Oct 05 Beat That Quote

As many of you are already aware Google bought the website Beat That Quote for £37.7 million on March 7th. This was a site that implemented black hat SEO practices, such as boosting search rank by buying a ton of backlinks. Beat That Quote is a UK based price comparison site for loans, insurance, mortgages and legal services. Beat That Quote was and continues to be a major violator of Google guidelines, even though it is now owned by the search giant.

Initially Google penalized Beat That Quote, by removing it from its search engine result pages (SERPs). Many people in the industry predicted that the website would be in Google limbo until the operators had time to clean up its linking system and other violations of the Google guidelines. Considering how Beat That Quote’s entire business was essentially based on the the violation of these guidelines, most people, including myself thought that this would take at least a month. However, within two weeks, Beat That Quote was ranking again on Google SERPs.

Beat That Quote ranking in Google SERP

In addition to this, no changes had been made to remedy Beat That Quote’s violations. So now it appears that Google is in the business of buying links and buying the sites that buy links. This is going against, arguably, the biggest rule in their own quality guidelines. To quote Big G, “Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.” There it is, clear as day. “Do as we say, not as we do.”

There are other instances of Google being hypocritical. Take for example Google’s misleading use of Chrome ads when Internet Explorer 9 launched. This was being done after Matt Cutts, the guy who deals with SEO and quality issues for Google, who I talked about in my previous post on exact match domain names, has stated to the public that Google only shows searchers ads that they would want to see. (How about none, Matt?).

Hypocrisy

Another example of hypocrisy is how Google places a great deal of importance on the customer service that your business offers. Businesses with better customer service rank higher in the SERPs than those with poor customer service. Now consider that Google’s customer service is non-existent. That is unless you’re pumping thousands of dollars into an AdWords account. Some might say that most of Google’s services are free so you’re “not a customer”, but I disagree with this completely. Google has made billions off the back of a free platform. Only with the millions of users that Google has on a daily basis are they able to make all their money through advertising. In addition Google collects and stores all of your information from multiple sources. Google knows more about you than most of your friends and who knows what they’re doing with our information in addition to using it for internal advertising purposes.

Though Google is the biggest game out there in the world of search, they’re not the most honest. Their motto “Don’t Be Evil” is clearly not one that they follow themselves. Google hypocrisy is very troubling, but as long as people continue to use their services and products without complaint, Google is not going to change. Bing is slowly taking more and more of the search market and offers the hope of healthy competition finally coming back to the world of search. We’ll just have to wait and see what the trends of web users will be going into the future.

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