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Google Wants to Tell You How to Run Your Website
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Posted by: forwardone
Recently the head Google’s Webspam team, Matt Cutts, made an announcement that Google is targeting websites that are selling text based advertising. This change goes hand in hand with a new initiative that encourages people to report websites they think, but can’t prove, might be selling paid advertisements.
In his post on hidden links Matt gives some details of links that were clearly designed to fool the search engines. However at the end of the post he slips this extra bit of information in: To make sure that you’re in good shape, go with both human-readable disclosure and machine-readable disclosure, using any of the methods I mentioned above.
Further down in response to some comments he elaborates on his position as follows: … paid links should provide some form of machine-readable disclosure (e.g. redirect through a url that is forbidden by robots.txt) so that search engines aren’t affected by the paid link.
This change in policy is exactly the opposite of Google’s published webmaster guidelines which state: Make pages for users, not for search engines … Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
Matt further states that Google will be looking at paid text advertising more closely and that they are now actively seeking reports from people willing to turn in other web publishers. This change in policy amounts to a virtual witch hunt where one publisher can turn in anyone whether they know the facts or not. One of the members of SEO Class Rae Hoffman writes: My general opinions on paid links aren’t important and neither are yours. This isn’t about whether or not paid links should or shouldn’t have value. What matters is that Google is going to decide whether you’re good or evil based on a guess they know full well has a coin flip toss chance of being accurate in the case of paid links done well. What is important is that Google stands up and admits their own weakness and finds another solution to their issue that doesn’t involve penalizing me or you, based on their “best guess” to a problem they themselves created when they based their entire algorithm on links.
You may wonder does this really happen, does Google look at reported text link advertisements, and is this really something to be concerned about? In 2005 the well known and respected tech industry blogger Jeremy Zawodny was attacked on multiple fronts for selling text link advertising which caused Jeremy to respond: Well, judging by the reaction to my sponsored links post I’ve struck a nerve. And I have to say, it feels like there’s a lot of unanswered questions and a lot of FUD out there. I’m still trying to digest everything. But so far I’ve found that there are at least three sides to this issue
While the issue did eventually die down, it seemed to coincidentally coincide with Jeremy’s announcement that he would stop selling advertising.
So the question remains; does Google have the right to tell you how to run your website and dictate how you are allowed to make a living? Andy Beal, internet marketing expert, has this to say: I don’t like to impose on others, my thoughts on disclosure (I personally disclose any relationships in our disclosure policy), but I think Google is going too far with this “best practice”. What business does Google have in dictating the disclosure of any business relationships on others?
Some argue that would should accept and embrace Google’s policy because it makes the internet a better place. However I point out the naive nature of that belief on my blog: … if you’re one of those people who think Google is in to make the world better, let’s remember Google is a for profit company. Their interest in keeping the organic side clean and spam free, is really governed by their need to maintain a spot people are willing to visit for them to put paid advertisements on.
This sentiment is echoed by Robert Scoble, a pioneer in the blogging world: If Google’s result set isn’t the best Google’s market share will start to go down as people figure out there are better engines out there. That, in turn, will hurt Google’s advertising business. Not to mention that if advertisers know there’s a cheaper way to get onto Google’s search engine than by buying an ad, they’ll go with that system.
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