Forum Moderators: open
<snipped long quote as per TOS>
Google, what are you doing? In your zest to weed out spammers, you are losing credibility! This is just another in a long list of sites whose PR has vanished/reduced or the bar gone grey. Soon, this kind of information will leak out of these message boards and get into the hands of the press, and you will see a headline "Google Manipulating Results"; and miles of the hard work you have done will go down the drain.
Google, you must remember, that you control 80% of the search market, thus you have a great responsibility on your shoulders. Don't lose your credibility. Fear the old saying "The bigger they are, the harder they fall".
[edited by: Namaste at 11:19 am (utc) on Jan. 9, 2003]
[edited by: NFFC at 11:50 am (utc) on Jan. 9, 2003]
[edit reason] URL removed - hand edit ;) [/edit]
Google has NO responsibility whatsoever to whichever webmaster decides to perform an experiment to manipulate the rankings, which is clearly outside the parameters of their quality standards.
In addition, that whole thing is ignorant enough to carry no credibility at all.
[edited by: Marcia at 11:27 am (utc) on Jan. 9, 2003]
Good thing your homework isn't being graded.
First, the quote above is completely out of context. The very same article goes on to explain that the initial conclusion was completely off base and that the PR0 was a natural one, rather than a penalty.
Second, the article you're quoting was inspired itself by somebody else "crying wolf" with a publicly posted paranoid rant about being censored by Google.
A few posts later they came to their senses and realized this was just a standard matter of a PR0 because they were newly indexed pages, and as such, had no proper PR attribution.
In the end.... much ado about nothing.
Now if I could only script a "chicken little" filter on my system to avoid this all-too-frequent nonsense. :)
Google's definition of artificial is of course artificial itself, since it is not the result of any natural laws, but a creation of their team members. It is their judgement of what is right and wrong...and as we know in many cases, what may be wrong for one, may be right for another. Google should thus hold their regulations as broad as possible.
Namaste, every single search engine that ever was has had quality guidelines. And they always will. It's their right, and that is their responsibility to their users. They have no responsibility whatsoever to coddle webmasters who perform experiments to manipulate the SERPs.
Case closed.
[edited by: Marcia at 11:51 am (utc) on Jan. 9, 2003]
[edited by: Namaste at 2:06 pm (utc) on Jan. 9, 2003]
I think Google did a hiccup this month and gave PR0 to some pages by accident.
I don't think it's a plot by aliens or Google. :-)
