Like the Stanford Daily and WordPress before, O’Reilly’s been called out for allowing a search-engine-spam network to place links on their network of sites. I’ve written about this before, and have thought about it since, and have decided that this sort of ‘advertising’, designed for robots instead of people, really doesn’t bother me much. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and the other big search engine companies aren’t public utilities – they’re money-making, for-profit enterprises. It’s time to stop thinking of search engines as a common resource to be nurtured, and start thinking of them as just another business to compete with or cooperate with as best suits your individual needs. I might feel differently if the search engines were just doing search – but the Googles, Yahoos, and Microsofts of the world aren’t doing that. There’s a distinct possibility that one of them is going to go after your business, if it hasn’t already – why worry about doing the same to them?
Linking to a search engine spammer for profit is clearly an overt act of competition – it says to Google that you’re attempting to make money at the expense of their index quality. It’s not for those afraid of bad PR or for anyone that really depends on Google traffic to their site. But it is a valid choice. It’s Google’s responsibility to ensure the quality of their search index, not the collective community of website publishers. I’m somewhat bemused at O’Reilly’s decision to take such a step – they no doubt do get tons of traffic from Google, and their deal with search engine spammers is probably a way of saying “we’re too important to the relevancy of your search index, Google – you don’t have the cojones to remove us.” Much more brazen than Shelley‘s decision to put up a couple links and knock out a car payment. But I really can’t criticize either of them.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
“It’s Google’s responsibility to ensure the quality of their search index, not the collective community of website publishers.”
You’re making a pretty persuasive argument here. Thank you.
My instant reaction to your post was to see myself in Google. I don’t think it should (ideally) be my responsibility to defend myself from referrer, comment, and email spam. The folks on the other end simply shouldn’t be subjecting me to that crap in the first place. So by extension, publishers shouldn’t be subjecting Google to it, either.
But then I paused to consider how Google actually functions. Yes, if I manually submit a spam-scented page to Google for indexing, I’m doing something bad. My act isn’t competitive… it’s anti-competitive and destructive. It’s the equivalent of spraying grafitti all over the corporate campus.
But if I have a site out there, and Google just follows links to find me… *they’ve* come to *me*. It’s not my responsibility to make my site friendly to their needs. They can take me or leave me… that’s on them.
Hmm, I respectfully disagree Greg. For one, I use Google every day and if somebody or some company is intentionally and knowningly (and that’s the key part in these discussions) gaming it — or selling space on their site to game it — then it pollutes the overall index and makes the tool that less useful and harder for me to find good results in the engine. It will take longer to get to the results that I need.
So it’s my _time_ that ends up getting wasted and my time is worth more to me than some crappy set of ads to “knock out a car payment.”
Sure, that opens it up on for a Google competitor to come in and produce better quality search results and forces them to create better anti-spam algos but in the short term it’s the same type of pollution coming into my inbox.
No thank you.
Greg,
I think this is the second time I’ve been routed here on a contentious issue and found great wisdom and insight here.
It always helps in any contest of power to evaluate the ability of the parties to respond to the complaint. Google puts out stock to generate 4 billion in cash and O’Reilly needs to understand that they are corrupting the search engines by accepting an ad that games Google. O’Reilly makes
a few hundred dollars for this shameless hucksterism (or brokering of same).
Of course, the real injured party is the user of the serach engine that has to avoid the crap broker’s web site and that individual pays…
a few cents in opportinity costs. We all lost
more than a few cents just trying to understand the issue and find the party at fault. I’m beginning to think the guy that cried wolf
might be at fault… but I shouldn’t believe everything I read and I should be really careful when I don’t understand the technology involved.
I’ll add you to my list of bloggers to watch becuase you explain the tradeoffs well.
Excellent points in the original post. I would like to add a few thoughts to the idea that Google is a for-profit company…
1) The majority of searchers do NOT understand the difference between natural and paid-for search results.
2) Google has made changes to its paid-for search results to make them blend in more with natural results and has increased the number of paid results to 3 on some listings.
So, if Google doesn’t have any problem taking actions that increase the likelihood that THEIR OWN USERS will go to paid-for (not-natural) search results without knowing about it, why am I supposed to care if my actions have the exact same end effect? Should I feel bad about sending some searchers to manipulated/’not natural’ results, when Google themselves do the same thing to half their users?
As an aside, this quote from the Google spokesman struck me…”For highly commercial queries, we believe an additional ad above the search results is good for both. (user experience and ad effectiveness)” It’s interesting that mesothelioma is considered a ‘highly commercial query’ (because it shows 3 paid-for results). Maybe they just mean ‘highly commercial’ for Google. Seriously, the gamma or whatever is too high on my laptop and I can barely see the difference in color between white and the sponsored background. The first time I saw 3 of them, I almost thought they were all natural results.
Search engine spam doesn’t attack Google, the company. It attacks people searching with Google, and any other search engine. It’s our responsibility to keep the web clean, and yes, at the same time we need to improve the tools to defend ourselves against it.
And as far as the current case is concerned, if O’Relly don’t remove the links, well maybe Google should blacklist them — then they’d lose their PageRank. If it’s not about morals as you suggest but about private companies trying to make their stuff work, then that would make a good point as well.
This “problem” will _never_ be solved by attacking publishers.
This “problem” will _only_ be solved when Google/Yahoo/MSN/etc modify their algorithms to make buying and sellings links ineffective.
When that happens, advertisers will quit buying links for the purpose of gaining keyword relevancy, and publishers will no longer be able to sell links for that purpose.
At that point, I suspect we will see a significant drop in the quantity and quality of web content.
If good publishers can’t make money publishing online, they will exit the business.
I completely disagree. An index may be proprietorial, but the web is a commons – anything that people do that makes it harder to index is a blight on all of us.
I think it would be useful to both you and your readers if you examined what you mean by “valid choice.”
I’m sorry, but you completely undermine your argument by having Technorati tags at the bottom of your post. Who’s getting value out of them? Not me, not you. It benefits Technorati and their crappy search engine.
Rod: I get value out of the Technorati tags in the form of a small trickle of additional traffic. Seven visitors today, three yesterday, nine the day before that, etc. I could get the same benefit by leaving in the rel=”tag” attributes and sending the links somewhere else but modifying the Wordpress plugin I’m using is way down my list of priorities.
{ 4 trackbacks }