David Emery OnlineMaster Plan
29 October 2007
Today, lets play a little game of ‘What if’:
What if Google – the biggest single source of traffic on the internet, and also the biggest advertising network – decided that it didn’t like one of its upstart competitors, and penalised people that used them so they didn’t get so much traffic from Google.
Wouldn’t that be a bit, well, evil?
Of course, all’s fair in love and war and all that, and it’s no surprise that for the sake of its adverts – which are Google’s bread and butter – they’d be prepared to fight dirty. It’s still a sharp reminder of how much power and control Google has, though. Personally, I don’t think Text-Link-Ads (and the people that place them on their sites) have done anything wrong from an ‘accurate search result’ point of view, so to punish them seems to be more then a little anti-competative.
It’s a very grey area though, in Google’s fairness; where exactly do you draw the line between something like Text-Link-Ads (which are normally obviously ads) and something like Pay-Per-Post (which look like normal blog/news posts, but are sponsored)? One is an obvious attempt to dupe Google into upping the PageRank of the original site, and the other is an advert (that, from Google’s point of view, has the same effect).
I guess the key thing is that if Text-Link-Ads causes a site to loose ranking on Google, shouldn’t every site that runs ads be effected as well? I’m sure that the folks at Google will claim that more traditional ads can be detected and ignored, but I would be extremely surprised if they couldn’t figure that out for Text-Link-Ads as well (surely that’s their job, being search indexers).
More ‘What if’s:
What if Google made the next move, and started penalising people using Microsoft as an advertiser?
What if started penalising competitors search results so its products always came out on top (so a search for ‘online email’ would have Gmail at the top)?
What if Google starts burying anti-google news so it doesn’t show up in searches (so ‘text link ads page rank’ would show up with almost nothing)?
Are these slightly hyperbolic scenarios really that much further away from what’s going on with Text-Link-Ads? I’m not sure if they’re really far enough away for comfort: Google has too much power, let’s not forget that.