In 1968, Clint Eastwood starred in a great Western called,
Hang 'Em High. In the movie,
Clint's character is wrongly accused of a crime by a Vigilante Mob and subsequently hanged ( don't worry,
Clint survives. He goes on to make many more great movies including
Dirty Harry. Maybe that movie is a better example.) Oh well. In any event,
The Vigilantes in Hang 'Em High, acted as, Judge, Jury, Prosecutor and Executioner;
not a great idea as the Vigilantes sadly find out in the end.
The reason that this movie comes to mind today has a lot to do with the events surrounding
Google's current Policy Violation.
Google has found itself in the uncomfortable position of having to admit, publicly, to a
contravention of its own Google policy and since Google is also the enforcer of its own guidelines, Google must now mete out the proper judgement and penalty on... Google. Hmmm.....does anyone else find this somewhat troubling? A violation has been committed and the investigation into the violation will be the responsibility of the perpetrator of the violation.
So, What exactly happened:
Well, it appears that Google
has been buying paid links to help influence search results for one of
Google's own products, the Google web browser called Chrome. This practice, as
Google will tell you, is a clear violation of its guidelines.
Once the story of
Google's violation became evident,
Google issued a quick
mea-culpa and then a quick
judgement and penalty of sorts in response to stories that hit the digital media space partly through the efforts, diligence and resources of
Aaron Wall of
SEOBook.com and
Danny Sullivan of
Searchenginland.com.
Since Google is also the enforcer and adjudicator of justice when there is a contravention of
Google's policies,
Google now has to enact swift, unbiased justice on.....
Google.
Complicated to explain, but even more complicated to validate.
In effect, Google caught itself and now has to hang itself (don't worry, Google will survive and go on to make many more self judgements; see "
Google Exec Testifies Before Congress C-Span").
This story has some legs and was picked up by the
Washington Post.
On January 3rd in
The Washington Post, Hayley Tsukayama wrote an insightful summation of the event and put it best with the following paragraph:
" In a nutshell, it appeared that the Google Chrome campaign was doing
something that Google has specifically banned in the past: paying
bloggers for links that will help the company pad its search results for
Google Chrome."
The goal of the campaign was to increase the rankings of
Chrome in search results.
The problem is that paid links of this type contravene Google's own quality guidelines. Specifically;
"Don't participate in link schemes
designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular,
avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your
own ranking may be affected adversely by those links."
As Hayley Tsukayama points out; In the past,
Google has criticized companies that have been a part of ad campaigns that used paid links to manipulate search results and has set up processes to penalize companies who implement this type of practise.
Historically, the head of Google’s web spam team,
Matt Cutts, has been quite vocal that sponsored posts shouldn't be a way for people to gain links in response for payment, that any links in such posts should use the nofollow attribute to prevent them from passing credit to Google’s ranking algorithm."
has been quick to respond to this issue.
On Jan 3rd,
Google released this first tepid missive;
"Google never agreed to anything more than online ads. We
have consistently avoided paid sponsorships, including paying bloggers
to promote our products, because these kind of promotions are not
transparent or in the best interests of users. We're now looking at what
changes we need to make to ensure that this never happens again."
Google followed that response with one directly from Matt Cutts;
Mr. Cutts released an explanation of what happened in this specific event and promised to enforce
Google's own discipline for such a violation on itself;
"We’ve investigated and are taking manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome and lower the site’s PageRank for a period of at least 60 days.
We strive to enforce Google’s webmaster guidelines consistently in order to provide better search results for users.
While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no
remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google
should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action
than we would against a typical site."
To Google's Credit, the penalty appears to have been enforced with some vigour. In a test performed on January 5th, I did two separate searches using Google's Search Engine involving the two terms;
browsers and
fast browsers.
In both cases,
Google Chrome did not show up on Page 1 of the search results page.
So, in this case, Google got their perpetrator who, in this case happens to be,
Google. And now
Google has enforced the full penalty on the perpetrator, again...
Google.
In the final analysis, Google appears to have gotten it right. They must be given credit for being open and forthcoming about the events that surrounded the Google guideline contravention.
If I go back to my original,
Clint Eastwood analogy, I think that
Google got their man....in a vigilante,
High Digital Plains kind of way. Dirty Harry would be proud.
(Darn,,,,,I should of used High Plains Drifter as the Example. Do you see how difficult this Vigilante stuff can be. :).
Sources;
http://searchengineland.com/
http://seobook.com/
http://google.com
http://imdb.com
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
