Udi Manber at Google suggests that they are working for better transparency in the rankings process but I recommend you do not hold your breath, because he’s certainly right about this:

For something that is used so often by so many people, surprisingly little is known about ranking at Google. This is entirely our fault, and it is by design.

Strategically I believe Google continues to make a mistake that ultimately is their great achilles heel, though Microsoft and Yahoo have been so busy fumbling their online balls they don’t seem to understand why more transparency is a good thing even in the search sphere.

Google’s idea is that transparency leads to sharing ranking secrets and that leads to abuse of those rules. Sure, there would be some of that, but better would be to involve the online community in the definition and policing of spammy material, and also to be more responsive to webmasters who have questions about why their sites suddenly disappear from the rankings or - far more common and mysterious - are simply downranked to the degree they no longer get Google traffic.

This last type of penalty, “downranking”, offers one of the few instances where Google actually comes very close to lying to webmasters (in my opinion they cross this line and lie to webmasters), implying that when “your site appears in the Google index” you have no penalty when in fact the downrank penalty by Google is severe, leading to almost no Google traffic. If you are an advanced SEO person you will know what is going on, but in probably the best example of how the lack of transparency backfires at Google you’ll find that only advanced SEO marketing folks and spam experts are familiar with the many subtle algorithmic penalties that Google dispenses with algorithmic ruthlessness.

Mom and pop businesses are often hung out to dry with these penalties or - more often - simply ranked lower than they should be because they have failed to perform basic SEO on their websites. Most businesses - even some large ones - have no idea what SEO even means even though their business may be living or dying on the search results. Also common are websites who hire or associate with questionable or incompetent SEOs (which constitute well over 90% of all SEOs). These folks often have no idea that they have violated Google’s improved-but-still-too-ambiguous webmaster guidelines.

In fairness to Google they do have a huge scaling challenge with everything they do. Dealing with milllions of sites and billions of queries can’t be handled with massive numbers of new staff. They need only a tiny fraction of their efforts going into staff solutions or they’ll be overwhelmed. However this is what the socializing power of the internet is for. Digg, Wikipedia, and many other sites effectively police content quality without massive labor costs. Another option is to charge websites for quality reviews that would identify problems rather than leaving the site at the mercy of a sometimes predatory SEO community.

So Udi I would like to be happy that you and Google are bringing more transparency to the process but forgive my skepticism that Google will give more than lip service to a much broader, open discussion and corrections of the many ways the ranking process has failed to deliver something that is really, really important to users and should be important to you: fairness.