In October of 2008 Eric Schmidt announced that SEO was about to get really ugly for anyone who doesn't own a brand. He didn't word it that way though. Rather, he stated
"Brands are how you sort out the cesspool. Brand affinity is clearly hard wired. It is so fundamental to human existence that it's not going away. It must have a genetic component." - Eric Schmidt
In response to that comment (& some of Google's pro-brand algorithmic updates) I created the following video.
Google's Brand Promotion History
Ultimately Google promotes brands for the same reason they promote Wikipedia: it is (generally) safe & easy.
Here is a history of how brand promotion became part of "the algorithm"
In 2003 Google did the infamous Florida update & ever since then they have generally trended toward placing more weight on domain authority (about the only big counter point to this would be Google's recent localization push)
Google's sandbox took it one step further by making it harder for new smaller sites to break through & giving them what amounts to a purgatory period
in 2006 BMW was caught spamming (after years of increased search traffic from spamming) they got a couple day slap on the wrist from Google. Smaller webmasters who were caught doing similar were penalized for far longer periods of time.
in 2005, shortly after announcing rel=nofollow, Google stepped up a campaign promoting FUD against link buying & promoting snitching (when combined with preferential treatment toward brands, this further favored big business at the expense of smaller webmasters)
over the years Google built increasingly sophisticated algorithmic filters to detect & demote aggressive link strategies (which, when coupled with brand promotion algorithms, further made it harder for small businesses to compete online)
in April of 2007 Google bought DoubleClick, highlighting Google's aspirations to move from demand fulfillment direct marketing ads into the lucrative brand advertising market
when the Google Vince update happened Google started placing more weight on search query chains, which would naturally favor large brands (due to their AdWords ad exposure on broader industry keywords & their large offline ad budgets - both of which aid recall by searchers)
when the Google Panda update happened Matt Cutts stated "we actually came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side." That algorithm allowed doorway pages & scraper sites to rank while killing off lots of smaller legitimate websites.
Sleazy Outing for Self-Promotion
In the later half of 2010 & the first few months of 2011 Google was getting beat up in the press about content farm spam (created by a combination of loose AdSense standards & Google putting too much weight on domain authority). To help deflect some of the bad press & show "who is boss" Google penalized both J.C Penny & Overstock.com for using manipulative links.
This past week the folks from Digital Due Diligence tipped of a NYT reporter for another hit piece. A lot of the top flower sites increase their ad budget around their busiest times of year, so coinciding with Mother's Day the New York Times highlighted how sites like ProFlowers, 1800Flowers, Teleflora & FTD were buying seedy links. I won't link at the NYT article because doing so would only promote more sleazy pageview journalism.
A Googler named Jake Hubert was quoted in the above mentioned article as saying the following:
"None of the links shared by The New York Times had a significant impact on our rankings, due to automated systems we have in place to assess the relevance of links. As always, we investigate spam reports and take corrective action where appropriate."
(Even Big Brands) Can't Rank Higher than #1
What is hilarious about that official Google comment is that sometimes Google has whacked websites based on perceived intent rather than results, & when I searched Google those 4 sites owned 6 first page results for that search query (along with the NYT article being listed as a 7th result (and 8th if you count the Google News result).
Google hard coded the algorithm to favor big brands (not once, but twice), promoted the big brands to the top of the search results, watches those brands violate their guidelines (in spite of said promotion) and then claimed that there is no corrective action needed for the violation since they already rank #1.
Well of course the paid links can't further improve a #1 ranking. You can't get any better than first place.
The good news for brands is that Googlers feel the sleazy outing angle is getting tired after J.C. Penny & Overstock.com & Google changed webmaster perception of their results with Panda (by making the common smaller webmaster pay for eHow's sins). Soon reporters won't justify wasting ink or bits on another sleazy SEO outing article because the pageviews won't be there.
At this point it is safe to say that Googlers don't really need to think of brands. All they have to do is search for *any* commercial keyword and click on the first result. The brand takes care of itself. :D
Since the Panda update happened, some scraper websites (monetized by Google AdSense) have started outranking Patrick for his own content.
Panda = No AdWords Soup for You
Distraught with the decline in traffic, Patrick turned to AdWords to try to bridge the gap and drive some revenues.
Unfortunately, Google wouldn't let him do that either:
I asked on what grounds he had decided that my site does not produce original content. His answer was that he had typed a sentence into Google and found it contained at many sites around the web. Seriously, I made a lengthy strong case for my site's record of having 100% original content and he typed one sentence into a Google search.
I emailed back and asked him to be specific about his search. This was his reply:
"An example of a specific sentence that appears in multiple websites is "a superb app for iPad and iPhone that lets you quickly and easily transfer photos and videos between iOS devices and computers – has been updated this week, to Version 2.3."
Google Rolls Out the Red Rug (for AdSense Scrapers)
Think about how perverse this is:
Google algorithmically penalizes your site
Google won't say why it is penalized, other than some abstract notion of "quality"
Google offers no timetable on when things can improve, but suggests you keep spending increasing sums of capital to increase "quality"
Google pays scraper sites to steal your content & wrap it in AdSense ads
Google ranks the stolen content above your site (so the content has plenty of "quality" but it is just not "quality" on your website)
Google tells you that you can't even buy AdWords ads, because you are now duplicate content for your own content!
Contributory Copyright Infringement
So now we have Google telling advertisers "I won't even take your money" precisely because Google is paying people to steal their content. Small publishers likely don't have the capital needed to sue Google, but clearly what Google is doing here *is* flagrant, systematic, abusive, and illegal (contributory copyright infringement).
One of Google's larger enemies may want to fund some sort of class-action lawsuit. Google deserves far more of a black eye than they have got in the press from the embarrassment that is the Panda update.
Um, Could You Please Help Me Out a Bit Here Google?
Yet Another Webmaster Loses Faith (& Trust) in Google
Since Google has ignored him (for months), Patrick felt he had to rebrand & redirect his old website to a new iPad website. Google made (a rather long and egregious series of) mistakes. And he had to pay the price for it, because Google is a monopoly that doesn't give a crap about how destructive their business is on the ecosystem, so long as it increases their profits.
Now that Google is aware that the panda fallout is costing THEM money, it will likely get cleared up quickly. I suspect to see an update within the next couple weeks at most. And it would happen even quicker if the press actually did its job. ;)
Update: Matt Cutts stated that the site wasn't hit by Panda here, so that wasn't what caused this. However that still means that Google has to work on better highlighting original content sources over the scrapers, stop funding the scrapers via AdSense, and improve the internal policies which state that you can't buy ads if a scraper outranks you for your own content!
One of the more perverse things about online markets is that since things are not done in person a lot of people are willing to work in the gray area. That allows people like Vitaly Borker to torture his customers as a marketing strategy. ;)
When Stanley Milgram did his famous study on if people were willing to torture others (so long as they thought it was part of a scientific experiment), he found out that the more distance they put between the torturer and torturee the more brutally they would behave. People would dial the voltage up to x if they were holding the hand of the person getting shocked, a bit more if the person was on the other side of a glass wall, and a bit more if they were behind a brick wall.
Fleecing Newbs
Many online economic innovations are ultimately scams, where the cost is hidden, with the scammers operating one step ahead of the legal system. Swoopo was basically a semi-legal form of gambling that took advantage of people's ignorance of math. As soon as it started working dozens of companies followed suit. The rage was so popular that people would buy overpriced "credits" to spend their "credits" to bid on the ability to get more "credits" at a slightly discounted rate. :D
OMG I Just Lost 3,000 Pounds!
The fake blog (flog) strategy where a woman writes about how she lost 40 pounds in a month due to Açaí & colon cleanse was an economic "innovation" where affiliates could rope a person into 2 fraudulent reverse billing scams at the same time.
Public relations hacks were quick to adopt the fake blog "innovation" for their corporate clients & such gems like Walmarting Across America & Working Families for Wal-Mart were born.
In Other "News"
Affiliates who needed to differentiate from all the other affiliates needed a new round of "innovation." So they would take the items or categories or topics they were selling something similar to & add a "as seen in" section on their websites highlighting how something tangently related to what they are selling was once mentioned in the media in some way.
From there it was a quick jump to fake celebrity endorsements & fake news sites offering "a special report on how you can get rich overnight" as a millionaire who wants to give back naively shares everything they know for $4 shipping in an anyone-can-do automated wealth generation blueprint, while losing 50 pounds in 1 month. :)
Step by Step
Ultimately sales is not an event, but a process. Which is why the above mentioned reverse billing scams only charged shipping off the start, so the perceived risk was lower than the actual risk (much like bad faith insurance companies that take your money until you need what you paid for, and then manage to disappear).
Everyone Pays for Fraud
The scammers eat off the plates of everyone honest in the marketplace. Multiple times a month I get refund requests from people who bought something totally unrelated to us from Clickbank, demanding I give them their money back for something that is in no way related to us. I highlight that refunds at clickbank.com is where they need to send their emails, but for every person who manages to get their money back there are likely 5 or 10 more people who are disillusioned & less trusting of online markets & online marketers.
Google Polices Scams *Everyday*
Circling back to the SEO & PPC niche, Google has to deal with the scams & scammers every day. In certain cases where it is exceptionally profitable (say illegal prescription drugs, knock off goods, Obama mortgage modification) Google may choose to look the other way / have lax policy enforcement, but at some point looking the other way creates financial risks & a risk of brand damage.
Doing What is Easy = Doing What is Best?
Generally when it comes down to it, Google's revenues are heavily concentrated & no matter how widespread or profitable any individual scam is, they can cut it out of their ad network without being overly concerned. Last September AdAge shared data showing that there are around a couple thousand advertisers spending over $10,000 a month on Google ads. While the longtail concept is widely praised, in the search ecosystem it reflects more on products rather than merchants. Some time ago SEM Rush sent me the following chart highlighting AdWords spend breakdown estimates.
Their numbers are based off of the publicly shared Google keyword estimates (which generally skew toward trying to get advertisers to spend more), and I believe they may count certain AdWords ad management platforms as being 1 advertiser each, but yet again Pareto principal appears in the data & Google could keep roughly 80% of their US search revenues if they only accepted ads from the top 5,000 advertisers (out of more than 300,000). And those estimates were before Google widely launched their CPA product ads, which only further consolidate traffic to a smaller number of websites.
Ultimately Google can try to police an ecosystem of x thousand companies or an ecosystem of x million companies. The latter will have more innovations in it, but also a wider variety of scams & be much more expensive to police. This is a big part of the reason Google has felt the need to become more & more portal-like over time. Their engineering culture assumes that they can do it better internally.
Depending on how your positioned, their anti-innovation "do what is easy" approach to search can either be a boon or a major hindrance. The companies that were worried about maintaining complex search strategies which sorta fell into top rankings on the Google brand +1 obviously benefited. But Panda (and Google's approach to AdWords) keep raising the bar on smaller businesses.
I thought it would be worth highlighting a few examples:
Google Arbitrage Tax
A friend recently had their AdWords account penalized for running an "arbitrage" business model.
the site wasn't advertising for revenues, but to build links & awareness
the ad campaign was inactive
the site had since been sold & the buyer added another ad unit to the page
To appreciate how arbitrary the above editorial judgement is against that webmaster, not only were they 0% responsible for the alleged editorial infractions, but 3 hours after the sincere "notification only" email Google did a follow up which said the site was once again approved to advertise, but the ads need to be re-submitted for review.
We live in a world where flagrantly parasitic sites like Mahalo required "an algorithm" (with endless collateral damage) to fix & yet the above sequence is somehow a reasonable way for Google to treat there paying customers.
Much like there is "too big to fail" there is also "too small to matter" but if you look at Google's numbers you can see how that happens. We are basically expecting them to be better than all other monopolies if we expect a level playing field.
Google Disclosure Tax
Some smaller advertisers may get their AdWords campaigns disabled because they offer a freeware trial, where a person has to buy the full version to unlock all of it's features. Google suggests that these advertisers lead with the disclaimer that a customer may eventually spend a Dollar if they like what they are trying, but sales is a process rather than an event. Sometimes you first have to show proof of value before people are willing to spend money. The problem is that if you are paying for every click & you have to lead with your disclaimer of potential cost for a full upgrade (and so on) then you are not going to be able to compete with a larger brand that does not need to clearly display disclaimers.
You can only have a strong conversion-oriented page with message clarity if you are a brand, otherwise you need to LEAD WITH THE DISCLAIMERS, which never works if you are paying by the click in an efficient market if you are taxed x% of conversions upfront. Not only are brands given leeway, but Google also allows their own products & services to routinely violate the terms of service they push onto others. The footer on Google Advisor states "The information displayed here was provided directly from the issuer and/or collected from the issuer's website. Check the details pages for each offer for the data source and update time. Google is not currently being paid for these listings."
Note the "NOT CURRENTLY." So everyone else is required to place the entire info harvesting policy next to the form, but Google can have a "google protects you from spam, Learn more" link which they specifically prohibit just linking to as an AdWords advertiser. Where do you see EXPLICITYLY how you can opt out of communications? Look at the table at the bottom of this page.
If you are creative enough you can say that disclosure doesn't have to kill conversions, but the problem is that sometimes it does. And when it does, it is not like there are many other avenues for you to compete online. In some markets Google owns over 95% of the search marketshare.
The brands always have the flexibility of setting up a mini-site to test if unbranded works better, but the non-branded smaller advertiser doesn't have the option of using similar textual formatting to their larger competitors.
Part of the reason Google & Facebook are willing to invest into smearing each other publicly is they are trying to damage each other's brands so the other is trusted less, so that they may build an asymmetrical information advantage.
The big issue with data harvesting is that one company's sales funnel or cross-marketing campaign is another's data harvesting scheme. Just like the tax on disclaimers, this is another area where larger businesses of scale get an economic advantage by being able to get more benefit of the doubt on their approach
Google's I am Duplicate Content Tax
In the past I highlighted how some webmasters have trouble ranking for their own content due to duplication & how it could even impact their ability to buy ads. Ultimately this leads to some level of fear & indecisiveness amongst many small business owners who may become afraid to have duplicate content anywhere on their sites.
While these businesses are told they don't add enough value, the biggest players grow through acquisition & duplication:
Google runs a product search engine, Boutiques.com & Like.com.
Google runs Google video search, Youtube & Vevo.
Bankrate runs Bankrate.com, CreditCardGuide.com, CreditCardSearchEngine.com, Interest.com, CreditCards.com, and NationwideCardServices.
The Panda update made it so that certain businesses did not need to build (m)any links to compete, while some other businesses were required to build many more links to stay competitive.
Around Mother's Day there was a hit piece in the NYT about how some online flower sites were buying links. Google's official take was that they did not care about the link buying since those brand rankings (allegedly) did not impact the search results. Today those same link buyers rank #'s 1-4 in Google
Brands rank because Google puts weight on brand-like signals (and they can get away with link buying which smaller competitors would get torched for). Then Google claims that the link buying is irrelevant because it doesn't influence the search results.
With that sort of circular logic why does Google even care about paid links at all? Why do they arbitrarily police one segment of the web?
On the flip side, there is a suspicion of smaller webmasters which is core to how Google operates (even if the site they are passing judgement on ranks right at the top of the search results for core industry keywords & is linked to organically from top newspapers). Sometimes it is a "shoot first, ask questions later" approach.
Google recently started sending out "unnatural link profile" notification emails. Well if they can detect that the link profile is unnatural then why can't they automatically discount it? (Didn't they just say they do that?)
Why, in this instance, do they suggest they can identify the problems & that a business owner should first be penalized for it, then need to fix it before reconsideration, all the while some larger businesses do the same exact things but Google looks the other way because they claim to have already detected it?
Why does one form of detection require penalization while the other doesn't?
Unstable Business Tax
During the Panda update many small businesses (which did nothing wrong other than participating on the same Internet that the likes of eHow abuses) got torched. They were given abstract qualities where they need to improve on. Over 3 months later they are still in the dark hoping the penalty clock hits zero before the bankruptcy clock does.
When traffic heads south & becomes unreliable a business not only loses that income, but it also loses negotiating leverage with suppliers.
The uncertainty not only retards investment, but may lead to physical, emotional, social & mental health issues. People make better life decisions when they are driven by love than when they are driven by fear.
Localization
The one big counter-trend to the move away from small businesses is Google's increased emphasis on localization, which allows some small local businesses to participate in search markets that they were simply priced out of in years past.
Only in the age of Google could news aggregation be considered a step up from news publishing. So when word came Wednesday that Salon’s CEO Richard Gingras is abandoning his post at the veteran online-news site to head the news products division of Google, it arrived without shame or snickering.
Gingras’ move will happen in early July, leaving Salon in a state of uncertainty – but then again, Salon has been in a state of uncertainty for years. Gingras has run Salon since 2009 and led a quiet effort to put the news site on the auction block. There were talks involving a sale to Newser, an aggregation site founded by Michael Wolff, but they fell through in February after AOL acquired the Huffington Post for $315 million and Salon’s board reportedly wondered whether it should increase its asking price.
Salon started in 1995 with help from Gingras and was a pioneer in online news. Currently, the site is known for engaging political and lifestyle content. But the company has been operating at a loss for years, losing $724,000 in the last quarter of 2010.
Google publishes no news but simply aggregates it. And Gingras has a history of working with the search company and advised it in 2007 and 2008 on the future of news, so Google’s execs seemed to like his ideas enough to bring him on board.
Salon is a strange creature in that it has been an independent media publisher since its inception, whereas most of its competitors are owned by bigger companies. Slate, for example, is owned by the Washington Post Company and The Daily Beast is owned by Newsweek-parent IAC.
Do you think Salon will be able to survive without Gingras at the helm?
distance they put between the torturer and torturee the more brutally they would behave. People would dial the voltage up to x if they were holding the hand of the person getting shocked, a bit more if the person was on the other side of a glass wall, and a bit more if they were behind a brick wall. 
