Brent Wilson

I find it hard to be a fan of Matt Cutts. A lot of that has to do with me having such a horrible experience with google and Matt Cutts blog always praising how awesome Google is with search. I’m not denying that they have done a wonderful job branding themselves as the go to search engine but they are hardly a great search engine.

I was rather pleased to see Matt Cutts call out Aaron Wall on his blog. I think this was a very bad mood on his part. When you work for a company that has a stock price of over $600 I don’t think it’s in your best interest to go around picking fights with individual SEOs.

Aaron makes a lot of very good points about how Google does the exact opposite of what they tell webmasters to do. Here is the list that was posted within the comments area of Matt’s Blog:

• How nofollow was pushed through as a fix for blog spam, and then quickly became something that you must use on paid links or else be called a web spammer.
• The uneven nature of hand editing – which was even included in semi-anonymous warning you guys had published on Search Engine Land.
• The death of many types organic links caused by Google FUD – as an example, I did public relations for a friend and got an article published about their business in the mainstream media. In that case my friend’s business was the focus of the article, and yet that media source did not want to link out because they felt that might be too promotional AND they were afraid to link out from their site. A web controlled by fear will fare worse than a web built on passion and creativity.
• How Google can buy YouTube and tightly integrate it into the search results, but if smaller webmasters buy sites and fix them up to improve user experience they are somehow considered spammers.
• How some AdWords advertisers are given discounts (through enhanced clickthrough rates) for using additional Google products like Google Checkout.
• Talking up the quality of linkbait and then penalizing sites that build organic links too quickly.
• When you penalize a site and allow people to steal that entire site’s content via your AdSense program. how hard is it to add ANY quality control issues to AdSense to verify sites are not a wholesale copy of another PRIOR to accepting them in your ad program? If Google wants to organize the world’s information they shouldn’t fund a large portion of the world’s information pollution.

Google loves using scare tactics to try to coerce webmasters into doing exactly what they want. Just take the recent Page Rank update that Google issued that knocked many large and small websites down tremendously because they sold text links on their blog. The fact that Page Rank still exists is outrageous. It’s Google’s way of keeping a grip on webmasters and controlling how they manage their website. Google doesn’t have a problem buying YouTube and shoving their videos down our throat every time we search for something but god forbid a 22 year old webmaster wants to make an extra $100 dollars a month he’s got to think in the back of his head if Google is going to penalize him for it.

What this tells me is that Google’s algorithm is flawed. Buying text links has obviously been a thorn in Google’s side for a long time. Now they have started fighting back with the worthless Page Rank tool bar that so many new webmasters live by.

Yes, Aaron has been taking a lot of shots at Google lately. They are all warranted. Google is out of control. They have gotten too big and control too much of the internet and it’s starting to show. I look forward to following the results of these two going at it.