wheel - 1:40 pm on May 9, 2007 (gmt 0)

>>>>Webmasters did not build Google.
It's commonly assumed that Google's initial success was a result of grassroots promotion from within the technical community.

>>>bashing webmasters that they obay Google rules is uncalled for and just plain stupid:
I don't think he was bashing webmasters that follow Google rules. He's bashing the folks that believe following Googles rules is somehow 'right', 'the only thing to do', or 'ethical'.

>>Google actually has respect for the robots.txt, so if you do not want to be listed - just exclude it.
You can do the same thing with MFA's and scraper sites. If they don't obey that, you can just block their IP's. It's the same thing as Google showing your cache. Sure, you can be proactive to block Google or other scrapers. And if you don't, both will scrape and republish your content in it's entirety. The difference is that some people seem to distinguish Google's practice as being their right, or ethical. It's not, it's simply allowed because we get something in return. That's it, it doesn't make it any different ethically than a standard scraper site. And again, this is an example of the blinders people have on over Google.

If someone scrapes and republishes my content without my explicit permission, isn't that wrong? Of course it is. It's important to make the distinction that Google doesn't have the actual right to do this, we simply allow it because it's a profitable relationship.

And in return, my motivation is to get top ranking to maximize that scraped content. Why would I care about someone's guidelines? I don't - they have every right to set up their guidelines and ban or penalize anyone even arbitrarily. That doesn't mean that anyone is 'unethical' or wrong if they believe they can get top ranking by ignoring the guidelines without getting found out by Google. I didn't ask them to crawl my site. I didn't ask them to rank my site. And I never agreed to any guidelines set out by a company who doesn't have my best interests at heart.