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Comment by eis | Hacker News Reader

You have to distinguish between ads and links being part of the page content.

As long as you seperate ads clearly from the site content and maybe give them a rel="nofollow" attribute, there should never be negative consequences.

Paying someone for low quality content around links to increase search engine rankings lowers the quality of the overall web for everyone.

Google does a lot of questionable stuff and I personally don't like the power they weild over the web. However, in this particular instance, I can't see anything wrong with this policy.

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How do you specify ads apart from other links.

Maybe I'm talking about a product, call it spammy, but I'm all praises about the product. The visitors to my website are actually reading this article, indicating that the article is not boring, badly-written content.

At the end of the article I write the line, "If you want to try out the product head over to http://theproduct.com".

Why does a multi-millionaire company get to decide that my HTML markup is `wrong` if there is no "nofollow" in my HTML?

I know they have the right to decide who gets listed on their search engine and who does not. If that is the case, they should not call their results fair.

> Why does a multi-millionaire company get to decide that my HTML markup is `wrong` if there is no "nofollow" in my HTML?

They don't "get to decide" anything. It's just that _you_ don't get to decide either. After all there are many others who also want to be listed at the top for a particular query.

Simply, their algorithm works in a particular way. Other tags might also affect the ranking, such as h1 tags, for example. There has to be _some_ mechanism.

Why is this so difficult to understand?

Indicating, that its a shortcoming in Google's search algorithm that makes anybody who wish to get listed on it's index to follow these `Rules`?

My point is that short of picking the search results randomly, any mechanism will have some rules (no matter how complicated) that affect how things get ranked.

So be open about the shortcomings in your algorithms instead of trying to show that the practice is bad, try telling people that your algorithm is not competent enough to know if the intentions are good or bad.

Hence your algorithm requires you to comply to the nofollow rule.

If they did fix their algorithm, no one would pay for link spam any more.

What does multi-millionaire have to do with anything?

As opposed to having a wildly unsuccessful, incompetent company with six employees deciding everything.

Turns out you have to be a really, really big company to even attempt to maintain such a massive global search platform that is fast and accurate. How else would this be accomplished? By a non-profit with 30 employees? By the UN? I don't see the logical alternative.

You can block Google if you dislike their search engine. Their product is private property, it belongs to Google, it's not a public utility. So they get to decide, as is right, how it works. You could always create your own search engine, like DuckDuckGo, and specify how it works.

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