Google's Constitutional Amendment: The Right to Rank as they see fit

Some of the most lively debate and controversy at search conferences surrounds the issue of Google and their ranking tactics, especially those surrounding links to and from other websites.

At Search Engine Strategies in San Jose the most interesting (and confrontational) session involved search engine optimizer Michael Gray taking Google's Matt Cutts to task on Google’s aggressive stand on commercially driven linking.

The stakes of the ”right to rank“ question may become even higher in the context of a recent Microsoft v Google case, where MS is suggesting in their court brief against the Google Doubleclick merger that the merger will create something like monopoly conditions in the online advertising space because (according to Microsoft’s sources) Google+Doubleclick serve more than half the world’s online advertising.

Although I don’t think MS is attacking Google ranking methods directly here it will be interesting to see if Google claims that since their algorithm does not rank the free “organic” listings on a commercial basis the suit has less merit than it would if they *did* favor sites in the organic listings. This would, of course, beg the key point that Google’s ranking power is now so high that it can make or break companies - offline as well as online - depending on how they rank in Google's “free” organic search listings.

Some would argue that this power confers on Google an obligation to minimize the collateral damage when good sites are excluded or downranked due to aggressive ranking policies, and maximize the correct rankings using, if necessary, more human intervention.

Google’s success has to a large extent insulated Google from the growing criticism in the webmaster community. Some of that criticism is self serving, e.g. spammers who are unhappy that old spam tactics now fail them, but much of the criticism is coming from users, webmasters and companies who are frustrated because of improper ranks for even the most obvious queries.

Google blames the spammers for this, but it’s a dynamic process and more transparency from Google - perhaps with stronger forms of site and webmaster ID for “official” or clearly white hat sites - could go a long way to solving these ranking problems.