Google’s unethical bullying compromises web quality

Disclaimer: This post only reflects my opinion and does not necessarily represent the views of my employer, co-workers, or anyone else.

Matt Cutts wrote something very disturbing on his blog today:

At the very end of the interview, I took the opportunity to send some props toward SocialSpark. As opposed to some services where paid posts pass PageRank, SocialSpark posts require nofollow so that any paid links don’t pass PageRank. If paid posts respect that requirement from SocialSpark, they’d be within our webmaster guidelines. I’ve noticed once or twice where an advertiser tried to get an extra nofollow’ed link in a SocialSpark post, but when I’ve mentioned those 1-2 examples, IZEA has taken action to correct that. So we’ll continue to keep an eye on things, but I wanted to mention the progress that I saw in SocialSpark.

This is a clear admission from a Googler that the search engine is dictating to other Web sites how they should be handling their content.

That is completely, totally unacceptable and without any moral justification.

The Web is not Google’s playground and Google’s various conflicts of interest in the matters of paid advertising (their own Javascript ads are indexed by other search engines, for example) completely discredit and disqualify all of their statements about what is acceptable or good for anyone with respect to how paid advertising should be handled.

Matt has previously argued that an FTC internal memo regarding paid endorsements should be extended to links, although the United States government says links are not endorsements.

Google has a well-established history of intimidation. They routinely publish any DMCA takedown requests on the ChillingEffects.Org in order to stigmatize people who seek to protect their intellectual property rights. Google blackmarked me on ChillingEffects.org when I went through what was then an exhaustive process of tracking down the right people to get them to remove a spam blog from Blogger (which was in clear violation of their terms of service). They did subsequently amend their documentation to help people issue such take down requests more quickly and with less hassle, but the prospect of being smeared on ChillingEffects.Org bothers some people.

In their latest broadside against large ISPs over so-called Net Neutrality, Google is now offering to help people monitor broadband communications. This is a clear signal intended to intimidate ISPs who have been resisting the false Net Neutrality legislation that has been sitting in Congress for a couple of years.

Google, like other huge bandwidth hogs such as Yahoo!, Amazon, Microsoft, et. al., has taken the position that the consumer (you and I) should pay for upgrades in technology and infrastructure that Google and its large company peers will then monetize for their own shareholders’ benefit.

The ISPs are actually looking out for our interests (and their own shareholders’ interest) by insisting that Google and other technology developers first create the services and then pay for the infrastructure that they intend to make profits on. I am clearly on the side of the ISPs in this matter because I have absolutely no desire to pay for Google’s future profitability up front before they’ve created anything.

Google likes to intimidate people, but intimidation is a two-way street. Just as Google can penalize sites’ search results for failing to comply with Google’s demands on how sites should manage their content, SEOs can also penalize Web sites for any hostile reason. (NOTE: Calacanis seems to be working on his search reputation management skills.)

The search engine optimization industry has gone on record, claiming it can and will hurt other people’s search engine rankings. Googlers have consistently said that almost nothing can be done to harm your site’s rankings, leading SEOs to conclude that so-called Google Bowling may actually work.

In fact, you don’t need to Google bowl anyone to hurt their search engine results. All you have to do is reshape their search visibility. Search visibility management — which some people call online reputation management or search reputation management — is the new battleground. The search engine optimization industry is actually better armed than Google for a war of intimidation.

Sites that comply with Google’s demands can, in fact, lose their good search results simply because the Web community chooses to punish them by promoting other sites into their best performing query spaces.

Before we walk down that ugly lane, Googlers, would you PLEASE stop bullying people and using intimidation to achieve your nefarious ends? Google needs to TRULY level the playing field and stop dictating to people how they are to manage their Web sites.

If you don’t like how a site links out, just ignore the links. Don’t dictate to people how they are to mark those links.