BUT, Google should be forced to publicly explain changes BEFORE they implement them…and then stand behind those changes in the future.

Lets use the No Follow attribute as an example. In 2005 they introduced this as a big change in the way Page Rank was calculated. So every SEO firm and webmaster in the know ran out and changed all of their irrelevant outbound links to no follow so they could retain more page rank.

Now June 2009 comes along and Google not only completely reverses itself on No Follow…but goes on to say, “and it isnt a big deal because we have already been doing this for for over a year.”

That is like saying if your wife has been cheating on you for a year or your kid has been stealing from you for a year – it must not be a big deal since it took you this long to notice. Talk about BUNK LOGIC.

No matter how good the people at Google claim to be, nor how many times they spam us with their “do no harm” tag line – they are still a massive corporation that needs to have some checks and balances imposed on it. We saw with lack or regulation meant to Wall St and the Housing Market…..lets open our eyes and start paying attention to what is going on in Mountain View.

Please point out where I was personally offensive or bitchy to the point to deserve the “drool” comment (or is that just how you talk to people)?

Although it was a tangent, I will engage you on the oil analogy: it varies greatly depending on the quality of the crude and the specific refining process itself..all of which are kept a secret. If you read that site in detail you would notice that they give approximate %’s…which mean major differences in $$$ from one extreme to the other when dealing in the volume that is involved.

And Big Oil does have the ability to harm everyone of us…remember that giant gas spike that precluded the recession?

And there is one more safe-guard against the spam sites…bounce rate. People click back enough and the website falls in rank.

The fact is that if you follow best practices re: good content, coding, site architecture and inbound links, a site has a very good chance to attain significant search engine visibility (and while top-three is great, there’s lot’s of success to be had for the listings that follow). These practices that are generally well known to everyone in the industry.

The root problem of seo issues come from black hat practices – practitioners and their clients alike are allured by the “coolness” factor in gaming the search engines algorithms knowing full well it’s often a temporary,and costly, solution. While algorithms do change, following best practices has proven to be successful despite these changes.

While the author appears to feel that AdWords ranking should be based on highest bid – no surprise that this would come from “one of the largest sites on the Internet”. Quality Score factors should influence paid rankings but if more transparency is required anywhere, this is the segment of Google that is in dire need of it.

Google has very clear best practice guidelines and it does work to stick to them. Offsite strategies have to become more inventive and focus on generating genuine user generated content, not trying to jip the system as soon a a hole is spotted ; ala PageRank sculpting.