Google Policy Favors Spammers

[Altair]

We operate an established web directory that has been fairly successful. This year, after six years of operation, we were delisted by Google. We made some changes to make the site more search engine friendly such as intentionally delisting (via robots.txt or noindex tags) pages that had little persistent value (news, etc.) and implementing a sitemap. We also attempted to fix anything that might be perceived as "abuse" (such as removing keyword tags) and followed the reinclusion procedure. This resulted in the same "informationless" form email ("we have passed your message on to our engineering team..") that others have reported. A registered letter to Google management produced no response, not even a "thanks for your comment", which is unusually sleazy behavior for a major company.

If we are doing something wrong we would obviously appreciate any clue as to what that thing is. How big a deal could it be to tell us?

It gets worse. Fixing the problem and requesting reinclusion does not result in immediate reinstatement. I understand that reinstatement occurs after the expiration of some "punishment period". The length of the punishment period is a secret and apparently varies depending on the alleged "offense". A "fix something and see if that worked" approach therefore could take years so legitimate web site owners are forced into a "shotgun" approach in which they make multiple, expensive changes in the often futile hope that one of them will eventually get them reinstated.

Spammers have none of these problems. Domain names are cheap. A spammer can serve up the same (or nearly the same) information under 20 different domain names and get 20 times the exposure of a legitimate site. If Google eventually finds and bans some of these domains, more are easily added. Spammers don't have to worry about registered trademarks, brand recognition, business cards, print ads, etc. Google policy harasses legitimate site owners and has no effect on hard core spammers who are laughing all the way to the bank. Google should disclose specific reasons why a site has been delisted and discontinue the childish punishment period. Google's policy of treating legitimate web site owners as the enemy is creating spammers, not helping with the spam problem.

I have noticed that the quality of Google searches has been declining and there are ever more garbage sites popping up in high ranking results. Google seems to be gradually losing the spam war. I suspect they are putting most of their effort into diversifying into email, maps, video, etc.

[saptarshi321]

now, what about those sites that has nothing but a bunch of adsense links and come up in adwords? of course they are paying to get those clicks but by putting them up in the results (Adwords) google is actually depriving other quality content sites to be found by visitors. In this case , dont you think Google is actually doing a trade off with their quality results for just $$$.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

What do you think ;)