all this SEO crap, leave up the parts customers actually want.
https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-update-mar...
“…or feel like they were created for search engines instead of people. This could include sites created primarily to match very specific search queries.”
The numerous “Tuta vs …” that all reword the same information clearly meet the “designed for search engines instead of people” standard imo.
https://tuta.com/email-comparison
Whereupon we find the following comparisons:
>"Protonmail vs Tuta Mail
Fastmail vs Tuta Mail
Mailbox.org vs Tuta Mail
Posteo vs Tuta Mail
Hushmail vs Tuta Mail
Startmail vs Tuta Mail
Riseup vs Tuta Mail"
...in other words, there's no shortage of email providers...
They even admit as much in the blogpost: “We have no idea why Google is no longer showing our website for thousands of keywords that we used to rank for in the past.” Juicing your ranking with SEO spam littered with “keywords” is now penalized in Google ranking. They would rank better by removing 90% of “content” on their website.
Then I scroll to the bottom of the thread on hacker news, saw this comment, and “oh, that’s why”. They didn’t even take down the SEO spam before complaining about being caught.
I really don’t think I could trust any “privacy focused” email provider that relies on such deceptive tactics to promote their business.
So... What are the thousands of keywords for which Tuta should rank high?
Here's Zapier for instance, comparing their tool to a Microsoft substitute:
The words "Power Automate" only appear 3x in the page. The title, subtitle, and a link to the same page. Nothing else on the page is relevant to "Power Automate", it's just the same marketing copy from the rest of their website. As a user looking for actual details on how the products capabilities compare to Power Automate this page is useless to me.
Google have been completely transparent about this. They have explained exactly what kinds of pages would be de-ranked under the latest changes.
Edit: This public issue seems to imply they have a way to mark system/admin emails: https://github.com/tutao/tutanota/issues/6708
IAmTotallyCeo@realcompanydomain.com is real or not?
And if you are an service user, how do you know,
ISwearIAmCustomerService@realcompanydomain.com is real or not?
Everyone else does it properly.
google.com/gmail.com are not mixed.
microsoft.com/(outlook.com,hotmail.com,live.com) are not mixed.
apple.com/icloud.com are not mixed
If you register an AD tenant, you can associate an domain with it, when you do this. It means all your windows accounts are also
something@domain.com
instead of the azure default of
something@tenantname.onmicrosoft.com
It is 100% optional to associate a domain and an explicit action. This to me means they are using the domain on azure for Windows AD.
Now why is this bad?
Well, Microsoft has two types of accounts "Personal" and "Work/School" accounts. You can create "Personal" accounts against any email address/domain. However, once you register an Azure AD Tenant, the default is to disable registering further personal accounts. The goal is to avoid corporate users leaking work documents to personal non-managed accounts. There is also an option to force merge any existing personal accounts at the verified corporate domain into work accounts.
Say tutanota, being the geniuses they are disabled the setting that turns off personal account for their verified domain.
Well those IT guys will now have completely worthless audit logs because there'll be constant failed logins from people accidentally selecting "work/school accounts" in the login screen when asked what type of account it is. Not to mention you'll have the reverse of employees accidentally creating personal accounts because some microsoft prompts are weird and may refuse to offer work/school as a login option.
> Tuta fomerly Tutanota https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuta_(email)
