Does anyone else find the strictness of these policies disturbing? It sounds like they found one post that violated their policy and as a result you can't find Chrome on Google for the next two months. While I appreciate the evenhandedness in applying the rules to their own company, should these things allow for a bit more leniency and discretion in enforcement?
The problem with "leniency and discretion in enforcement" is exactly what we've seen: people will reflexively be outraged at Google when they appear to break their own rules.
Now, if Google's policy was to be lenient and to "give each offender a chance," think about how they would respond to two situations:
The first situation is some unknown marketing agency that's clearly violating the rules and arranging the selling of links to inflate their PageRank or their clients' PageRanks. This would be the typical case that their policy was designed to weed out, and Google's webspam department would have no reason to be lenient. And they likely wouldn't.
The second situation is when another department at Google appears to violate the Google webspam rules. Someone from Google webspam would see that Google Chrome is in violation, and of course they would feel the need to be lenient. Sure, it's a big company, but I'm sure any employee would assume they could work things out with the Chrome department.
This would just end up being the exact situation we've seen unfold today: Google Chrome would appear to get a pass, while the "obvious spammers" would be punished normally. I don't see how "leniency and discretion" could possibly result in anything other than unequal application of Google's policies.
"While Google did not authorize this campaign, and we can find no remaining violations of our webmaster guidelines, we believe Google should be held to a higher standard, so we have taken stricter action than we would against a typical site."
Maybe. Maybe they don't go through the home page; maybe they go through the Google home page but don't look at it.
But the problem is the same when other companies that make an honest mistake in good faith, get punished in this manner:
1. there wasn't anything they could have done to prevent this mistake (if the Chrome team can't figure out the rules, who can??)
2. the people who end up being punished are Google's users themselves, who won't understand why they can't find BMW when searching for "bmw", and will probably think they did something wrong.
I'm not defending spammers, BTW, or even SEO (which I think is borderline evil regardless of the color of its hat).
What I'm trying to say is that Google should find a way to punish spammers without punishing its own users.
I can't speak for them, but I'd guess you have to be a lot harsher on yourself than you are with others when you have power, or else people are going to feel that you are using your power unfairly.
I think that their response is also proving a point to the general SEO community that this sort of activity is frowned upon. It's very unlikely that your typical website would get such a harsh punishment for something so small & trivial.
That Google applies the same rules to itself as to everyone else is commendable. What seems strange is how much of this needs to be done by hand.
In essence, Google is admitting that they're unable to detect spam / low quality content, and therefore their "policy" is to punish the perpetrators when/if they get caught.
This may be needed to enforce the rules, but it's an obvious disservice to Google's users, who are apparently considered "collateral damage".
The actual problematic link was a single link, apparently - I don't think it's reasonable to have automated systems ban a site from google for a _single_ link, which might well be a false positive. They're trying to show they don't have a double standard though, hence the manual action.
> I don't think it's reasonable to have automated systems ban a site from google for a _single_ link
No, but it would be reasonable to ban the post sporting the offending link.
It also would be in the benefit of Google's users to demote pages that are content-free. I thought this was what "Panda" was all about, but I'm not sure if it's working?
