Their TOS is more of a spec than an agreement. It says that if you sell links, they may flag you as a spam site. I don't think that's unreasonable at all.

As an internal policy or part of their algorithm, do whatever you want. But that is not what they are doing. The point of the policy, the point of this publicly declared part of their secret sauce is not to recognise and flag spam sites, it is to intimidate sites into stopping a practice which hurts Google. It is the effects of the intimidation not the effects of the flagging which are substantial. I think it is also safe to say that they are the purpose of the policy.

Sure it is, spam makes search less useful for users, keeping it out is most definitely a quality assurance issue.

> it is to intimidate sites into stopping a practice which hurts Google

Which hurts Google's users as well, spam hurts us all, spam sucks. Google is correct here in removing sites which partake in such practices.

Not exactly. Site X with text links on it is not (necessarily) less useful then a site with declared ads on it. The quality assurance issue is the effect these have on Google's ability to analyse the web. Google's way of preventing site X from doing this is by intimidating. They are not removing the site because it is so spamy that they don't want it on their search results (a case that is equivalent to HN deciding to ban a site). They are doing it because they want these sites to comply with some sort of practice. It is the publicity and threat of these penalties which are their 'raison d'etre.'

I have no problem at all with Google using whatever policies they want to make up the search results. Including kicking sites off. I do have a problem with Google threatening to do so in order to achieve some other goal.

> Which hurts Google's users as well, spam hurts us all, spam sucks. Google is correct here in removing sites which partake in such practices.

Perhaps. But it is doing so by exercising its power to shut down the internet (for that site) to enforce a standard. Google decided at some point that all paid links need to be marked in a special way. This is the standard for disclosure. They then use their power to enforce it.

I think that the policy of enforcing Google's nofollow guideline by removing sites from their index is not directly about keeping their index free of spammers. It is about enforcing a standard for disclosure specifically designed for their purposes. It's not about disclosure to users, it is about disclosure to search engines.

I don't want anyone purposely deceiving the search engines. I have a problem with the way Google is enforcing this. I think this hints at the issues with having such a powerful Google.

Again, so what. I don't care how they do it, but I'm glad they do. The idea that Google is doing something wrong by using their size to try and make a site comply is simply absurd to me; of course they are, that's what they should do.

The practice hurts Google because it hurts Google's users, so of course they want to stop it. As a frequent Google search user I want them to stop it as well. Buying your way to the top of Google results should be made as difficult as possible.

I think Google is allowed to remove sites from their index. Is that what you mean by 'whatever they want'?

If they want to remove sites from their index because those sites are no good for their index, etc. ..Fine. But, if they remove sites for reasons other than 'We don't want these sites in the index or in the SERPS,' that is a problem. In this case, I am arguing that they don't want to remove those sites from their index. They want those sites to comply with their nofollow policies. I don't even have much a problem with these policies. I have a problem with Google being able to set policies and enforce them directly with the threat of removal from the index. It is almost equivalent to the threat of removal from the web entirely due to the way people use the internet and Google's role in that. Many sites get more traffic from searchers Googling the name of a site then direct traffic.

Sure they can. They wouldn't survive very long. That's why they don't.

There is not a perfect marriage between what is good for Google and what is good for the world.

If they are flagging sites with a legitimate purpose and with original content, simply on the basis that their evermore dated method for determining authority is not working so well anymore, Google (as an authority themselves) should not be flagging them with such a label. I think it is unreasonable, not for denying them traffic, but for labeling them as spam. It's not impossible to find out who's in the supplemental index all of a sudden.

Danny Sullivan's comments below the Business Insider article are spot on.

In his words, "Plenty of people get this stuff already. It's been out there again, for years."

It started with the whole nofollow issue.

To be fair, the post misquotes Matt Cuts. He didn't say terms of service. He said:"paid links that pass PageRank are absolutely a violation of Google's quality guidelines"

Spam: thin site, lacks original content, few pages indexed, crawled infrequently, ranks for a small selection of keywords, weak backlink profile

Authority: many pages indexed, thick site, loads of original content, crawled frequently, ranks for a variety of keywords, diversified backlink profile

Page Rank used to be a strong indicator of this, but currently a better indicator is how often your site is crawled. That's why one authority link can do worlds more for you than hundreds (or thousands) of spammy/low quality links.

Not everybody blogs about everything going on in his/her life.

I would expect that these true spam sites exist as a link network somewhat seperate from the rest of the web. You could start manually defining filters based on what sites are actively selling links on the digital point forums.

We may have actually had this conversation in the real world, come to think of it.

* i would assume that the problem parallels with spam emails. i think webpages offer more clues to what the page is about than emails though.

Spam passess a single toll gate on the way to each user. You have an address book with contacts and previous conversations and a whole pile of data about previous 'known good' emails in the inbox.

Spam filtering has gotten pretty good. A lot better than google at filtering out 'bad' search results.

There is a trick to save you the obscene costs of being indexed -- simply make your robots.txt like so: User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /

Were they supposed to foresee people buying links back in 2003/2004?

You have to have new policy or terms for new use cases.

*the article feels like a bit of a 'hit job' on conductor / I would like to offer up that things might be at least a little different than they seem from one side/point of view.