Google's Search Quality Team Says… No, They Are Not…

A recent post in the Google Webmaster Help forums was enough to make Google upset. A lot of speculations were made that Google was indulging in those activities that it should not get into at all:

Here are some of the allegations:

“Can Ebay and others actively attempt to control and influence what shows up in search results whether they agree or disagree with it? Unfortunately, yes.”

“Do I hate Google for this? No. Its not their fault that the above mentioned websites, companies and politicians have found yet another way to censor the truth and anything they disagree with.” – Bluegill

In response to this post Googler JohnMu wrote down four things that some people think Google is doing, but according to him, these are never implemented by Google ever! These include:

• Googlers changing crawling, indexing or ranking of content they don't agree with. As a data point, check the search results for http://www.google.com/search?q=jew as well as the explanation at http://www.google.com/explanation.html.
• Large companies being able to encourage Google to change crawling, indexing or ranking of a site they don't like. Yes, they contact us, but no, they don't get any results.
• A site being damaged with regards to crawling, indexing or ranking, by someone else on the outside. I've seen sites run into troubles for getting hacked, but I've never seen them run into trouble because of something someone other than the owner did outside of the site.
• A spam report being taken seriously if the site itself was abiding our Webmaster Guidelines. 42,000 spam reports wouldn't change a thing, regardless of who filed them, if the site is compliant.

“Obviously, any of these things could theoretically happen, but I haven't seen it happen, and I don't believe it's something a webmaster has to worry about. If it ever became obvious to Googlers that one of these things happened, it would be resolved immediately — so if you feel that it has happened, please take the time to submit a spamreport with the details. We take these reports very seriously.”

We certainly believe Google on this aspect! Of course, the big daddy of search engines can not go wrong on these issues!

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