MrSavage - 5:22 am on Oct 6, 2009 (gmt 0)

I may not have made a clear point. It's the hand picking of sites that I'm talking about. Of course algo is human powered. I've never seen search engines as being a panel of humans who comb over the results and press a button to manually remove, shift, squash sites at will.

"Well, the Web spam team does have the ability to say this result is spam, so it should be demoted or penalized or pushed down in some way. But we don't have any ability to say for this query ...we think that this page should rank No. 1. "

Think about that for a moment. This is not something, with my limited intelligence, realized was actually happening. I can understand adjusting algo, but hand picking site to demote is startling to me. For me, and obviously not to you, having a person or a group of people hand picking sites to push down, it's a bit scary. It's not scary if you trust who is doing it. As w webmaster how can you even get a grasp on what is happening with your rankings? Do ugly sites get pushed down? What if you are on page #1 and are just learning about designing graphics? Ugly color schemes? I always say, what constitutes spam exactly? Eye of the beholder?

Again, look at that quote again. It's nuts. If can push a site down off pages, duh, then you can essentially cause the other surrounding sites to rise up. If you push 5 down, jeez, that #6 site just went to #1. I'm baffled by the logic in the comment.

People can be fine with that, that's great. I'm not so trusting. My concern is the hand picking. That's news to me, so maybe I'm just a complete idiot who knows nothing about SEO and search engine companies. Maybe they all hand pick sites to squash. I have no idea. This is the first I've learned of it happening. It sounds like Mr Cutts is part of a panel that judges what can or cannot show up. They have the power to hit the delete button. Perhaps that's why Google is #1. I've just never thought that search results were open to judgement by a panel or a small group of people. In communism, it's the government that decides what the people should see. They think it's the right thing for them to see, therefore it is. I would be a lot more comfortable with penalties, but when you are open to a panel judging you, I'm not really okay with that. With their dislike of Microsoft, don't you ever wonder about that? Hmm, a slight bias can't enter into a panel who judges websites? Isn't to bias to be human?

I'm having a bit of fun with this. I thought penalties were a way of dealing with results on Google that were suspect. I thought that was the role of the spam team. I didn't know that they could manually squash websites. You would think they could at least send you an email letting you know that your site sucks. At least with a penalty, there is a path you can follow to lead yourself back to rankings and or back to the index. That info may explain why there are hundreds of "what happened to my site rank, i've dropped from 2 to 10!" I think folks you now have your answer.

Perhaps Google wants to be more like a social networking search where everyone has a say in what ranks and what doesn't rank. That's great. The big difference is, I would trust a search result that is based on the opinions of 15 million people, rather than what, 10 or 20 Google employees.

[edited by: MrSavage at 5:46 am (utc) on Oct. 6, 2009]