Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Reasons For Censoring and Manipulation Of SERPs, News And Blog Results By Google

In the previous post we have covered the methods used by Google and its Affiliates to censor, manipulate or otherwise tamper with the SERPs, news and blog search results. In this post we are trying to analyse the reasons behind such behaviour of Google and its Affiliates.

The reasons for censoring and manipulation of SERPs, news and blog results by Google and its Affiliates are as follow:

(1) As a direct result of censorship requests from governments and law enforcement agencies of various nations, including India.

(2) To protect the interest of online advertisers who advertise with Google and it Affiliates. If non paying and free services are appearing at the first page of Google SERPs, etc then there is no motivation for paid advertisers to purchase Google’s services.

(3) To help the online reputation management and brand protection Partners and Affiliates of Google. Many times rich and powerful business houses and multi national companies ask Google to remove objectionable and offensive contents from SERPs, news and blog searches. Although Google does not entertain such requests and do not remove the claimed offending contents unless they are legally sustainable, yet manual action penalty and demotion of blogs and websites in such cases is very common practice on the part of Google and its Affiliates.

(4) Intellectual property rights (IPRs) violations may result in not only removal of offending contents but even offending websites and blogs are punished in case of repeated infringements. For instance, blogs on Blogspot platform may be deleted, suspended or demoted depending upon the facts and circumstances of each case.

(5) Splogs and contents farms websites are frequently punished by Google. However, in many cases these Splogs and contents farms are also responsible for punishment of original, genuine and useful websites and blogs. Contents lifted from these original blogs frequently appear at Splogs and Google punishes the original blog owner for the wrong doing of the Splogger. Presently Google seems to have been defeated by these Splogs and content farms.

(6) At Perry4Law Techno Legal Base (PTLB) we have been observing that bad neighbourhoods are deliberately picking up our contents and linking back to us. Google’s algorithm is fooled due to this practice which considers bad neighbourhoods and Splogs as original source of contents and punishes the original and genuine blogs.

(7) Negative search engine optimisation (SEO) also uses the same method as discussed in point (6) above. Due to negative SEO Google believes that a genuine and original website is engaging in spam behaviour but in reality this is not true. But Google still punishes the original and genuine website due to bad and malicious behaviour of others.

We would add more reasons to this list from time to time. If you have any idea or recommendation in this regard, kindly contact us and share your views.