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Comment by throwaway420 | Hacker News Reader

Even if you use nothing but white-hat and above-board SEO strategies, you're at risk of your page getting penalized or delisted. This happens to people every day. Only unlike Rap Genius, there is literally zero way to communicate with somebody at Google unless you manage to get a popular thread going at HN.

I'm happy this Rap Genius incident happened because it's driven some attention to how Google's business actually operates, how poor their algorithms actually are, how arbitrary their search engine actually is, how poor their customer service practices are, and many other similar ideas.

Granted, these are monumentally hard problems to solve and Google still does it better than anybody else, but it's good that some attention is directed here because there are numerous problems with how ranking in Google currently works.

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> Even if you use nothing but white-hat and above-board SEO strategies, you're at risk of your page getting penalized or delisted

This rather suggests that what you're calling "white hat" is a slightly less white shade than you may think. After all, who exactly is defining what "above board" is here?

You're talking as though Google has some kind of responsibility to you. They don't. You are not their customer. Their customer is the searcher, and they have every right to do whatever they like with their results to give what they think is the best result for the searcher.

I'm getting pretty tired of this attitude (generally among "SEO" people) that Google is some sort of public property.

1. The searcher is not the customer, the AdWords buyer is. For example, Expedia.

2. Once a company reaches monopoly status the government can regulate it for the public good.

1. This oversimplifies the relationship. The ultimate transaction is from the AdWords customer to Google but in most cases a lot of that money will have come from Google searchers wallets.

2. Well, that's not quite right. The government can limit the actions of a monopoly to prevent abuse, but demanding arbitrary shit isn't really something that's in the statute books.

One thing's for certain, the "white hat" "SEO"ers paying bloggers to write thin articles about them to increase their organic search ranking are certainly not Google's customer and they have no obligation to please them.

>> Even if you use nothing but white-hat and above-board SEO strategies, you're at risk of your page getting penalized or delisted

> This rather suggests that what you're calling "white hat" is a slightly less white shade than you may think. After all, who exactly is defining what "above board" is here?

We've had a lot of proof by vigerous assertion in this thread. I particularly like the protestation of lily-white innocence by marketers writing "great content" in "guest posts".

A thousand words on "10 things to bring on your next business trip", or "5 things to ask when choosing an online university" isn't exactly Woodword & Bernstein on Watergate, Joyce's Dubliners, or even Michelin's Guide to Paris restaurants.

Google had a monopoly and exerts market power over the internet. They legally do have a responsibility to the public.

I'm getting pretty tired of the attitude that they have no responsibility to anyone other than those who buy advertising from them since it's blatantly false.

> Google had a monopoly and exerts market power over the internet. They legally do have a responsibility to the public.

Not really. Certainly not a responsibility to abide by the whims of random people who want their content ranked higher.

And if we decide to burden them with "responsibilities", what about their responsibility to keep my search results free of spa^W SEOers' crap?

All monopolies with market power have a responsibility to the public. It's a matter of policy and law.

You're right that they don't have a responsibility to abide by the whims of random spammers, but they also don't have carte Blanche to use their power to regulate the internet as they see fit.

The 'it's their product so they can do what they like' line is simply not correct. When they take action like this they need to be scrutinized carefully and we as the public most certainly should debate the merits of their actions and their effect on the internet.

I don't think you're using the word monopoly correctly here.

Google clearly does not have a monopoly on search.

Google certainly has a monopoly on search, which is why it is being investigated for its practices by the EU. If I am using the word incorrectly, then so is the EU, but since the term is defined by policy, that isn't possible.

If you think the word monopoly means that there is precisely zero competition, then you are not using the word as it is used by economists, governments, and the law.

Monopoly is defined by effective competition, barriers to entry and market power. Google qualifies.

While I agree that it is necessarily difficult to create a search engine ranking algorithm that isn't gamed, customer service isn't something that should be lumped in with the 'difficult problems'. Google has been notoriously terrible at customer service for years and it's amazing that they've been so successful despite this.

This. What I despise the most is their hypocrisy and the clean face their Head Hypocrite Matt Cutts always wears when answering those SEO questions. So you have the biggest search engine in the world and all the transparency you can think of consists on putting a man in front of a camera like a country preacher, always saying things that leave open spaces of interpretation?

Because, what? You expect Cutts to be on the phone handling calls from irate webmasters instead?

If Google sells me ad-space - or a Nexus - and then doesn't respond when I have a problem, that's bad. But if your pages drop in the search result rankings, suck it up and maybe pay a bit more attention to the spirit of that preaching - Google owes you ZERO customer support if all you're paying for is snake-oil from some 3rd-party SEO "expert".

It's odd that you talk about snake-oil in a thread where it's already mentioned that Google will just as easily ban you even if you follow their rules. Expedia and RapGenius are the two latest examples of how easy it is to cheat the system.

Meanwhile the world commerce is moving towards the Internet and Google controls 70% of that. But you don't want to come off as "spammy" so better to risk your company and follow the rules of an unresponsive search company that might or might not punish you for it.

...it's already mentioned that Google will just as easily ban you even if you follow their rules.

Are there examples of sites that have done no SEO, and can still point to a banning-type event in their search result ranking history? Obviously this wouldn't be a big site; it might just be a random business the marketing of which is mostly offline.

Meanwhile the world commerce is moving towards the Internet and Google controls 70% of that.

...so you gotta do what it takes to get ahead, even if that means abusing the system and everyone else who depends on it? That's been the spammer's argument from Day 1, and it's just as crap now as it was twenty years ago.

No one owes you a successful business. If the only way you can find to make money involves dumping on others, then you shouldn't be surprised when there are consequences - even if you're following the "letter of the law" while doing so.

What exact system are people 'abusing'?

Google is already a cultural monopoly. They get to decide what people see and how and when they see it. That is why this One Man Show is bullshit. It looks hypocrite or at least it shows that they take their incredible responsibility very lightly. You choose.

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