aleksl - 2:08 pm on May 9, 2007 (gmt 0)

atlrus: When my website ranks at the same spot on Google, MSN and Yahoo, and the last two account for less than 5% of my search engine traffic... and if Google disappears tomorrow - I could give ***

This is a pipe-smoking comment. If MSN and Yahoo bring 5% of your traffic, G brings 95%, and if G disappears tomorrow, you will loose 95% of SE traffic. How is THAT for "I could give ***".

This is precisely on the OP's topic "Today’s Webmaster & Their Relationship with Google", and you, my friend, didn't get it.

Great Original Post. A for-profit corporation CAN’T POSSIBLY define ethics. They either make money, or don’t. If they don’t, they have to lay off people, if they do – money has to come from somewhere. That somewhere is people who now have to pay for traffic.

Granted, Google originated a HUGE market, where there was almost none. I refer to web advertising one can argue that there were banners before G...let's not go in there for the moment. But G also want to own that market. Not even dominate - OWN. They no longer have to hide their data mining activities either.

I think I agree with several previous posters - if you make money on the internet, Google is a competitor. Competitor for traffic. We as webmasters and business owners want free or low-cost traffic - from any means. Google also wants free traffic, so they can redirect it through toll booths - their paid channels (Adwords being one). As more and more internet traffic will flow through Google-owned entities, they will be making it increasingly hard to escape the toll booths.

Hence their guidelines, which is nothing more than a toll booth marks. "No doorways" - I don't argue the essence of doorways, but Google doesn't like them not because they are bad for visitors, but because this is a free traffic that escapes. Also, their guideline about "content". The #1 and #2 reasons they need content is so they can put Adsense on it, or scrape it and put Adwords on their SERP pages for related KWs. How is that can be considered "ethical", or even a "webmaster guidelines"?..

Many, many things to consider...

Webwork - Google doesn't exist. Just ask any buddhist. :)

[edit]punctuation[/edit]

[edited by: aleksl at 2:11 pm (utc) on May 9, 2007]