If your Google AdWords quality score is too low, Google will allow you to compete in the auction with reasonable ad pricing ONLY if you give them your conversion data:

The arguement from my representative was that your pages are terrible so if we can’t see how well you convert our users then we will need you to pay $10.00 per click to make up for your low QS (my average keyword price was $2.75 at the time). That of course would have put me out of business.

Once I caved and allowed them to snoop on my conversions they allowed me to keep buying at or near my original keyword price.

If your copyright content is being uploaded to YouTube, Google will protect you if you upload your copyright content to Google:

I see a monetization in the works.

a) All of the big companies will make the effort to supply Youtube with good qualities of their videos. Movies, Shows etc.
b) YouTube gathers all that stuff, and builds the largest database of top quality videos.
c) Youtube offers the media companies to enter into a partnership. “Hey guys, you already have the stuff uploaded…why not sell the premium content to our millions of users?

If people are scraping and stealing your content Google will eventually allow you to rank for your own work if you sign up with Google Webmaster Central and register your copyright work.

After all your sites are registered with Google, how easy will it be for them to force compliance on smaller webmasters? Given the indiscriminate attitude exhibited when Google recently hand edited PageRank scores, it seems there is good reason to not register with the borg.

Search Engine Land recently listed a bunch of sites that had their PageRank scores manually edited for selling links. Of course, if you are the publisher of one of these sites, you don't care about an algorithm relevancy score so meaningless that it is edited by hand. You care about traffic.

Rankings Never Changed

SERoundtable was on the list of sites which saw their toolbar PageRank scores reduced, but I just looked at some of the terms they were ranking for, and they are still right at or near the top of the results for everything they were ranking for, even the competitive terms.

Traffic Matters, PageRank Does Not

Watch the Compete.com traffic stats for the sites listed in that Search Engine Land post. Google even provides large sites like the NYT over 20% of their traffic, so if these sites were really penalized you will see a plunge in traffic. If you do not see a plunge in traffic across these sites then toolbar PageRank scores are proved irrelevant as a measure of quality and trust.

Since When Are Publishing Networks Bad?

Many network blogs had their PageRank scores dropped too. Again, you can simply check the traffic stats to see if there is any real impact, or if Google is just polluting their Toolbar PageRank scores.

Since Google is demoting PageRank's viability as a site's global authority score perhaps this is a time for Yahoo to bring back WebRank, or Ask to launch something like CommunityRank. The Google-webmaster relationship is fraying. This presents an opportunity for whoever wants to take it.

Publishing is About Networks

If Google is penalizing blogs for being part of a network of sites, how long until they penalize IAC for owning 20 travel sites? Or Monster.com for owning 100 thin lead generation education sites? Or BankRate for owning white label sites with similar names? Networks have always been a part of publishing based business models.

It seems someone or something inside of Google is melting down. Choppy times ahead for webmasters worldwide.

A friend of mine recently emailed me to ask if his site was penalized for selling links. The same email went on to say that he is ranking better than ever in Google, even for his core category single word query, but his toolbar PageRank score dropped by one.

Google Stats Are Wonky

Many of Google's webmaster stats are rarely updated and/or intentionally inaccurate. And many stats change on a whim, while reflecting no real change in the structure of the web.

PageRank is the Wonkiest Stat of Them All

Toolbar PageRank scores are only updated about once every three months. In between updates hundreds of millions or billions of web pages are added to Google's index. These new pages absorb PageRank and generally cause the PageRank of existing pages to be lowered. Pages that were a high PR 7 might become a low PR7, pages that were a low PR7 might become a high PR6, and so on. The one exception to this rule is that if your site's inbound link authority grows faster than the web does then your PageRank score goes up.

PageRank is recomputed in near real time and toolbar PageRank scores are perpetually outdated. If you are starting from a PR0 and get a few quality links then of course you should expect a PageRank greater than 0 on the next update, but even the fact that your pages are getting indexed means you have some share of PageRank even if the toolbar does not show anything. In some cases the toolbar not only shows outdated data, but sometimes it even sticks, showing you the PageRank score of another site or showing all pages as 0.

It is no coincidence that Google chose not to update toolbar PageRank scores in a great deal of time before spreading more propaganda against paid links, and then launched a partial data push (how often do they do that)? This way when they finally update PageRank and many pages have a slightly lower PageRank score many webmasters will wonder "was I penalized?"

Why the Hate for Paid Links?

As Michael Gray rightly points out:

If Google wins what’s going to happen is the market will go underground. You’re going to have to "know a guy" to get you links. For a lot of people that removes any options, leaving the only option being Google. Does anybody really believe that the PHD’s at the plex haven’t applied any "gaming theory" to this model and figured out this will make them even more profitable? (c’mon we’re googly we’d never do that) Once the advertisers are underground, market forces of scarcity will take effect, and prices will skyrocket. So even if you don’t believe in paid links, you should still get involved in the debate, if for no other reason than to keep the advertising market free and open instead of under the control of Google.

If making PageRank function requires hand editing isn't that an indication that PageRank is irrelevant? Why not change they relevancy algorithms rather than trying to scare people?

Deflecting Blowback

Danny Sullivan posted about Google's latest battle against paid links. I followed up on the absurdity of the situation, and in response to our posts Danny and I were both called liars. Which might seem like a fair assessment of the situation to a person new to search marketing.

Why would Google make an official webmaster announcement, but provide no quotes for the story and not publish it on any of their own websites? Probably because they know what they are doing is illegal, and want to be detached from the story to not look like overzealous dictators.

What Google Can't Cloak

The two things Google can't cloak are the visitors they are sending you and how much they charge you for a click. Sure their ad auctions have a hidden "quality" factor to them, but that is just an indication of how much they trust your ad account and your site. If Google is sending you more traffic and ranking your site better then you have nothing to worry about.

My friend's lower PageRank score was an anomaly. It was irrelevant, because at the core, his site is ranking better and Google is sending him more traffic. At the end of the day Google can put smoke an mirrors wherever they like, but if your search traffic trend is up you are not penalized.

Why Search Traffic Can Go Down Without a Penalty

1. Competition: if the competition is out-marketing you then your site might slip.
2. Seasonal traffic patterns: if you go out of a high demand season it makes sense that your traffic may drop even if rankings improve.
3. Automated filters: In some cased individual pages might get automatically filtered for being too closely aligned with a particular term, but they can usually overcome that by loosening the focus of those pages and their inbound anchor text. That is why it is important for an SEO to track their statistics, to know where they are and how reliant they are on each phrase. In some cases I have seen sites which ranked for many additional new queries but got filtered for one of their highest traffic terms. The page focus and anchor text was loosened and the page came back ranking better than ever.

Alan Greenspan was recently interviewed on the Daily Show.

Explaining his old job, he stated:

I have been dealing with these big mathematical models forecasting the economy, and I am looking at what is going on in the past few weeks and say, you know if I could figure out a way to determine weather or not people are more fearful, or changing to more euphoric, and I have a third way of figuring out which of the two things were working, I don't need any of this other stuff.

I could forecast the economy better than any way I know. The trouble is that we can't figure that out. Forecasting today is as good or bad as it was 50 years ago. The reason is human nature hasn't changed. We can't improve ourselves.

Economic Trends Are Caused by Emotions

The prices of commodities often change without any underlying change in value, just a change in perceived value. After all, what is money backed by and why did the dollar lose 25%+ of its value over the last few years? If it is supply and demand related, why did we need to sharply increase the supply of currency? Once a trends start heading in one direction, just the creation of the trend (or perception of the trend) causes a following.

Investments are based on risk to reward ratios, and if people are afraid they are less likely to take risks. People like what is familiar, but by the time something has no perceived risk there is little upside potential, and then eventually the bottom falls out of the market, like what happened with real estate recently.

Tracking Real Estate

Paul Kedrosky recently posted about real estate predicting broader market trends, the mortgage market meltdown destroying a town, and using Google trends to predict real estate markets.

Letting Google Share Other's Emotions With You

Google makes communication faster and cheaper, advertising more relevant and trackable, and audience aggregation more efficient. They also create a lot of cool tools that evolve the web which allow publishers to layer value over the top of them. Not only can you use Google to predict real estate trends, but you can use them to

• see how much people are willing to pay for a conversion
• estimate the price and volume of a keyword (or compare keywords)
• buy and test the traffic stream today
• find out what keywords are hot today
• track seasonal search trends (comparing keywords, regions, languages, and cultures)
• track seasonal publishing trends (in news, blogs, or general web publishing)
• track if anyone has covered a specific topic, and who covered that coverage (using blogsearch, or if your own site Google Analytics)

Trends Are Increasingly Fast

There is already a college course on making Facebook applications. Facebook applications are less than a year old, and colleges are typically years behind the market.

With Google's mass storage of usage data, huge reach, analytics and conversion tracking code they can track the changes of sentiment and demand faster than anyone else can. They can buy out competitors before anyone else understands their full value.

Classifying Fear & Euphoria

Just like Google can classify queries as being informational or transactional in nature, how hard would it be for them to

• track searches and classify them as pessimistic or optimistic?
• track searches of people who visit Google Finance often (or any other finance site, given the Google Toolbar) and classify them as pessimistic or optimistic?
• track changes in outlooks from people who are known thought leaders, have old trusted accounts, and/or have spent significantly through Google Checkout?
• track search volume and link it to economic activity?
• assign an economic value to each query based on ad value?

Right there Google is already a better economic predictor than anything the Fed could hope to be, but what happens if Google decides to also buy and sell securities?

How Google Can Influence Markets

Answers.com

A couple years ago Google switched their definitions link partnership from Dictionary.com to Answers.com. Earlier this year Answers.com announced they were buying the competing Dictionary.com, and a Google update caused Answers.com's traffic to plunge.

When Answers.com announced their Google traffic was cut their stock plunged, which indicates two things:

• Answers.com has a weak business model
• Google has leverage to make Answers.com do whatever Google wants

In spite of Answers traffic increasing and a recent stock market rally, their stock is still down quite a bit from its highs. Answers recently did gain a bit of value though, when they announced they renewed their Google ad syndication partnership.

Syndication = Spam?

In the same way that an algorithm adjustment can kill the profitability of a site, so can a new Google business partnership with a competitor, as newspapers are figuring out right now. If syndication is a large part of your business model look for that stream of revenue to dry up soon.

Flawed Self Analysis

We are bad at self analysis, but we tend to like / trust / believe what is familiar. If we let machines know us well enough they will find the holes in our personalities and egos that are easy to exploit for profit.

Personalized search helps highlight what is familiar, and makes us trust Google more by reinforcing our worldviews. Not only can Google bring back things you liked in the past, but they can recommend new stuff, guide your thoughts, and share ads as content.

Predicting the Future With 99%+ Accuracy

Not only can Google update algorithms or add features to stun competitors, but they also could easily see real trends first hand (like cuts in marketing budgets, search related product demand, or organic mentions) and trade securities or derivatives in near real time. They also have a pretty good idea of the types of sites their next filters are going to take out.

What more for predicting market trends if Google buys DoubleClick (a leading online ad server) and become a free international Internet service provider? Cory Doctorow recently covered how Google can go wrong, but until more people think along those lines Google is going to grow to be the single largest economic engine in the world, and the best predictor of micro and macro economic trends.

Frank Schilling and Shoemoney recently had two great posts about Google. When combined I think they paint a picture of Google that skips past the rhetoric and double talk. Frank said:

As a publisher, I've always viewed Google as a bit of a predator in this context.. taking publishers in, convincing them to serve Google ads, and then allowing those publishers to toil for Google, working sites into their algo to serve the beast, all for increasing revenues, finally to have Google's algorithm scrub you from the index if you become too successful at punching ad converting pages to the top.. Good publishers take on the role of sacrificial lamb to show the algo guys where the holes are and they get to ride the express elevator to the street as a reward.

Shoemoney's video about avoiding getting hit by Google stated that the key is just don't do things that make Google look stupid or undermine the perceived magic that occurs at Google.

My site that Matt Cutts hand removed from Google's search results got too much exposure and Matt killed it not because the site was spammy, but because it was mine and it was getting too much mainstream traction and exposure. My marketing was too appealing, aggressive, and effective. In another year that site would have been untouchable, and that thought made Matt Cutts feel uncomfortable.

The Changing Desires of the Magical Fictitious Average User

• One day Google sells the story of how "PageRank reflects the unique democratic reflection of the web" and a day later they talk about "hand editing to protect our users".
• One day they talk about how "Users don’t want to see results sorted by who has the biggest pocketbook." and the next day they are talking about how "ads are a type of information".
• One day they talk about how "the FTC believes ads need to be clearly marked" and the next day they tell publishers to blend ads in the content and remove the ads by Google notification from their own ads.

How Relevancy is Defined

• Money to Google = relevant, good user experience.
• Large profit stream going elsewhere = spam, unless such classification hurts Google.
• Relevancy algorithms and user priorities change to match Google's business interests. Spam is redefined as business partnerships allow Google to increase revenues. Google is never considered spam, even if Google pays their partners to steal your entire website and wrap it in Google ads.

With Google, the whole concept of relevancy is a shifting mind control game. As long as you do not get the wrong types of exposure you can make a lot of money without them doing anything about it. Go too mainstream with something a little sketchy or something with the scent of smart SEO to it and they will try to kill you out of resentment, jealousy, and to try to protect the lies that their business model are based on.