Well, ok, not quite a conspiracy, just common business actions – but these actions aren’t often covered by most news outlets/influential blogs.

All businesses do “bad” things. But everyone seems to, or at least until the last few months, see Google as “good”. In recent months there has been quite a lot of people pointing to their “do no evil” motto, and questioning it.

Google are massive. They’re to the point now where you could say they controll a very large share of the internet. And not just through their organic search results. You have to remember that Google provide a lot of services. Here is a list of what I regually use -

• Google search
• Their adsense / adwords ads (as in, I click some adsense ads on other sites if they look like what I am after)
• Google News
• Gmail
• Google Reader
• Google documents and spreadsheets
• Froogle
• Google webmaster tools
• Google Video
• Youtube
• Google Maps

That is quiet a lot of varied services from one company that I use. And don’t forget that there are many more services they offer (I just don’t use them). I can’t think of any other company (online or offline) that provides such a diverse range of services that I use (excluding the fact that many companies are owned by one large company).

Google is here to make a profit – nothing wrong with that. In fact I don’t really see much wrong with anything that Google does – I am not a Google fanboy (!) but they don’t do anything I wouldn’t expect almost any company to do.

Google have always “spoken” to their users in many ways. Of course they’ve got their official Google blog – http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ – and countless other blogs on blogspot.com, they have Google groups within “Google Groups”, and key people at Google have blogs (yes, I am looking at Mr Cutts…).

Now we’re onto Matt Cutts (if you don’t know, Cutts is the head of Google’s Webspam team, and note that his blog isn’t directly linked to Google), have a read over some of his recent posts about buying links – http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/.

Google (via Matt Cutts (and also their webmaster guidelines)) are trying to give out rules as if they’re the Internet police – policing in terms of spam, black hat methods – (and note this post isn’t a dig at Google for what they do. Just my views on what is happening). And all the SEO blogs (if you don’t read them you probably don’t realise just how much everyone links to everyone, and how everyone seems to know everyone (at least – the main players, Cutts, Aaron Wall, the guys at Seomoz etc etc)). Apart from black hatters, everyone just accepts that they must listen to Google, and everyone (generally) agrees with what they say.

Everyone is basically agreeing to themselves that Google is almost acting like the internet police. So saying “don’t buy links” seems like a good, moral rule. After all, we wouldn’t want people manipulating search engine results, would we.

But, what about the fact that Google’s main earner is effectivly selling links (through their adwords/adsense ads). Of course, these links have no effect on search engine results (unlike the bought links that Cutts mentioned), but they get traffic to peoples sites, and that is the #1 (assuming it is targetted traffic etc) thing that site owners and companies want – people to visit your site.

So, think about it … if Google starts preaching that buying (and therefore selling) links is bad, where are people going to go when they want to buy links? Go straight to Google. Buying links from Google won’t have any negative effect!

And just a note here – when i say links and talk about the adsense links, i know they’re not really links. But you get what i mean? Yeh? If not leave a comment and i’ll rewrite this bit up…

So Google, using its chosen methods tells webmasters that buying links is bad. And that will result in more profits…

Now onto my next point and this again resolves around adsense (remember, it is their main earner…). Black hat methods are bad, mmmkay!??!

But why? Ignoring the really spam filled terms like viagra, ringtones etc, people use black hat methods to get their pages to users, and in most cases this page is usefull to the user – otherwise the black hatter can’t really profit. Even ads are useful for users if they point them in the right direction that they want to go.

But rather than hire a SEO firm to get your page to the top of Google, Google much prefer you to use adwords and pay for clicks. Why would google want to give you free organic links!?!??

I believe that Google could also do a far better job at stopping spam. Just take a look at a search for viagra, ringtones etc. It wouldn’t take much for someone at Google to take all those paracite pages off the first few pages, but they don’t… (ok, they do every now and again…)

And also – Google is funding most spam. Almost all spammy crap sites (aka adsense mini sites) are, you guessed it, filled with adsense ads. So it makes sense for them to let the spammy pages at the top -

Firstly, the actual companies want to get higher than the spammy pages that show their ads (on the adsense ads on the spammy pages), so would hopefully (in Googles eyes) use adwords.

Secondly, even if they don’t use adwords, there is always (98% of the time) some other company they can display an ad for on the spammy pages if a user clicks it.

Part 2 coming soon.