Matt Cutts Responds on Google's Paid Link Campaign
plus.google.com
plus.google.com
Now, if Google's policy was to be lenient and to "give each offender a chance," think about how they would respond to two situations:
The first situation is some unknown marketing agency that's clearly violating the rules and arranging the selling of links to inflate their PageRank or their clients' PageRanks. This would be the typical case that their policy was designed to weed out, and Google's webspam department would have no reason to be lenient. And they likely wouldn't.
The second situation is when another department at Google appears to violate the Google webspam rules. Someone from Google webspam would see that Google Chrome is in violation, and of course they would feel the need to be lenient. Sure, it's a big company, but I'm sure any employee would assume they could work things out with the Chrome department.
This would just end up being the exact situation we've seen unfold today: Google Chrome would appear to get a pass, while the "obvious spammers" would be punished normally. I don't see how "leniency and discretion" could possibly result in anything other than unequal application of Google's policies.
http://images1.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/chrome-on...
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/news/internet/Google...
But the problem is the same when other companies that make an honest mistake in good faith, get punished in this manner:
1. there wasn't anything they could have done to prevent this mistake (if the Chrome team can't figure out the rules, who can??)
2. the people who end up being punished are Google's users themselves, who won't understand why they can't find BMW when searching for "bmw", and will probably think they did something wrong.
I'm not defending spammers, BTW, or even SEO (which I think is borderline evil regardless of the color of its hat).
What I'm trying to say is that Google should find a way to punish spammers without punishing its own users.
"While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site."
http://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pag...
In essence, Google is admitting that they're unable to detect spam / low quality content, and therefore their "policy" is to punish the perpetrators when/if they get caught.
This may be needed to enforce the rules, but it's an obvious disservice to Google's users, who are apparently considered "collateral damage".
No, but it would be reasonable to ban the post sporting the offending link.
It also would be in the benefit of Google's users to demote pages that are content-free. I thought this was what "Panda" was all about, but I'm not sure if it's working?
It's similar to when you see an ad for an NBC show while watching a different NBC show, or an ad for Consumer Reports auto pricing service in Consumer Reports magazine.
[edit: for the down voter, if they would for a 3rd party, they should for themselves and remove the Ad. If they wouldn't take it away for a 3rd party, they should leave the Ad. Simple consistency]
// I am sorry for any grammar errors in the above sentence. don't worry, I won't do it again.
From what I could find doing some (brief) research, this is a case in which the difference breaks down nearly perfectly along generational lines. Those ages thirty-five and under overwhelmingly prefer "on" and those younger prefer "by"[1]. Prepositional choice has always seemed a bit arbitrary to me, and the fact that there are dialectical differences reenforces that belief[2].
To suggest that this contributes to a "generation holding the less weel read attitude that grammar doesn't matter" strikes me as a bit misguided.
[1] http://www.inst.at/trans/16Nr/01_4/barratt16.htm [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_di...
First, in your citation 1, you have the generational aspect of "on" and "by" reversed. The original and correct[1] usage is "by accident". Acceptance by the younger generation doesn't make "on accident" correct, it is just accepted for lack of knowing otherwise. (This will, granted, eventually result it in showing up in dictionaries as a usage.)
The new generation, whether less read or less likely to have read the writings of prior generations, is less influenced by existing usage, and mistakenly verbalizes "on accident" to over-regularize with "on purpose".
"Over-regularization" is the kind of mistake a toddler makes until they learn correct usage by hearing and reading correct usages from multiple example experiences.[1] As the new generation reads less old material, and socializes textually with peers more and earlier, incorrect usages imprint to the point they gain defenders from the "everyone's doing it so don't call it wrong" camp.
Language and grammar evolves and as far as linguistic changes go, the use of one preposition over another is pretty benign. Prepositional choice is already essentially arbitrary and varies from region to region.
English is a moving target. The current generation forming its own vernacular doesn't make in any more or less correct than when the previous generation did it. It's not as if English has its own académie française, and the flexibility of English is one of its most charming properties.
Leaving aside the condescending quip about toddlers, I don't see how over-regularization of prepositions is a bad thing. They're already confusing enough as it is and I personally would prefer a language with more consistent rules than not.
EDIT: A quick addendum: I didn't actually know this was a mistake and I appreciate having learned it anyway.
> I don't see how it holds any more weight than your argument from antiquity
The dictionary is nothing but "argument from antiquity", as would be the conventional definition of "correct usage", in contrast to the "many people doing it wrong makes it right!" definition you disavowed, skipped a graph, then repeated.
Prepositions are not "essentially arbitrary" even when used with metaphysical concepts. Particular prepositions work with particular types of concepts, and curiously, end up quite similarly used among a variety of cultures and languages. In English, for example, is the concept something you can possess, or a process that happens to you? If you consider other things that couple with "on" or "by", you'll see what I mean.
Certainly English is charming, and rapidly evolving. You've likely read Bill Bryson's "The Mother Tongue", but if not, you might enjoy it.
http://www.amazon.com/Mother-Tongue-English-How-That/dp/0380...
Though in many ways for them it's like taking money from their left pocket and putting it into their right pocket, so I suspect they will be able to outbid others until infinity.
I'm assuming their bean counters have decided on an acceptable user acquisition cost, and likely won't bid above that. If, for example, they're willing to spend $1 on that spot, and somebody else is willing to give them $20 for it, I'm pretty certain they'd sell it out in a flat second.
But that means they're not taking money from anyone else for that ad spot and putting it in their pocket.
I think most of the reactions so far are overly cynical - it really seems like Google is trying to do the right thing here.
This sends a strong message to the rest of the Internet: We won't stand for even the perception of impropriety when it comes to our money maker: search (well ads, but you know what I mean)
How can a site know if they've been demoted, manually or algorithmically? How can they find out why they've been demoted in order to clean up?
I had a client get caught in one a while ago, the notification isn't perfect and at the time (I don't know about now) they didn't e-mail the account holder as well, which I thought was a bit daft as they have your e-mail as it's your login.
For the client, when I cleaned up their site and wrote an appeal saying what had been done, the Webspam team were very quick at processing our appeal and restoring the site. It wasn't a buying links penalty though, it was about stuff they had on the site from some dodgy advice they'd had a few years before that I'd been trying to get them to remove, so it was easy to show they'd learnt their lesson in the appeal.
This isn't the first time by the way, they penalized Google Japan in a similar situation a couple years back.
What steps does Google take to ensure this does not happen? A poster below asked the same question and someone else responded saying there are no documented cases of this happening, but let's just assume it's a hypothetical situation for now. What will Google do when something like this happens? How will they verify who was wronged?
The economics of this only work out well if you have high marketshare (if you're 5% of the market, and you blow up a competitor, 95% of the benefit accrues to the other 95% of the market). So I think this threat is overblown.
Every time it comes up, I've asked for examples--if you hear of any after the fact, I would greatly appreciate it if you'd get in touch. Email's in the profile.
The marketshare of clicks is mainly divided among the 10 sites on the front page. I imagine the benefit, when shared among only 1-9 sites, could be significant. Also consider the benefit of moving from ranking 11 to 10 or from 2 to 1, for example.
Though I can't speak for the efficacy of this technique, this fairly old article suggests submitting competitors articles to directories to reduce their perceived (by search engines) quality: http://www.bluehatseo.com/open-questions-when-to-never-do-ar...
'In fact, the page no longer ranks for “chrome” or for “chrome browser,” either.'
http://searchengineland.com/google-chrome-page-will-have-pag...