Sometimes when a Google engineer decides he is pissed off at a site he or she may penalize the site in a way that the company does not rank in the top 30 results for any search query, including branded navigational queries. Imagine if you search for SeoBook and couldn't find this site? How is that a good user experience for searchers using Google? It is their index, so I think it is fair if Google nukes sites that they dislike for non-brand queries, but when they do it for brand related queries too, they make their search results irrelevant and provide a bad user experience. What makes the situation worse than it needs to be?

the definition of relevancy changes depending on Google's business interests
the definition of spam changes depending on Google's business interests
Google is unpredictable in their hand editing
if Google does not like a particular market they may hand edit the leading company while leaving competitors ranking at the top of the search results for the competitor's brand. in some cases they penalize the cleanest services while leaving dirtier market players easily accessible
even if a site is deemed as spam and penalized they can still buy ads on Google, which makes it seem as though it is only spam if Google isn't getting paid

If Google wants to become the default way we access all information can they continue to penalize brands for their official brand names?

Published: September 2, 2007 by Aaron Wall in google

Free Search Traffic: Add Keyword Rich Content to Authoritative Pages

Keywords or Key Words: Search Query Modification

Comments

abaton

September 4, 2007 - 4:32pm

n/a

I had this problem a few years ago. Google marked me as spammer, which I really wasn't.
But this was a good idea for google, because I had to buy ADwords, which cost me up to 15.000 € the year.
I had a hard fight with google Germany, because they said, they didn't through me out of the index - nono of course not, I only was on #1 on a few keywords ;) and then for nearly one year not longer found on google.
But now, after studying the german SEO scene my website stays better than ever.

I haven't read the SEOBOOK until now, because I am a little bit afraid of hundreds of english pages. My english is not bad, but not really excellent!

So, isn't there a German version of the book. Or, are you planning to let it make?
Perhaps I would search here someone for the translation - Germany is a nice market too ;) :D