Site owners needs to understand that like any other business, there are rules for online entities. Bad links, duplicate content and unethical SEO/SEM practices are big mistakes (appraise your seo consultant!) – but the situation cannot go worse if the website or company in question delivers what it promises, and if most users find their worth visiting the site. I do not think Google is anyone’s enemy (except maybe Y! or MS). We found few examples to illustrate this..

Last year a popular diamond retailer’s website traffic vanished overnight from Google search results, and their sales dropped 0.5 Million Dollars in just a couple of months. The site was transferred to Google’s supplemental index – some prefer to call it Google Hell. It is the worst fear of many that depend on search results to keep their business visible online. It means most users will never see the site or many of it’s pages, when they search. And getting out can be difficult – because most don’t know what they did to get placed there.

It is meant to work as a holding pen for pages of low quality or designed to appear artificially high in search results. Such pages are scanned less frequently than those in the main index, meaning that once a page is marked for Supplement, it can languish there for many months before Google’s reappraisal.

If that makes the world’s leading Web crawler sound judgmental, consider Google’s difficult position. The search behemoth is faced with the endless task of reading and ranking billions of webpages, the equivalent of putting our Planet’s population in order from tallest to shortest every few minutes. Meanwhile there are growing numbers of pages filled only with junk text and advertising, designed solely to fool the search bots. It’s Google’s task to sort out the trash from the worthwhile, and to do it better and faster than competitors like Yahoo!, Microsoft or Ask.com.

How does Google decide what kind of pages get punished? For obvious reasons, Google keeps the details of its decision-making a secret, since it is trying to prevent sites from playing with the search engine. Unfortrunately, it also means that site owners can offend Google and not know what they’ve done until its too late.

There are few other stories. Consider MySolitaire.com, an online diamond business, spent January to June of 2006 in the supplemental index. Amit Jhalani, the site’s vice president of search marketing, says he figures that cost his business tens of thousands dollars in sales, and he says he doesn’t know why the site’s pages got down.

But he admits that he tried gray-area tactics like buying links from more established sites to juice his traffic. “For a small site like ours, you have to stay right on the edge to compete with sites with bigger budgets,” he says. Jhalani says he removed the links that may have offended Google, but the site remained in Google’s gulag. Jhalani wrote Google asking the search engine to reappraise MySolitaire; nothing happened. Since Google ranks sites partially by the quality of sites that link to them, he painstakingly contacted every site that seemed to be of low quality and linked to MySolitaire, asking them to remove their links, sometimes even sending cease-and-desist letters. Finally the site returned to Google’s main index last June, though Jhalani has no way of knowing just what finally caused Google’s algorithm to forgive him.

Doesn’t it sound something like a Governement crackdown on surrogate advertising by cigarette and liquor companies by bringing their advertisements under the magnifying glass. Similarly, online crackdowns are essential for managing a liberal online society, but the question is who should be responsible for it. Google may feel a moral responsibility to take such actions, but I think there should be independent, democratic and international institutions, and they should take the leading role to make the web stable – both socially and economically!

Source: Forbes and Solution Point