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(rt) In a recent piece titled “Is Adolescent Google’s Voice Changing?” Stepworth’s SEO Blog analyzes the current dismal state of Google’s PR image and comes to the following conclusion:

Google seems to be in that awkward adolescent stage as it starts to deal with the harsh realities of shareholder satisfaction, a rapidly growing search sphere, and the increasing sophistication of the technologies it brings to search. In the midst of such change, a culture shift was inevitable. The real question to ask now is, “What kind of a global citizen does Google want to be as it grows up?”

The issues at hand as discussed in the article may vary but they all tend to combine to impair Google’s public standing fairly massively:

1. The Google toolbar AutoLink feature introduced in the toolbar’s third beta version in January 2005. This not only provoked a massive outcry by webmasters fretting about Google snatching away their visitors to direct them to competitors’ sites (e. g. Amazon for ISBN tagged content), effectively killing their business.
   See ↗ fantOpEd:
   Search Engines as Data Gobblers
2. The recent U. S. law suit filed against Google (and several other PPC outfits) claiming conspirational click fraud.
   See: ↗ The Demise of Google’s AdWords Program?
3. Reports from at least one SEM agent (and spuriously confirmed by others in forums) indicating that Google is poaching on agencies’ larger, more lucrative PPC management clients.
4. If other reports should prove correct, Google has begun offering free optimization advice directly to webmasters and businesses, effectively circumventing established SEO / SEM companies and potentially driving them out of business.

However, the article’s list of Google related contentions is far from comprehensive. Here are some more:

5. Copyright Infringements I – The lawsuit filed by French newswire service Agence France Press for copyright infringement, claiming $17.5 in damages.
   See ↗ AFP Sues Google – the Implications For Search
6. Trademark Infringements – The recently lost court case in France, where Google was sentenced to pay $110,000 in damages for trademark infringement, seriously impacting the basic tenets of their AdWords program. Moreover, it seems that a further 15 law suits are pending in France alone. (Google has won a few similar cases in past but this court ruling may well set a new, negative precedent.)
   See ↗ The Demise of Google’s AdWords Program?
7. Privacy Issues – Google’s unabashed violation of surfers’ privacy in aggressively pursuing their obvious goal of becoming the world’s largest data mining company is attracting increasingly negative attention. A toolbar which sends essentially sensitive or confidential information (login IDs, passwords, possibly credit card data, etc.), unencrypted or not, to Google Central without making surfers aware of it, is less than a little problematic.
   Also, note that this is not just about some abstract, merely academic “privacy” concept: it may well entail liability charges of gigagntic proportions should any or all of this collected data be abused some day. After all, Google wouldn’t be the first company to experience the hassle incurred by some disgruntled worker leaving the company in malicious intent with a hard disk or two chock full of sensitive user data …
   See ↗ Using Google Toolbar for SEO, and the Risks
8. Copyright Infringements II – There is also the ongoing issue of Google’s persisting copyright violations via their page caching function. While webmasters may opt out of having their copyrighted content both cached and displayed in a modified via the NOARCHIVE tag, it is actually Google that has been violating international copyright law for years and is relentlessly monetizing this infringement. Apparently, this case has not been tested in court yet (the AFP suit mentioned above is a slightly different story) but it stands to reason that it will one day, probaly sooner rather than later, once a sufficiently deep pocketed plaintiff regards this state of affairs as a serious revenue maker.
9. Google’s Politics – While they are trying hard to convey an image of being mavericks of core Wester values like liberty, democracy and human rights, Google has demonstrated several times in the past that they are only too willing to compromise their attitude in favor of a fast buck or two, one prime example in point being China, where they blithely succcumbed to the regime’s Internet censorship in order to stay in business. Not a very pressing issue for the majority of their Western devotees, perhaps, but not at all forgotten, either.

Whereas the article quotes a Google rep declaring that “the search engine marketing community is an extremely valuable and important industry, to both Google and advertisers” (but refusing to address the allegations at hand), an ever growing number of search marketing professionaly refuses to be convinced in view of their day to day experience with Google staff.

Also, there are quite a few of those who would argue that if this is Google’s supposed “adolescence” phase, the misbehaved brat could do with a thorough caning or two. And whatever happened to the wildly popular principle of “three strikes and you’re out”? What’s good for the goose should be good for the Google gander.

A more rational approach seems very much in order here. Let’s not forget that this isn’t some weird disincarnate, essentially innocent entity in the process of finding itself – these are shrewd, mature men and women, some of them the wealthiest in the world, who have been going at it for years. Thus, it is only fair to assume that they know perfectly well what they are doing and should consequently be held fully accountable without being granted any totally unjustified benefit of the doubt …

Read the blogged article here:
→ “Is Adolescent Google’s Voice Changing?”

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