hutcheson - 11:40 pm on Feb 5, 2006 (gmt 0)

There are a couple of points Google is making here -- and making them, I think, VERY effectively. By killing a bear and nailing its hide to the doorway, they are NOT announcing that every other kind of vermin they find will be carefully skinned and mounted. They are announcing that ALL vermin will be KILLED -- rats and mice as well as other bears should stay away.

There is no such benefit to posting rat tails or mouse skulls -- and so smaller vermin may be crushed without notice. But ... NOT WITHOUT WARNING! No, not without warning. If BMW with all its notorieity and political clout, can't bluster ITS way past the Google algorithmics -- what hope for lesser offenders? And anyone who misses THAT message has no business calling himself a professional webmaster, let alone a competent one.

But why shouldn't Google just de-louse the bear, or do whatever else it takes to make it socially presentable, instead of taking such extreme steps?

Well, the answer here is simple, also. Google knows -- Google HAS to know -- ANYBODY who's ever seriously looked at search engine HAS to know -- that very few sites abuse the guidelines in only one way. The rat carries a wide variety of diseases. Anyone is wise to suspect that a violator of one guideline is likely to violate many others -- in fact, that most violators will be constantly adding variations of abuses hoping that Google won't be able to detect them.

The obvious response, the only sensible response, is to pound any site using any of the detectable abuses -- without warning, without notice. Give no clue to the abusers as to what's detectable, and what's not. Raise the risk of abusing in ANY form, hopefully to an unacceptable level.

Harsh? Not to the honest webmasters. Not to the surfers who are hoping that reputable companies can rank well for their own trademarks in the absense of artificial rank manipulation. Only to the people who called themselves professional manipulators of Google, but who didn't bother to observe how Google wished to be manipulated.