oneguy - 1:51 pm on May 10, 2007 (gmt 0)

Google is amassing an enormous amount of information on surfers. For a while it was anonymous surfing information. Indeed, your ISP knew more, as MC recently pointed out, because they can associate your name and account with your surfing habits... Webmaster Central is like an ISP in terms of what they know about those who sign on to WCentral, only worse, because they have access to: Your your G checkout and banking information, your WHOIS historical data, your registered sites, your Adwords sites, your tactics, your searches and Web behaviour, your domain registrations, your non-adwords ad buying, your Performics affiliate account, your affiliate sites...

Man, you aren't kidding. If people are concerned about privacy, webmastering is not a good job. But hey, they have a privacy policy.

Increasingly, G is not just my business partner and enabler, they are my competitor. Everything that G does and says must be viewed, IMHO, as I would view the comments of a competitors. Not necessarily evil. But certainly not my friend. They simply are what they are. A company that seeks to control access to the world's information.

That's a good way of looking at it. If you're going to be a webmaster, you have to have to make a choice. Seems like the choices are "deal with google" or "stop webmastering." There's little else that would make financial sense.

Google literally has webmasters brainwashed into thinking that their guidelines defines ethics.

Not just guidelines, but public statements from employees. Let's suppose that someone makes some rather vague statements about paid links. There are only a few people who could make such statements and have webmasters falling all over themselves to go hunt information for them. Anyone think MSN, Yahoo, or other heavyweights could do that? I doubt it. That's what I would call "mindshare."