The War is coming…

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20 12 2006

The War is coming…

Is it just me or is there a growing sentiment of anti-google in the air these days?

When I began doing this stuff Google was the greatest thing since sliced bread - they were here to save the world of the internet with their fresh thinking, advanced computer systems and famous do no evil slogan. The little guys, the underdogs, the college drop outs that made good from just a startup in their garage.

Now they are a public company, they have US$500 stocks and are worth billions of dollars - they are big enough and ugly enough to attract some anti-google press for lack of a better word. I like to call it tall poppy syndrome because I always thought of a tall poppy being cut down a few inches so that other poppies could take a bit more of the sun, but apparently thats at odds with the real definition.

Anyway, what is at the root of this shift in opinion against Google?

I guess the ideals have always appealed to me as far as SEO goes. Write good content for the search engines and wait for the inbound links to come in. Google will find my useful information and make it available to netizens using their search engine. Content is King etc.

But as I got my hands dirty with SEO my natural human greed and laziness kicked in, the perfect world I had prepared for myself and our clients began to compromise on this and that. Not big stuff, but I increasingly found myself intrigued by the hat of black. Most interesting was how those blackhats trick the search engines. Understanding how to trick the search engines helped me to better understand how they work and led me to depersonalise (is that a word) the company that I probably held in too high stead.

I don’t know what I thought in the first place, that maybe Sergey and Larry would review my site themselves and think maybe ‘look at ol’ frank down there in New Zealand, just tryin’ to get his content out there to help our users, boost him on up’. Or that people would find my site/clients’ sites and link to their content naturally and in a timely fashion. Often it just did not seem to happen.

Getting back on topic, I think that a lot of peoples’ initial disillusion with Google and search engines in general has led in part to this backlash that I seem to be witnessing.

I hear you saying - ‘What evidence do you have of this backlash Franco?’. Well, none. Only my gut feeling, and that is based a lot on what I read on peoples blogs, forums etc. I find a lot more posts on blackhat or borderline blackhat/greyhat/quasi-blackhat? techniques. People seem to be a lot more honest about what they do to get ranked or what they think about Google. Largely its great stuff, fresh and honest approaches on how to rank in Google. Straight answers and opinions which I am grateful for (especially given there is no SES New Zealand or equivalent I can go to). Sometimes it goes further into how Google is doing this or doing that, thats unethical, this is evil etc., recently more so with the click fraud debacle. Again, all useful stuff to be mindful of.

I guess what I am trying to say is that I feel a war brewing. Where SEOs are less white hat and idealist and more black hat and realistic/honest about what works and what doesn’t. As Google gets more and more fed up with the people gaming their system they are going get heavy handed and possibly create a bit of dissent in the SEO community as their spam algos produce false positives and people start complaining that they have been wronged in this way or that way.

In short, I see it becoming more acceptable for SEOs to hide behind the mantra of ‘fuck Google, its a big corporation out to make money’. I’m sure there will always be a large number playing the TOS - for their clients if not for anything else. But I can hear the dark side calling, and its getting louder, and the louder it gets and the more this industry expands, the more new SEOs will be tempted by that hat of black and the war will rage harder.

Update:
http://www.itworld.com/Tech/4535/apple-google-microsoft-fickle-consumers-dr–080320/index.html

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