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.
> 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.
2. Once a company reaches monopoly status the government can regulate it for the public good.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Google clearly does not have a monopoly on search.
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.
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".
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.
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.
...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.
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.