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Doing Things The Right Way — or The Google Way (was: How To Lose Trust)
SEM News Source: http://www.searchenginepeople.com
Published: Jun 18, 2009 - 01:37 pm
Story Found By: DavidWallace 969 Days ago
Category: SEM
Ruud Hein writes, "A lot, an awful lot, has been said about The No Follow Issue but one thing I miss so far is Trust. With what feels like sleight of hand, Google has done away with a huge chunk of Trust in the relation it is trying to build between itself and webmasters."
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from bwelford 968 Days ago #
Votes: 0

As I noted on the post, the problem is that the Google PageRank measuring stick only works if people do not know how it works. Otherwise we all adjust to be as high on the totem pole as we can. The only approach that Google could have taken is that all is secret and they reveal nothing. Then we could trust them. This in-between behavior they exhibit is bound to be seen as a sign of untrustworthiness as you said. They are clearly on the horns of a dilemma with no obvious solution.

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from Misscj 968 Days ago #
Votes: 1

Sorry but, what’s there to trust? Google is a business and their business is search. SEOs make a living making sites compelling to the search system. The business of search is to provide the best results from a collection of data to users (in this case). The SEO tries to get particular sites to be chosen as the best result by the search system.<div></div><div>I think it’s Google who should have a trust issue lol! They owe us nothing. Like it or not SEO is tampering with the results and it is adversarial IR. It’s not a crime and it’s a liegitimate profession but don’t ask them to help you.</div>

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from Jill 968 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Hmm...wonder why my comment was never approved over there...

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from Ruud 968 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Doubt about the canonical tag is now superseded by complete skepticism.That’s one result, one example, of the effect this change has had on me. I haven’t done any polling but my impression is that an awful lot of SEO’s and webmasters feel played. That’s a trust issue.Does it matter? No. Am I a whiner? Nope. Do I look differently upon the relation-building campaign Google has been on since 2005/2006? Oh yes... Oh. Yes.Another way to put this is; was I too gullible? Uhuh. Not many will come out and say so (I even expect some "well, we did know this from our extensive testing" type of posts) but I tell you, I never saw this one coming. And it *that* sense it’s a VERY good thing to happen, one you can file under "Fool Me Once"Jill, your comment has now been approved. I find this almost ironic to say but you were stuck in spam [big grin]

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from Ruud 968 Days ago #
Votes: 1

Peter sums it up well in his comment: Does it change how I work with my clients or practice SEO? No, at least not much. Does it change how likely I am to adopt or evangelize Google’s next mandate? Absolutely.

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from onreact 968 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Sooner or later there will be some sound regulation put in place by some civil society or government entity to prevent Google from duping its users and webmasters. The black box approach of hiding as much as possible from the public won’t work forever. It’s not about trade secrets, it’s about transparency.Google is almost a global information monopoly so the sooner some democratic oversight will be put in place the better otherwise we end up one day in a 1984 like dictatorship. The Google China connection is the best example where we’re heading to. Comparatively small issues like this one will add up as well until the sentiment towards Google will come close the current popular view of Microsoft.

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from Sebastian 967 Days ago #
Votes: 1

IMO the right way would have been to compute Google’s opinion on particulary links in the black box. Bothering webmasters with rel-nofollow was wrong. Now that’s out, assigned to 3% of the Web’s hyperlinks and often misused, it became a pandemic disease that search engines cannot control. There’s only one way out of the dilemma: dump rel-nofollow support. 

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from tentonjim 958 Days ago #
Votes: 0

My opinion on Google has always been "Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts" - I agree with misscj G is a business and whatever they "release" as far as SEO stuff is bound to have a benefit for them in some way... like make their algo run cleaner... whatever. Beware G’s "best practices" imho.~ Jim

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