One thing that upsets me, routinely, about Google’s search results is the hypocrisy.  Last week, Frank Watson disclosed that Ripoffreport is now selling links.  For years now, Ripoffreport has been the bane of the seo’s existence.  Of course, anyone who knows anything about search realizes that selling links is a clear violation of Google webmaster guidelines.  Yet, somehow this is okay (if you are RipOffReport).

Refer back to this post from early 2008, outlining some of RipOffReport’s more heinous violations of Google’s Webmaster guidelines.

Here are a few of the points explained in this article:

1.)Technical Guidelines from Google:

“Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.”

If you search for Rip Off Reports search results pages in Google by doing this site:ripoffreport.com – intitle:”search results” it will bring back only the search results pages that are currently indexed in Google which on my results shows 49,400. That is a lot of pages that shouldn’t be in Google’s index.

If you don’t think this is a big deal read this article from Search Engine Land and the main post from Matt Cutts of Google.

2.)Quality Guidelines – Specific Guidelines Section:

“Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.”

Subdomains – w3.ripoffreport.com Exact replica of Rip Off Report over 2,000 pages indexed in Google.

Domains – www.badbusinessbureau.com Exact Replica of Rip Off Report over 17,000 pages indexed in Google.

3 Google Cached Links of the same exact post on all 3 domains, there are thousands of cached Duplicates.

They are definitely up for Spammers of the Year.

3.) also from Quality Guidelines – Specific Guidelines Section

“Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.”

There was even a recent post attacking us

Check out the title tag,

“97th Floor It Is Better On Top Spy With Firefox 97th Floor social media scam spyware tracked users scam 97th floor firefox social media Internet Internet”

They mention 97th Floor 3 times, Firefox 2 times, scam 2 times, social media 2 times then Internet Internet at the end.

But, despite these clear violations, the site continues to rock right along.

Example #2:  Mahalo

Rewind the clock back to February for the context here.  For those of you who do not know, Mahalo professes to be a “search engine”, at times.  At other times, it is an aggregator of information.  It basically depends on what mood Jason Calacanis (the highly eccentric founder of Mahalo) is in on that particular day.

Though Google has made it very clear that it will not allow search results to be placed within its search results, somehow, Mahalo listings are okay.  Listen to the mouthpiece of Google, Matt Cutts, explain this one:

It’s kinda interesting because I think Jason…he is a smart guy. He’s a savvy guy, and he threaded the needle where whenever he talked to some people he called it a search service or search engine, and whenever he talked to other people he would say oh it is more of a content play.

And in my opinion, I talked to him, and so I said what software do you use to power your search engine? And he said we use Twika or MediaWiki. You know, wiki software, not C++ not Perl not Python. And at that point it really does move more into a content play. And so it is closer to an About.com than to a Powerset or a Microsoft or Yahoo! Search.

So, basically, Matt Cutts is finding a way to justify the fact that they keep Mahalo ranked so highly in search results.  Where is this in webmaster guidelines?  So if you tell Matt Cutts that you are using a particular type of software, you are in the clear?  Is that how this game is played?  So, let’s not forget the fact that Calacanis autogenerates thousands of pages of content which he obtains by scraping the pages of others.  And, somehow, that is okay.  (I didn’t see that feature in the MediaWiki software.)

I say all of that to make a point.  When it comes to Google, it just matters who you are.  Two years ago, Answers.com received a significant penalty from Google because Google didn’t like the fact that they were just aggregating content and not creating value.  But, somehow, it is okay when Mahalo does it.  Based on Matt Cutts’ comments, it is clear that he is having a one-on-one dialogue with Jason Calacanis.  And, I can assure you that most normal website owners don’t have a one-way flow of communication to Matt Cutts.

For two years now, Google has been penalizing those who sell links.  Yet, somehow, they are not able to detect those such as RipOffReport that do it in the most obvious ways.

It is clear to me that Google has a tremendous amount of power over website owners.  And, unfortunately, I see that power being wielded in an arbitrary, unpredictable and inconsistent manner.  I could give you more and more examples.  But, unfortunately, the vast majority of them come down to one conclusion:  it isn’t what you are doing… it’s who you know (at Google).