While I appreciate that you seek out solutions instead of whining about problems it's still not right that Google "penalizes" websites or webmasters and even their families on a whim. Google is not the government so they have no law behind them that empowers them to judge people. Also it's our content not theirs. When your content appears in a newspaper you have rights too. On Google you have no rights. They won't even reply. This is similar to the middle ages when you were guilty on accusation and there was no independent judiciary. So if Google really wants to judge people there must be also a way to appeal the verdict. Ideally you would have an independent lawyer too.

Thanks for the comment Tad. I can't make my mind up how I feel about that point - if we manipulate their algorithm by exposing a weakness so that we can benefit, should we complain when they penalise us for it? I really do hate the lack of response though, it just leaves you in limbo and is beneficial to no one.

It's like parents beating their children. There is always a choice. Like in parenting it's to ignore the bad behavior as long as possible and to reward the positive one. Punishment is for right-wing politician who still believe that it can deter copycats. It has been proven by social scientists that it doesn't.

But Tad, as a parent you also have to provide boundaries and ensure that there are consequences when those boundaries are crossed. For a very long time Google decided that there would essentially be no consequence for crossing most boundaries. It's what they called 'neutralizing' links. What it did was make it seem like there were no boundaries. To me, Google essentially determined that there must be a consequence or else the behavior persists.

AJ: The consequences are that it doesn't work. That's perfectly enough. No need for punishment whatsoever. Do you have kids? When your kid shouts at you you don't give him what he wants until he does it right.

Yes, I'm a parent. And if you're at the park and you say 'do that again or we're going home' and they do it again, guess what, you take the child home, even as they wail and scream. Your shouting example is actually part of my point. As SEOs shout about wanting to go back to the park or out to eat (aka back in the SERPs) you don't just give them what they want.

Google is a business. They can do whatever the hell they like. If you don't like their service, use a different search engine. Just because they happen to be the most popular doesn't mean they have to treat you in a special manner. That said, I agree that the lack of response from Google regarding *anything* is infuriating. They have atrocious customer service and are basically a black-box in many aspects.

To be fair to Google, you can ring their Adwords support number and get straight through to a human...

So a business can do anything? Also just imagine Coca Cola or Ford penalizing its users for using their product in the wrong way. Google is way off. And indeed I use Blekko instead of Google whenever possible. Moreover I try to un-Google myself when it comes to other products beyond search. I can't support a ruthless corporation like Google.

I mostly use Duck Duck Go nowadays for personal search, so I'm right with you in the "Avoiding Google" camp. That said, a business really can do anything they want with their product. It's their fault if they sink their own boat. Fortunately for google, they have a good enough product (or strong enough monopoly) that they can do whatever they like right now.

Can anyone really think about trying to do customer service for a search engine? Google recently reported that there were 30 trillion unique URLs. For the sake of argument lets say there are 1 billion websites. If in a given year 1% of them contact Google that means there are 10 million service requests, which translates into 19 per minute. And that's just the initial contact right? Because it's never a simple yes or no answer (even when it is.) Have you seen the Webmaster Forums? The level of 'I can explain it to you but I can't understand it for you' in the forums is pretty damn high. So, sure, you may think that your specific request matters and deserves attention. You might even be right because you're not some dope (you've got skills) but there's no real way to know before hand. (Unless you gave greater access to Google based on Authorship. Talk about a way to boost adoption!) Is it frustrating? Yes. But the numbers for customer service just don't scale very well.

Haha touché AJ. But, to bring it back to the issue of a reconsideration request - which is a big issue and affects the survival of businesses, individual jobs etc... - you would not be talking anything like the numbers in your example. By making it a paid appeal you would 'weed' this out further. If 5% of the 20,000 affected domains did indeed pay for an appeal, as per the example in my post, you are only talking 1000 service requests. Say a site review takes a Googler 5 hours, that's 5000 man hours, probably split over a couple of months. You'd only need a team of around 20 to get this covered off. You could then even scale this back once the initial deluge has died down. Mike Essex (Koozai_Mike) emailed me a reply about this earlier: "I do feel sometimes “free” services simply shouldn’t be free if they can’t police things properly. If you can’t give a good service for free then you should charge" Rather than offer us a poor service for reconsideration, just offer a good service and charge people for it.

I think the idea of paying for customer service or a review is interesting but I think most of the SEO community would go absolutely bit shit crazy, right? The meme would be that Google sets arbitrary rules, then penalizes you and then makes you pay just to tell you why they put you in the pokey. I just don't see that going over very well even though - logically as you lay out - it might be beneficial. And to be selfish, I'd rather that money go to stellar SEO consultants who can navigate the landscape and provide the right direction without having it spelled out by Google. On the flip side, having reconsideration requests at all is actually pretty nice, right? And I'm not sure that it's all that different than having a court appeal. "I stole from a lot of people and made a ton of money before I got caught, but I don't do that anymore, can't I catch a break and go free?" "Appeal denied, send him back to his cell." I know there's far more nuance to it but it's not that far off. The part that's missing is the sentence length. You don't know how long you're going to be in the pokey. Now, prior to Penguin most SEOs had a good idea of the length of certain types of penalties. Penguin? I just don't know. (Though it's interesting that traffic sometimes flows AROUND a Penguin penalty. You pick up clusters of keywords just off the poison keyword term.) So it winds up being a bit like working on the chain gang where you're constantly looking up at the boss to ask 'is that enough?' One of these days you'll work it off. Until then you're just Cool Hand Luke.

Great business model IMHO. Google penalizes you and you have to pay retribution. I see even more penalties in the future. Right now it works similarly though, you pay the Google tax via PPC ads.

Nah it's nothing like a court appeal. With a court appeal you can get advice from a lawyer who actually knows the rules, not someone (however stellar they may be) who is making educated guesses. Then you get a 4-6 week delay before your 'sentence', for which you are also not given a reason. And don't forget the fact that they are effectively ignoring 'good behaviour'.

I liked your post, but for me, I have zero expectation of Google ever offering any type of customer service. We don't pay Google to index our sites and Google doesn't pay us for the "privilege" of indexing them, even though they are profiting from ads that surround organic SERPs. Premium services typically offer premium customer service. Google might be the premium index of the world's sites but we don't necessarily pay to be a part of their premium service.

We pay Google by working for free for it. We provide the content they monetize. Guess why authors wanted to stop Google Books. They were smarter than webmasters.

If Google made a shift to their business model and required site owners to pay them to crawl and index their site(s), the same way they now for free, what would you think about that?