ncgimaker - 10:55 am on Jun 7, 2005 (gmt 0)

My view on this is he was right to leak it. Google might have an NDA, but their beef is with the leaker not the person they leaked to.

I also think they should have that information openly available on their site. A clear statement of what they stand for.

It does seem to have several problems.

Search engines suck, theres no other way to put it. You visit a luxury goods site and see colours designed to stimulate memories, food pictures to water the mouth, cultural references, jazzy styles to set the mood. Poetic text or use of slang? Clean cut typography or antiquated fonts? Google sees, table tags and strings of dictionary words and not much else.

Google is not god, it is a blind-deaf person with a poor grasp of language and no awareness of culture.

It needs a walking stick for many non text sites simply to be able to obtain a few words to even get a hint of what the site is about.

In the document they give several examples of hidden text, but nowhere do they make the distinction as to whether the text is there to aid the search engine or to deceive the searcher.

The Marantz example they gave seems to have been changed to remove the hidden text. So now Google thinks that page is about "Global home page. All Rights Reserved".
What keywords are you thinking from the paragraph I just wrote? I'm thinking "baby bathwater", yet I didn't use those words in the paragraph and Google is unaware that 'throw' and 'threw' fit with that keyphrase.

A meta comments tag is hidden, links to the page are hidden, but are they there to deceive or to explain in terms the search engine can understand? Are they the white stick for the blind search engine?

ODP+PPC, if the site adds value to ODP then how about putting a meaning on that value.
So for example, a medical site with some ODP page that ranks for k1 k2 k3, shouldn't rank for k1 k2 k3, it should rank for medical words + k1 k2 k3.

Likewise if a site is added value to another site, what added value is it?. The visitor goes to that site over the other site for what exactly?

They should have pre-determined sets of keywords for "purchase, sale, ...."
"reviews, studies, guide, research..."
"ideas concepts novel..."

The reviewer could define exactly what the added value is, either by specifying the words themselves, or by selecting from a pre-determined group*.

This afiliate site has value beyond the thing it affiliates to because it adds "...." related usage.

* disclaimer, I have an ODP+PPC site among my set. I'd like to tell the search engines to rank it for (set of words) + ODP, rather than for ODP keywords itself for which it would be spam. It is *not* spam, for "k1 k2 + ODP words", it is the only site on the net for that!

How do you give the blind man his white stick if he refuses to accept white sticks from anyone and prefers to stumble around.