If you were them would you do the same? Probably.

[Google-]Death to spammers! A fate worse than death. No, a fate worse than a fate worse than death. … Well, you get the idea…

Google said, “Don’t run red lights when trying to race to the top of the index.”

BMW failed to stop for the red lights and was penalized for it.

After restarting the service and getting the domain back – it led to a long discovery process to figure out what was wrong and how to get listed again. I kept submitting the site to be indexed to no avail. During this time we lost considerable mindshare among folks watching our space – it was almost as if we didn’t exist.

One of the hardest problems was determining if we had done something wrong in the first place. The general consensus was we must have. We were assumed guilty by many folks who I discussed this with.

I sent a few emails that got no reply. Posted to Ask Metafilter – got the advice to give up and get a new domain name. Posted to a Google newsgroup. And then went looking for Google employee bloggers and found one who gave me the info I needed to get unblacklisted. I followed his instructions – which at the time was sending an email with a particular subject line and details in its message. I got an automated response that was maddening and led me to believe it wouldn’t work.

A week or so later Dan Gillmor raised the issue on his older blog: http://dangillmor.typepad.com/dan_gillmor_on_grassroots/2005/03/google_and_tran.html

Matt Cutts of Google commented that I had followed the correct procedure and staff looking to approve Philly Future for reindexing.

Getting unbanned is doable and can be done quickly (as that thread attests a couple weeks). It took me many months due to lack of knowledge. It would have been great if Google provided a service to determine if a domain was blacklisted and to look at websites and review them for appropriate search engine optimization techniques and flag those deemed abuse. I could at least have known then that the trouble wasn’t me. But I didn’t even know I was blacklisted except for the symptoms – not showing up in Google with numerous bloggers pointing to us – and a zero PageRank.

Matt Cutts has posted about the reinclusion proceedure here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/reinclusion-request-howto/.

It sounds like BMW may have brought this on themselves, at a site that large, with their resources, it’s almost inexcusable. Google’s guidelines are pretty clear and simple. However, I would like to see Google have better support for webmasters like those I just suggested. It looks like they are experimenting with some ideas already, see: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/webmaster-communication/ .

My experience tells me that if you aren’t in Google – you don’t exist. As soon as we got in Google things immediately changed for Philly Future in terms of influence and attention from others who run similar sites.

As for my suggestion that you were being apologist, it strikes me that all this flap is about tone and appearance — all of your points were both valid and informative. And I appreciate your “let me try to shed light on the issue” response vs. Jeremy Zawodny “You’re stupid, shut up” response.

I understand the problem of bait and switch that Google is battling, but to compare what BMW did to purveyors of child pornography is stretching it a bit.

I would love to learn more about the history of this debate — you’re right that I’m obligated to do so, having waded in.

If raising hackles leads more people like you to shed light, I can’t see how that’s not a good thing.

Of course you can say whatever you like. I didn’t suggest otherwise. I’m just providing some additional information that might help influence how you and others think. I assumed you wanted such comments, since you allow them here.

As for me turning off my comments, that’s not true. I’m not sure if you were aiming that at me or not. But if you have any comments about anything I’ve written, you’re more than welcome to post in our forums, http://forums.searchenginewatch.com. Want to comment about what I’ve written on the BMW issue? Here’s the exact discussion on that, http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=9948. You’re more than welcome. I love comments and discussion. Heck, that’s why I’m commenting here.

Yahoo and MSN are definitely not insignificant. There are plenty of sites that do not rank well in Google but thrive and survive. That’s been the case for years. It was the case even before we had Google. It is an important player; the most popular one currently, but building it up as the only one or the only one that matters simply inflates Google’s own mistaken opinion of itself and the mistaken opinions others have of it.

Comparing Google to the other search engines is crucial if you want to determine if its behavior is somehow wrong in this matter. As I’ve explained, it is simply deciding what it will accept just as all the other major search engines do. If you have a problem with BMW being banned, that’s not a problem with Google — that’s a problem with search engines in general.

That issue — whether search engines as a whole should be banning for various reasons, either because of technicalities or because of underlying content — is a long discussed one in the search engine optimization industry, the people who have been fighting this front line battle you’ve now waded in on. If you explore some of that discussion (and I’ll be happy to send you links to good articles if you want), you’ll find it is hardly a black and white issue.

Cloaking content, as BMW was doing, isn’t necessarily deemed evil by many if the content is pretty much getting people to a page that it’s a about. So what if BMW used “used BMWs” 42 times in copy no one can see. The end result was you got to a page that no one would deny is about used BMWs. But then again, if I cloak content about children’s games and deliver you to porn, is that OK? Such things happen. If I steal your content here because you rank well for a term, then cloak it, then manage to rank well for that term myself and point to a page of my own on that topic, is that OK?

These are some of the many issues involve and which have been debated. We’re far a perfect solution, but to suggest that Google or anyone is getting a free pass simply doesn’t reflect the people really watching this space, the SEOs. The SEO commentary has been fairly consolidated around the fact that BMW got what they deserved, if only because the content cloaking was so old school that it could only survive on a German language site that Google and gang aren’t watching so much.

I agree with you that there is competition in search, but as for MSN and Yahoo having caught up, I’m just not seeing it. My experience has been 1) submit a query to a non-Google search engine, 2) click through two or three pages of results, 3) toss the query at Google just for giggles, 4) see the answer I need appear in Google SERPs on the first page, usually in the first six or seven entries.

YMMV.

I hate to say it, but I’ve lost a certain amount of respect for this blog based on this post.

nn
This is precisely why people are concerned about. There’s a real danger of people preconcieving that Google’s right and then judging the matter.

It’s hard to write about media 2.0, when you don’t seem to grasp a basic concept of the internet.

BMW was essentially using techniques designed to boost rankings which rely on cracks within Google’s system. This is commonly called ’spamming’ although it has nothing to do with spam– it has to do with exploiting Google’s system to get more hits. Exactly what spammers and splogs do.

Every day, hundereds if not thousands of sites get blacklisted in exactly this same way. Most of them will never recover, because they never had the content in the first place. BMW will of course be back, but this is a good lesson to all of those SEO idiots who think they won’t get caught.

BMW should have immediately fired their SEO team, apologized to Google, and moved on.

This is not about Big Brother– it’s about Google, a multi-billion dollar company, protecting what is still essentially their only asset- relevency of search results.

The China decision and this have zero connection other then Google trying to make money. You can’t make money if you allow people to exploit the principal reason for being– to deliver the best search results.

1) A *good* use of power!

2) More an action to which they were pushed by embarrassment than any kind of Stalinist purge.

The overheated rhetoric makes talking about Google’s power *harder*, because defense against spammers is so important.

What raises my red flag is the tone that Google takes in justifying their actions. (Maybe it’s the tone that I took that prompted you to write a 6+ point apology for Google — if I was so off the mark with this post, it would hardly be worth your time — and it’s my blog, so I can say whatever I want, right? At least I don’t turn of my comments to block the flood of people telling me I’m wrong.)

We may both agree that what BMW did was an “unfair” practice, but Google’s ability to arbitrate “fair practices” with such impact is a new phenomenon in the history of information flow and marketing activities, and I don’t think it can be given too much scrutiny.

That Yahoo and MSN have competing search engines has no bearing on an assessment of Google’s behavior or on the current measure of their power. If I decided to block BMW from AdSense and all Chinese IP addresses from accessing my website, do you think anyone would care? No, and why — because my site doesn’t matter — it’s insignificant in the grand scheme of information flow on the Internet. But the same is not true of Google.

What Google does matters a lot — which is not to say we should regulate it or make it illegal — they may not have crossed that line yet. But if our default posture is to give them a free pass, what’s to stop them from crossing that line?

Orwell’s lesson is that you slide down the slope faster than you think.

I’m glad you sleep well at night confident that Google would not seek retribution against a website that expresses a dissenting opinion — why would they do that? — because they can — that’s how power corrupts. Maybe you’re also confident that the government is only wiretapping conversations with terrorists — it’s only by trusting in power that we put ourselves at risk of subjugation. If that’s over-the-top, it’s only the because the particular circumstances pan out that way, not because the principle behind the inquiry is misguided.

1) Google does not have near total power, not even in search. Yep, a huge amount of traffic flows through Google. A huge amount also does NOT. Yahoo, MSN and Ask Jeeves are all independent search voices that have a lot of usage. Google is merely one search “newspaper” among them — a big one, but not the only one.

2) Google is not the only search engine that annoits itself judge, jury and executioner. They all have guidelines that they themselves solely create and measure against. Google isn’t some unusual exception. That’s standard practice in the search engine industry and has been since pretty much day one. Need more? See http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3344581

3) Suggesting that lowering the ranking of a site is better than dropping a PageRank score is simply silly. You don’t really seem to understand how things actually operate. If a site is banned, it is removed from the index entirely. That is in effect one of those “tweaks” you are talking about. Yeah, the PageRank score drops as well. Who cares? It doesn’t matter ultimately what your score is. It matters whether you rank for anything in actual searches. That leads to another possibility — that you aren’t banned but that you are penalized. So big deal — you might still keep your PR7, PR8 or whatever but you don’t rank for any term. That PageRank doesn’t help you at all. And by the way, Google’s actually won the legal right to do whatever it wants with PageRank scores (see http://www.pandia.com/sw-2003/21-searchking.html, http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/2165111)

4) Orthodoxy? OK, tell you what. How about someone takes a copy of something from your web site, cloaks it so that only Google sees it, then feeds out something different to a users. Would following that orthodoxy bother you? OK, that’s not what happened here. What happened here is that BMW was showing pictures of pretty cars but to Google’s spider, it was showing nonesensical copy including the repetition of the phrase “used cars” over 40 times. No issue with that? Actually, you might not. Exactly what is deemed to be “manipulating” Google or any search engine is hotly debated by those in the trenches of search engine optimization and has been done for years. But what you’ll find many will tell you is that ultimate, the final arbiter on these matters is the search engines themselves. Fly in the face of what they say NOT to do, and you might find yourself banned. Don’t like it? Find another search engine to be listed in for free. Search engines are under no obligation to carry anything, any more than a newspaper (or your own web site here) is obligated to carry anything.

5) Are you in danger of being banned for your “dissent?” Please. Google lists web site that are far more antagonistic that this post even comes close to approaching. Heck, Google-Watch.org has been slamming Google for years and remains listed just fine.

6) As for Alexander’s post, there were no “secret police” that went out and did this. Philipp over Google Blogoscoped reporting on the BMW spam here, http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-02-01-n31.html. That spread out among a variety of search blogs, including my own. That publicity meant Google was going to have to do something, otherwise it would have been accused of allowing BMW to break the rules other sites have to follow. And then no doubt we’d be told that this is because BMW might advertise with Google, so look at how evil they are in playing favorites, etc.

Overall, I can understand many of the concerns you have, but they a lot of real perspective about how search engines have and currently do interact with web site content.

A big site like BMW should have known better — or more likely in this case, probably a firm that was doing the SEO for BMW should have known better. They deserve no tears here. They’ll be back in Google in short order. Reserve your concern for the smaller site owners who might accidentally do stupid things. Even there, things have actually gotten positive over the past few months with Google actually doing an outreach program to many of them that might violate guidelines, as covered more here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/webmaster-communication/

Google got in the door because the switching costs of search engine choice seven years ago were near zero. The move to personalization is an attempt to increase these costs artificially, but it’s not Windows-expensive.

Yahoo’s public message on search is at best mixed. Has Susan Decker made any follow up statements since here Bloomberg interview? And Yahoo is generally considered second to Google in search relevance. What’s the next option? MSN? AOL? Ask?

Not at this point in time.

And from NitPic2.0 ™, British historian Lord Acton’s commentary on power predated Orwell by a few decades: Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

(Or the corollary: Power tends to corrupt; absolute power is much more fun!)

If BMW didn’t know the risk they were taking, their SEO consultants certainly did.

That said, yes Google is scary. But this is an example that falls way down the list of things to be afraid of. Blogs shouldn’t rely on search engine traffic anyway. Until Google can take away your inbound links, you’ll be fine.

Their power is derived from their user base. If they take actions that worsen the search experience enough to leave the door open to a competitor, people will switch just like they switched to Google seven years ago. This is the ultimate low-swithing-cost free market we’re talking about here, as far away from Stalinism as can be. Is Publishing 2.0 at risk? Who knows… how much of your traffic comes from Google searches, and how much from links outside of Google’s sphere of influence?

Please see the above link, and Kedrosky’s, for yourself. However, the episode still raises this question: is the power the revise history via the cache more awesome than the ability to limit real-time search results?