Google always says to keep your visitors in mind when building your website, and stuff like that. Adding useless content to a website whose visitors only want to see the index.php page is silly, but I’ve gotta do it, right?

Another issue I have is the deal with duplicate content. I’ve read your other post where it says there’s no real duplicate content penalty (as far as its not malicious and stuff), but I’m a big fan of making websites that centralize information. I manually pull information from many sources and offer it in a very clean, safe to visit from work, accesible website. Unfortunately though, I’m probably eventually going to get raped by Google sometime for it, even though I believe that my centralized information is more useful for a web visitor than them having to visit 10 different websites to find the same information.

All fair though I guess right?

This statement

“SEO = spam” in Google’s opinion (simply not true). is true imho (The simply not true bit I mean).

Google has shown me that if you set out to be good and helpful and try your best to help Google to index and return the best results for a search term then Google rewards you accordingly.

I also do not agree that a natural/organic result can be purchsed well not unless you count hiring a seo/seo writer that is. Of course loopholes can be found and exploited but these are the things that get one penalised are they not? Maybe that is where the problem here lays?

I never go on face value alone and would question the motives of Aaron concerning any of his statements.

Aaron is obviously well respected in the SEO community but as we all know it those who know SEO who are the ones that know more than most when it comes to how to use words with motives that are not always clear.

If I we’re Aaron and I had a problem with Google I would try to talk to Google about it privately.

Maybe other than that others have expressed their own individual gripes that would be a way to address the personal gripes Aaron has.

Addressing the gripes of multiple people would of course be helpfully done with a Google public statement of some sort to clarify any misunderstandings and the position Google has. Of course Google cannot reveal all as that would make things all too easy to abuse.

Surely a person should be able to work out for themselves to some extent why they had been penalised though.

I have achieved some amazing natural/organic results myself recently purely by following the guidelines and by trying to provide the search results Google says it wants. So I know for myself that when Matt says it is simply not true that those results can be bought this is correct I have the evidence to prove it. Well at least to myself that is.

I find it difficult to believe anyone can buy top rankings after what I have seen achieved by my own SEO efforts.

sheeesh, some ppl’s kids!

They were told not to buy and sell links, yet people did it and got hit by the big G.

When are you people going to listen? He plainly tells us what they are doing to reduce spam, all you have to do is listen(read)!

Sure the search engines will be ever changing because there are people out there that want the big , short term income and will relentlessly spam to get that top position for a few months and then have to start over because they are hard headed.

I Think Aaron is out in left field here, But also think Aaron is not alone, Google is right there with him.
They break their own T.O.S. on a regular basis. Linking schemes out the wazoo. The google subdomains and the internal linking form high pr pages puts the new G. project right up top with high PR fast.
Craigslist practises the same thing as many other corporate giants.

Google has even now started a huge local listings with it’s own algo, and you can bet that if you do a local search now on G. You will get PPC ads and 3 to 10 local listing before the natural search results.

G. is a self interest company and making the internet more communist day by day. But it is also not alone, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines are doing the same.

Just my opinion.

Also, Google has become overly arrogant in their leadership position. You claim that you “Do no evil” however I see Evil every day from Google. Just last week I had to remove an adsense ad for Kitty Porn off of my site. You advertise kitty porn, illegal gambling, and many other horrible things just to help your bottom line, yet you claim this absurd motto that you “Do no evil”. Its a complete laugh.

I think Google is about to get it’s head handed to it with the Yahoo/Microsoft merger and the forthcoming recession. After your revenues drop, and Microsoft becomes a close #2 player, you won’t be acting the way you are now if you intend to keep that leadership position much longer. I think Aaron is absolutely right in what he has said about Google, and I commend him for coming forward and making his claims public.

If you retaliate against him it will only enrage us more. It’s time to eat a piece of humble pie my Google friend.

You said: “Kathy, your case intrigues me a little bit. I poked around a bit (I agree that hystersisters.com is a great site). I’m seeing that some 57,279 urls were robots.txt’ed out. I might take a second look there to see if you’re forbidding us from crawling something that we should be crawling. I’m going to ask a few more people at Google their opinion though.”

I don’t want to be a pest but were you able to find out anything that would be a help to me? Thanks for your help! I appreciate you!

You also wrote this:
“Google forces webmasters to do things Google does not like.”

Nope. You are not being forced to do anything at all. If your competitor told you to put in a special paragraph of text on your page because it would make that page do better……. would you do it?

Just because spam is working today, does not mean it works tomorrow if indeed it is spam. Build a better website and stop worrying about your competitor. Simply report the page spamming to Google and forget about it after that.

This is not for Sarah;

It’s very frustrating to read all the stuff out there about this pagerank and linking issue. It’s almost like the entire industry is totally clueless…. most of it anyway. Am I and a few others the ones who are clueless? I’m sorry, but I don’t think so.