
Dear Rupert - daw___
http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.com/2014/09/dear-rupert_25.html
======
Someone1234
While I disagree with almost everything News Corp claimed, I do think this one
has a ring of truth to it:

> willing to exploit [its] dominant market position to stifle competition

Google has, on multiple occasions, utilised its search engine to prop up or
otherwise give an advantage to its own products over that of third parties.
The most obvious example is Google+, however YouTube is also a prime example
(the change to video search is fairly recent), as is Google Maps (which
effectively wiped out the sometimes superior competition at the time), and
Gmail (which was heavily advertised on Google.com).

While Google doesn't, as far as I know, "fix" search rankings to give
themselves an edge they do sprinkle adverts for their products before search
results (e.g. YouTube, Google Maps) or around the perimeter of the page (e.g.
Google+, Gmail).

That all being said however: I'd take what Google does over what News Corp
does any day of the week. Google might be a little corrupt, but News Corp is
the poster child for abuse of position. Plus News Corp's lobbying has screwed
up more than just their own specific market segment, it has had lasting
effects on countries (and helped put innocent people in jail, literally).

At the end of the day as the internet stands in 2014, you have a great deal of
choice. If you're tired of Google's shenanigans then hop over to DDG, Bing, or
even Yahoo!

~~~
kllrnohj
> Google has, on multiple occasions, utilised its search engine to prop up or
> otherwise give an advantage to its own products over that of third parties.

Not in search rankings it hasn't. There is zero, zilch, nada, nothing wrong
with google.com showing ads for other google stuff but not 3rd parties, same
with the spaces around the search results.

And your "obvious" example is anything but. Google+ does not rank highly, and
afaik never has. A search for "Wil Wheaton" turns up lots of results including
his twitter and tumblr profile, but his G+ profile (which is fairly active) is
no where to be seen on the entire first page.

~~~
yuhong
I posted this on Slashdot:
[http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5671759&cid=47875989](http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5671759&cid=47875989)

~~~
yuhong
In fact, thinking about this particular antitrust case, I think a tutorial
regarding the layout of Google search result pages might be a good idea as a
settlement.

------
wmt
That was brutal. Demolished pretty much all of the serious accusations in the
original letter with facts that could not be true if the accusations would be
solid.

It was also wonderfully mean to ignore the News Corp CEO who signed the letter
and reply to Rupert instead, implying quite a lot about the role of the
current CEO.

------
al2o3cr
LOL, News Corp bemoaning that someone's actions might "lead to a less
informed, more vexatious level of dialogue in our society". I presume their
objection to that is that Google is horning in on their gig...

~~~
philipwhiuk
I think you meant 'homing' but kerning helped your typo slip under the radar.
:)

~~~
charonn0
To "horn in" is an idiom meaning to participate without being invited.

------
tehwalrus
That last link... for Murdoch to accuse anyone of lowering the tone of the
debate is truly laughable, well done Google!

------
easytiger
This had me in stitches:

> Undermining the basic business model of professional content creators will
> lead to a less informed, more vexatious level of dialogue in our society

Newspeak indeed.

------
rackforms
Google's contributions to making the web safer, faster, and generally more
awesome cannot go upraised.

But as a small business owner under a rather crushing Google link penalty
since 2011 I thought I offer my perspective.

First, it's important to note my penalty was absolutely not of my creation — I
never bought, sold or traded links, and followed Google Web Master guidelines
to the letter.

Unfortunately loads of spammy links I never created came home to roost in 2011
and I've been penalized ever since.

I've done my best to clean up but so far no relief has come.

So that out of the way my points:

1\. People are certainly free to choose a different search engine and yes,
plenty of alternatives exist. The problem is we don't appear to be using them
anymore.

Although I'm just one example, last month's traffic numbers are quite telling:

328 hits from Google, 2 from Yahoo, and 1 immediate bounce from Bing.

Of the 328 Google hits, only 10 were for keyword searches. The rest we all for
direct variants of my company name (rack forms, rack forms, and rack form).

The kicker: On Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo I'm page two or higher for keyword
searches, on Google page 15 or lower.

Please let that sink in for a moment: despite being buried 15 pages deep in
Google, I still got more keyword hits from them than I did from being a top
result in three other search engines combined!

It was not like this just a few years years ago and it's frankly quite
concerning.

Here's the rub: If you're a Google user, which over 98% of my potential users
appear to be, because of my penalty you'll simply never know I exist, and if
you're in the market for kick ass web form software that kinda stinks for you.
I have a fantastic product!

Despite this living hell of a penalty I still believe in Google, and
absolutely believe they mean well. I just really, really hope they can figure
out a way to prevent spam without getting guys like me caught up in the middle
of the fray.

For my business Google's market share is no longer academic, it's a tough
reality that's becoming very difficult to ignore.

~~~
blauwbilgorgel
Did Google notify you of a link-based penalty? You should set up Google
Webmaster Tools, if you haven't already. Then you can read notifications about
suspicious links pointing to your site and disavow the ones that are spammy.

I am not so sure that you are under a link-based penalty. I know you did not
ask for this, but I had a look at your website's link profile, source and
index health.

1\. SEO: The online web form market is hugely saturated. You probably can not
compete with Wufoo on terms like "web form builder". Honestly ask yourself if
you currently deserve a top 10 spot for this term. Are you a top 10 player in
this field? Explore more specific and longtail keywords. Create better
targeted pages and page titles. "Documentation - NicSoft Software" is a missed
chance. Create more content on the blog (inbound marketing).

2\. Links. You do not have enough natural links to beat competitors. They get
linked from webdeveloper forums by real users of the software. You also should
check out Google's stance on "Powered by"-links. If this turns in the majority
of your backlinking profile, you get links from a lot of bad neighborhoods.
These links may thus do more harm than good. It is not an editorial link, but
probably in exchange for a free version of the product. Much safer to nofollow
links created for profit or SEO/online marketing purposes.

3\. Site HTML is not well-structured for information retrieval. For every page
on your site, the first heading is "Home". Browse your site with styles
disabled. Reorder repeating boilerplate code below the relevant page content.
Specify a canonical or make sure only one version is served to visitors with
redirects (both www- and non-www versions of the site return duplicate
content).

4\. Index health is poor. Robots.txt file is indexed. There are a few inactive
subdomains, an unattended Wordpress and Drupal install in a subdirectory.
Includes are indexed as separate pages "/inc/footer.php". Documentation (the
content "meat" if the site) is off limits for bots. Over 90% of pages on the
site are in the secondary index, which is not a good sign.

About 10 hits a day from Google is far too low for any commercial site to
survive on. You could get more than 10 hits on a random wordlist.

Do not solely think about in-links. Are you even linking to reputable sources
yourself? End-node sites are far less interesting for visitors than hub sites.

~~~
rackforms
Didn't ask for it? If I've learned one thing from this whole affair it's how
understanding and kind complete strangers can be. Your feedback is hugely
appropriated.

That said, a few thoughts:

1\. The link based penalty stems from the fact the traffic drops correlate
exactly with Penguin release dates. Also, the "official" volunteers and other
good folks over at the Google Webmaster forms came to the same conclusion.
Before those exact dates I had ranked on page 1 for "php web form software",
and page 1 or 2 for "web form software", since mid-2008.

To that end, you're 100% correct the market is tough, but we're a very
specialized form builder, made especially for developers.

As far as deserving Page 1 - Google used to think so for several years, as my
product is pretty darn great if you need flexible form software. We have four
versions, two of which are free, covering both self-hosted and SaaS models. No
one even comes close to offering such a wide variety of solutions.

In short, if you need form software and you find my site you're guaranteed not
to be disappointed. If nothing else you're able to choose between two pretty
awesome free versions, something no one else offers. I'm also ecstatic to
answer questions and help users out, even if they don't buy or use my
software. I would think this would be of high value to Google -- and it
certainly used to be before the penalty.

As far as the site recommendations: I'm taking these to heart for sure, though
I have to say, the previously mentioned Google Webmaster forums -- the current
site is a direct result of working with them for over 3 months, making the
exact same types of changes and improvements. Nothing, and I mean nothing,
worked.

I didn't know at the time, but it was recently stated by John Mueller from
Google that a Penguin recovery is simply not possible until they refresh and
release a new version of the Penguin algorithm.

So at the end of the day, sadly, (and please do not take this as dismissive as
you bet I'll be making changes): my problem is not content or structure, it's
that darn link penalty.

All the while, and again, I'm not sure who this benefits.

~~~
theworst
Let me first say that I am sympathetic to your situation. My startup was
financially ruined by the Google penalties.

However, I'm not sure that anchoring yourself to "they used to think I was
good enough" is a valid argument. Perhaps they were presenting bad results
that benefitted you before, and have fixed that with better results now.

It honestly sounds like you're mostly upset because something was taken from
you that you were used to having. That does not necessarily mean you deserved
it previously.

~~~
rackforms
Thank you for the understanding, and my heart goes out to you as well for your
penalties. In a more just world real users would decide what succeeds and what
does not.

My defense of the current site from a content perspective is simple: just go
to it (www.rackforms.com).

I feel very strongly the look (clean professional), layout (easy to navigate),
and technical details (fast, fully responsive, etc) are not causing it to be
penalized from a content perspective.

My reasoning for why it should rank is also simple: it used to rank high, and
none of that was an accident. I've always followed common sense methodology
when creating it, such as creating content for humans, not search bots.

Never the less, since the penalty I've happily made dozens of changes, most of
which were suggestions from kind and well meaning SEO folks -- none of them
made a difference. Not a single one.

Conclusion -- my issue isn't nor has it ever been content, it's links.

Of course the irony is the vast majority of changes I made were to please
search engine bots, not humans. Google has always said this is the opposite of
what we should be doing.

For example, one guy suggested I used to word 'form' too much on my home page,
and Google may consider this keyword stuffing. And so I pruned it from 23 to
12. Trouble is I sell web form software, and let's just say changes I made
were, in many cases, a stretch -- many sounded decisively nonhuman. Who and
what am I helping at that point? Google bot is clearly smarter than that. The
kicker: the current page 1 site used the word 'form' 43 times. It's just silly
voo-doo at this point, and no one except Google knows what the hell they're
talking about.

Here's why this is all a bit scary: as link-penalized webmasters poke around
the edges and make such changes, we're getting further away from a site that
used to be looked upon favorably by Google from a content perspective.

The reason I cite "it used to be good enough" is common sense. Yes we can
always improve our site and we should be: but a link penalty, mine especially,
is so thorough and so unrecoverable so far, that making loads of other changes
will very likely hurt more than help.

But again, just visit my site, visit the page 1 and 2's, and then consider I'm
page 15 or lower. I have no doubt my site, should it's ranking be restored,
would be a delight for Google users to visit.

------
andyn
Love that last bullet.

~~~
quink
Being in Australia, I consider any claim by Rupert that someone else is
damaging the public discourse even remotely as much as him to be utterly
ludicrous.

Yesterday was just another example of that. I'd qualify which yesterday, but
it really applies to all of them.

------
mistakoala
> Google is a “platform for piracy and the spread of malicious networks”

So, like Sky Broadband in the UK, then?

------
Mithaldu
While they make many good points, they also show their cards by failing to
substantiate their claims about search algorithm changes and Android Google
Play lockin allegations.

~~~
kllrnohj
How did they fail to substantiate the claims? There wasn't even anything to
actual counter there, News Corp's letter had nothing of substance. Google
responded by quoting Yelp, who has said that the algorithm changes have not
harmed Yelp (aka, an independent 3rd party is also disputing News Corp's
claims).

As for the Android Google Play lockin allegations, what more is there for
Google to say? Android is open source and usable by anyone, this is simple
fact. Google even calls out Amazon and Nokia doing exactly this. There
literally does not exist a certification process for Android-related products.
There exists a certification process if you want _GOOGLE PLAY_ , but not if
you just want Android.

~~~
Mithaldu
Links that actually detail the changes made to the algorithm, and links to the
Google Play certification requirements would be useful substantiation; just
like they did for all the good points they had above that.

Also, i don't understand why you felt the need to emphasize Google Play. That
is exactly what i had said in my comment above.

~~~
kllrnohj
> Links that actually detail the changes made to the algorithm

That's a joke, right?

> links to the Google Play certification requirements would be useful
> substantiation

Irrelevant. You should re-read News Corps' claims, which is what Google is
responding to. Google Play certification was not a complaint. Android
certification was the complaint - and you can't link to something that doesn't
exist.

~~~
Mithaldu
You know, while i hate Murdoch and what he's doing, this doesn't mean that
i'll be blind-eyed to the bad things Google is doing alongside the good
things. You're being no better than Murdoch in your blind defenses.

> That's a joke, right?

Absolutely not. Why should it? There is no need to lay bare the entire thing,
but a change log has no reason to be hidden.

> You should re-read News Corps' claims

I did, and while they do not say "Google Play" outright (since it involves
actually MORE things than Google Play), they very clearly state that they are
talking about things other than the core OS package:

    
    
        Google has developed a "certification"
        process for *Android-related products*

