The Truth About Subjective Truths

A few months ago there was an article in New Scientist about Google's research paper on potentially ranking sites based on how factual their content is. The idea is generally and genuinely absurd.

• You can't copyright facts, which means that if this were a primary ranking signal & people focused on it then they would be optimizing their site to be scraped-n-displaced into the knowledge graph. Some people may sugar coat the knowledge graph and rich answers as opportunity, but it is Google outsourcing the cost of editorial labor while reaping the rewards.

  .@mattcutts I think I have spotted one, Matt. Note the similarities in the content text: pic.twitter.com/uHux3rK57f— dan barker (@danbarker) February 27, 2014

• If Google is going to scrape, displace & monetize data sets, then the only ways to really profit are:
  • focus on creating the types of content which can't be easily scraped-n-displaced, or
  • create proprietary metrics of your own, such that if they scrape them (and don't cheat by hiding the source) they are marketing you
• In some areas (especially religion and politics) certain facts are verboten & people prefer things which provide confirmation bias of their pre-existing beliefs. End user usage data creates a "relevancy" signal out of comfortable false facts and personalization reinforces it.
• In some areas well known "facts" are sponsored falsehoods. In other areas some things slip through the cracks.
• In some areas Google changes what is considered fact based on where you are located.
  

  How Google keeps everyone happy pic.twitter.com/KmBBzpfzdf— Amazing Maps (@Amazing_Maps) March 31, 2015

• Those who have enough money can create their own facts. It might be painting the perception of a landscape, hiring thousands of low waged workers to manipulate public perception on key issues and new technologies, or more sophisticated forms of social network analysis and manipulation to manipulate public perceptions.
• The previously mentioned links were governmental efforts. However such strategies are more common in the commercial market. Consider how Google has sponsored academic conferences while explicitly telling the people who put them on to hide the sponsorship as part of their lobbying efforts.
• Then there is the blurry area where government and commerce fuse, like when Google put about a half-dozen home team players in key governmental positions during the FTC investigation of Google. Google claimed lobbying was disgusting until they experienced the ROI firsthand.
• In some areas "facts" are backward looking views of the market which are framed, distorted & intentionally incomplete. There was a significant gap between internal voices and external messaging in the run up to the recent financial crisis. Even large & generally trustworthy organizations have some serious skeletons in their closets.
  

  @mattcutts I wonder, what sort of impact does http://t.co/vdg3ARGSz2 have on their E-A-T? expertise +1, authority +1, trustworthiness -_?— aaron wall (@aaronwall) April 6, 2015

• In other areas the inconvenient facts get washed away over time by money.

For a search engine to be driven primarily by group think (see unity100's posts here) is the death of diversity.

Less Diversity, More Consolidation

The problem is rarely attributed to Google, but as ecosystem diversity has declined (and entire segments of the ecosystem are unprofitable to service), more people are writing things like: "The market for helping small businesses maintain a home online isn’t one with growing profits – or, for the most part, any profits. It’s one that’s heading for a bloody period of consolidation."

As companies grow in power the power gets monetized. If you can manipulate people without appearing to do so you can make a lot of money.

If you don't think Google wants to disrupt you out of a job, you've been asleep at the wheel for the past decade— Michael Gray (@graywolf) March 13, 2015

We Just Listen to the Data (Ish)

As Google sucks up more data, aggregates intent, and scrapes-n-displaces the ecosystem they get air cover for some of their gray area behaviors by claiming things are driven by the data & putting the user first.

Those "data" and altruism claims from Google recently fell flat on their face when the Wall Street Journal published a number of articles about a leaked FTC document.

• How Google Skewed Search Results
• Inside the U.S. Antitrust Probe of Google
• Key quotes from the document from the WSJ & more from Danny Sullivan
• The PDF document is located here.

That PDF has all sorts of goodies in it about things like blocking competition, signing a low margin deal with AOL to keep monopoly marketshare (while also noting the general philosophy outside of a few key deals was to squeeze down on partners), scraping content and ratings from competing sites, Google force inserting itself in certain verticals anytime select competitors ranked in the organic result set, etc.

As damning as the above evidence is, more will soon be brought to light as the EU ramps up their formal statement of objection, as Google is less politically connected in Europe than they are in the United States:

"On Nov. 6, 2012, the night of Mr. Obama’s re-election, Mr. Schmidt was personally overseeing a voter-turnout software system for Mr. Obama. A few weeks later, Ms. Shelton and a senior antitrust lawyer at Google went to the White House to meet with one of Mr. Obama’s technology advisers. ... By the end of the month, the FTC had decided not to file an antitrust lawsuit against the company, according to the agency’s internal emails."

What is wild about the above leaked FTC document is it goes to great lengths to show an anti-competitive pattern of conduct toward the larger players in the ecosystem. Even if you ignore the distasteful political aspects of the FTC non-decision, the other potential out was:

"The distinction between harm to competitors and harm to competition is an important one: according to the modern interpretation of antitrust law, even if a business hurts individual competitors, it isn’t seen as breaking antitrust law unless it has also hurt the competitive process—that is, that it has taken actions that, for instance, raised prices or reduced choices, over all, for consumers." - Vauhini Vara

Part of the reason the data set was incomplete on that front was for the most part only larger ecosystem players were consulted. Google engineers have went on record stating they aim to break people's spirits in a game of psychological warfare. If that doesn't hinder consumer choice, what does?

@aaronwall rofl. Feed the dragon Honestly these G investigations need solid long term SEOs to testify as well as brands.— Rishi Lakhani (@rishil) April 2, 2015

When the EU published their statement of objections Google's response showed charts with the growth of Amazon and eBay as proof of a healthy ecosystem.

The market has been consolidated down into a few big winners which are still growing, but that in and of itself does not indicate a healthy nor neutral overall ecosystem.

The long tail of smaller e-commerce sites which have been scrubbed from the search results is nowhere to be seen in such charts / graphs / metrics.

The other obvious "untruth" hidden in the above Google chart is there is no way product searches on Google.com are included in Google's aggregate metrics. They are only counting some subset of them which click through a second vertical ad type while ignoring Google's broader impact via the combination of PLAs along with text-based AdWords ads and the knowledge graph, or even the recently rolled out rich product answer results.

Who could look at the following search result (during anti-trust competitive review no less) and say "yeah, that looks totally reasonable?"

Google has allegedly spent the last couple years removing "visual clutter" from the search results & yet they manage to product SERPs looking like that - so long as the eye candy leads to clicks monetized directly by Google or other Google hosted pages.

The Search Results Become a Closed App Store

Search was an integral piece of the web which (in the past) put small companies on a level playing field with larger players.

That it no longer is.

WOW. RT @aimclear: 89% of domains that ranked over the last 7 years are now invisible, #SEO extinction. SRSLY, @marcustober #SEJSummit— Jonah Stein (@Jonahstein) April 15, 2015

"What kind of a system do you have when existing, large players are given a head start and other advantages over insurgents? I don’t know. But I do know it’s not the Internet." - Dave Pell

The above quote was about app stores, but it certainly parallels a rater system which enforces the broken window fallacy against smaller players while looking the other way on larger players, unless they are in a specific vertical Google itself decides to enter.

"That actually proves my point that they use Raters to rate search results. aka: it *is* operated manually in many (how high?) cases. There is a growing body of consensus that a major portion of Googles current "algo" consists of thousands of raters that score results for ranking purposes. The "algorithm" by machine, on the majority of results seen by a high percentage of people, is almost non-existent." ... "what is being implied by the FTC is that Googles criteria was: GoogleBot +10 all Yelp content (strip mine all Yelp reviews to build their database). GoogleSerps -10 all yelp content (downgrade them in the rankings and claim they aren't showing serps in serps). That is anticompetitive criteria that was manually set." - Brett Tabke

The remote rater guides were even more explicitly anti-competitive than what was detailed in the FTC report. For instance, requiring hotel affiliate sites rated as spam even if they are helpful, for no reason other than being affiliate sites.

Is Brand the Answer?

About 3 years ago I wrote a blog post about how branding plays into SEO & why it might peak. As much as I have been accused of having a cynical view, the biggest problem with my post was it was naively optimistic. I presumed Google's consolidation of markets would end up leading Google to alter their ranking approach when they were unable to overcome the established consensus bias which was subsidizing their competitors. The problem with my presumption is Google's reliance on "data" was a chimera. When convenient (and profitable) data is discarded on an as need basis.

Or, put another way, the visual layout of the search result page trumps the underlying ranking algorithms.

Google has still highly disintermediated brand value, but they did it via vertical search, larger AdWords ad units & allowing competitive bidding on trademark terms.

If Not Illegal, then Scraping is Certainly Morally Deplorable...

As Google scraped Yelp & TripAdvisor reviews & gave them an ultimatum, Google was also scraping Amazon sales rank data and using it to power Google Shopping product rankings.

Around this same time Google pushed through a black PR smear job of Bing for doing a similar, lesser offense to Google on rare, made-up longtail searches which were not used by the general public.

While Google was outright stealing third party content and putting it front & center on core keyword searches, they had to use "about 100 “synthetic queries”—queries that you would never expect a user to type" to smear Bing & even numerous of these queries did not show the alleged signal.

Here are some representative views of that incident:

• "We look forward to competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there—algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search results from a competitor. So to all the users out there looking for the most authentic, relevant search results, we encourage you to come directly to Google. And to those who have asked what we want out of all this, the answer is simple: we'd like for this practice to stop." - Google's Amit Singhal
• “It’s cheating to me because we work incredibly hard and have done so for years but they just get there based on our hard work. I don’t know how else to call it but plain and simple cheating. Another analogy is that it’s like running a marathon and carrying someone else on your back, who jumps off just before the finish line.” Amit Singhal, more explicitly.
• "One comment that I’ve heard is that “it’s whiny for Google to complain about this.” I agree that’s a risk, but at the same time I think it’s important to go on the record about this." - Matt Cutts
• "I’ve got some sympathy for Google’s view that Bing is doing something it shouldn’t." - Danny Sullivan

What is so crazy about the above quotes is Google engineers knew at the time what Google was doing with Google's scraping. I mentioned that contrast shortly after the above PR fiasco happened:

when popular vertical websites (that have invested a decade and millions of Dollars into building a community) complain about Google disintermediating them by scraping their reviews, Google responds by telling those webmasters to go pound sand & that if they don't want Google scraping them then they should just block Googlebot & kill their search rankings

Learning the Rules of the Road

If you get a sense "the rules" are arbitrary, hypocritical & selectively enforced - you may be on to something:

• "The bizrate/nextag/epinions pages are decently good results. They are usually well-format[t]ed, rarely broken, load quickly and usually on-topic. Raters tend to like them" ... which is why ... "Google repeatedly changed the instructions for raters until raters assessed Google's services favorably"
• and while claimping down on those services ("business models to avoid") ... "Google elected to show its product search OneBox “regardless of the quality” of that result and despite “pretty terribly embarrassing failures” "
• and since Google knew their offerings were vastly inferior, “most of us on geo [Google Local] think we won't win unless we can inject a lot more of local directly into google results” ... thus they added "a 'concurring sites' signal to bias ourselves toward triggering [display of a Google local service] when a local-oriented aggregator site (i.e. Citysearch) shows up in the web results”"

Google's justification for not being transparent is "spammer" would take advantage of transparency to put inferior results front and center - the exact same thing Google does when it benefits the bottom line!

Around the same time Google hard-codes the self-promotion of their own vertical offerings, they may choose to ban competing business models through "quality" score updates and other similar changes:

The following types of websites are likely to merit low landing page quality scores and may be difficult to advertise affordably. In addition, it's important for advertisers of these types of websites to adhere to our landing page quality guidelines regarding unique content.

• eBook sites that show frequent ads
• 'Get rich quick' sites
• Comparison shopping sites
• Travel aggregators
• Affiliates that don't comply with our affiliate guidelines

The anti-competitive conspiracy theory is no longer conspiracy, nor theory.

Key points highlighted by the European Commission:

• Google systematically positions and prominently displays its comparison shopping service in its general search results pages, irrespective of its merits. This conduct started in 2008.
• Google does not apply to its own comparison shopping service the system of penalties, which it applies to other comparison shopping services on the basis of defined parameters, and which can lead to the lowering of the rank in which they appear in Google's general search results pages.
• Froogle, Google's first comparison shopping service, did not benefit from any favourable treatment, and performed poorly.
• As a result of Google's systematic favouring of its subsequent comparison shopping services "Google Product Search" and "Google Shopping", both experienced higher rates of growth, to the detriment of rival comparison shopping services.
• Google's conduct has a negative impact on consumers and innovation. It means that users do not necessarily see the most relevant comparison shopping results in response to their queries, and that incentives to innovate from rivals are lowered as they know that however good their product, they will not benefit from the same prominence as Google's product.

Overcoming Consensus Bias

Consensus bias is set to an absurdly high level to block out competition, slow innovation, and make the search ecosystem easier to police. This acts as a tax on newer and lesser-known players and a subsidy toward larger players.

Eventually that subsidy would be a problem to Google if the algorithm was the only thing that matters, however if the entire result set itself can be displaced then that subsidy doesn't really matter, as it can be retracted overnight.

Whenever Google has a competing offering ready, they put it up top even if they are embarrassed by it and 100% certain it is a vastly inferior option to other options in the marketplace.

That is how Google reinforces, then manages to overcome consensus bias.

How do you overcome consensus bias?

Google recently added highlights at the bottom of various sections of their mobile search results. The highlights appear on ads, organic results, and other various vertical search insertion types. The colors vary arbitrarily by section and are patterned off the colors in the Google logo. Historically such borders have conveyed a meaning, like separating advertisements from organic search results, but now the colors have no meaning other than acting as a visual separator.

We recently surveyed users to see if they understood what the borders represented & if they felt the borders had any meaning. We did 4 surveys total. The first 2 allows a user to select a choice from a drop down menu. The last two were open ended, where a user typed text into the box. For each of the 2 survey types, we did a survey of a SERP which had an ad in it & a survey of a SERP without an ad in it.

Below are the associated survey images & user results.

---

Google recently added colored bars at the bottom of some mobile search results. What do they mean?

answer	no ads	with ad
none of the other options are correct	27.7% (+2.7 / -2.5)	29.9% (+2.8 / -2.7)
the listing is an advertisement	25.8% (+2.8 / -2.6)	30.1% (+2.8 / -2.7)
each color has a different meaning	24% (+2.7 / -2.5)	19.6% (+2.5 / -2.3)
colors separate sections but have no meaning	15.5% (+2.4 / -2.1)	12.5% (+2.1 / -1.9)
the listing is a free search result	6.9% (+1.8 / -1.5)	7.9% (+2.0 / -1.6)

Given there are 5 answers, if the distributions were random there would have been a 20% distribution on each option. The only options which skewed well below that were the perceptions that the colored highlights either had no meaning or represented free/organic search results.

Link to survey results: without ads vs with ads.

And here are images of what users saw for the above surveys:

---

For the second set of surveys we used an open ended format

The open ended questions allow a user to type in whatever they want. This means the results do not end up biased by the predefined answer options in a quiz, but it also means the results will include plenty of noise like...

• people entering a, c, d, k, 1, 2, 3, ggg, hello, jj, blah, and who cares as answer choices
• some of the responses referencing the listing topics
• some of the responses referencing parts of a search result listing like the headlines or hyperlinks
• some of the responses highlighting the colors of the bars
• etc.

Like the above surveys, on each of these I ordered 1,500 responses. As of writing this, each had over 1,400 responses completed & here are the word clouds for the SERPs without an ad vs the SERPs with an ad.

SERP without an ad

SERP with an ad

On each of the above word clouds, we used the default automated grouping. Here is an example of what the word cloud would look like if the results were grouped manually.

Summary

For a couple years Google has removed various forms of eye candy from many organic results (cutting back on video snippets, limiting rich rating snipets, removing authorship, etc.). The justification for such removals was to make the results feel "less cluttered." At the same time, Google has added a variety of the same types of "noisy" listing enhancements to their various ad programs.

What is the difference between reviews ad extensions, consumer ratings ad extensions, and seller ratings ad extensions? What is the difference between callout extensions and dynamic structured snippets?

Long ago AdWords advertisements had a border near them to separate them from the organic results. Those borders disappeared many years ago & only recently reappeared on mobile devices when they also appeared near organic listings. That in turn has left searchers confused as to what the border highlighting means.

According to the above Google survey results, the majority of users don't know what the colors signify, don't care what they signify, or think they indicate advertisements.

The Facts of Life

When Google introduced the knowledge graph one of their underlying messages behind it was "you can't copyright facts."

Facts are like domain names or links or pictures or anything else in terms of being a layer of information which can be highly valued or devalued through commoditization.

When you search for love quotes, Google pulls one into their site & then provides another "try again" link.

Since quotes mostly come from third parties they are not owned by BrainyQuotes and other similar sites. But here is the thing, if those other sites which pay to organize and verify such collections have their economics sufficiently undermined then they go away & then Google isn't able to pull them into the search results either.

The same is true with song lyrics. If you are one of the few sites paying to license the lyrics & then Google puts lyrics above the search results, then the economics which justified the investment in licensing might not back out & you will likely go bankrupt. That bankruptcy wouldn't be the result of being a spammer trying to work an angle, but rather because you had a higher cost structure from trying to do things the right way.

Never trust a corporation to do a librarian's job.

What's Behind Door Number One?

Google has also done the above quote-like "action item" types of onebox listings in other areas like software downloads

Where there are multiple versions of the software available, Google is arbitrarily selecting the download page, even though a software publisher might have a parallel SAAS option or other complex funnels based on a person's location or status as a student or such.

Mix in Google allowing advertisers to advertise bundled adware, and it becomes quite easy for Google to gum up the sales process and undermine existing brand equity by sending users to the wrong location. Here's a blog post from Malwarebytes referencing

• their software being advertised on their brand term in Google via AdWords ads, engaging in trademark infringement and bundled with adware.
• numerous user complaints they received about the bundleware
• required legal actions they took to take the bundler offline

Brands are forced to buy their own brand equity before, during & after the purchase, or Google partners with parasites to monetize the brand equity:

The company used this cash to build more business, spending more than $1 million through at least seven separate advertising accounts with Google.
...
The ads themselves said things like “McAfee Support - Call +1-855-[redacted US phone number]” and pointed to domains like mcafee-support.pccare247.com.
...
One PCCare247 ad account with Google produced 71.7 million impressions; another generated 12.4 million more. According to records obtained by the FTC, these combined campaigns generated 1.5 million clicks

Since Google requires Chrome extensions be installed from their own website it makes it hard (for anyone other than Google) to monetize them, which in turn makes it appealing for people to sell the ad-ons to malware bundlers. Android apps in the Google Play store are yet another "open" malware ecosystem.

FACT: This Isn't About Facts

Google started the knowledge graph & onebox listings on some utterly banal topics which were easy for a computer to get right, though their ambitions vastly exceed the starting point. The starting point was done where it was because it was low-risk and easy.

When Google's evolving search technology was recently covered on Medium by Steven Levy he shared that today the Knowledge Graph appears on roughly 25% of search queries and that...

Google is also trying to figure out how to deliver more complex results — to go beyond quick facts and deliver more subjective, fuzzier associations. “People aren’t interested in just facts,” she says. “They are interested in subjective things like whether or not the television shows are well-written. Things that could really help take the Knowledge Graph to the next level.”

Even as the people who routinely shill for Google parrot the "you can't copyright facts" mantra, Google is telling you they have every intent of expanding far beyond it. “I see search as the interface to all computing,” says Singhal.

Even if You Have Copyright...

What makes the "you can't copyright facts" line so particularly disingenuous was Google's support of piracy when they purchased YouTube:

cofounder Jawed Karim favored “lax” copyright policy to make YouTube “huge” and hence “an excellent acquisition target.” YouTube at one point added a “report copyrighted content” button to let users report infringements, but removed the button when it realized how many users were reporting unauthorized videos. Meanwhile, YouTube managers intentionally retained infringing videos they knew were on the site, remarking “we should KEEP …. comedy clips (Conan, Leno, etc.) [and] music videos” despite having licenses for none of these. (In an email rebuke, cofounder Steve Chen admonished: “Jawed, please stop putting stolen videos on the site. We’re going to have a tough time defending the fact that we’re not liable for the copyrighted material on the site because we didn’t put it up when one of the co-founders is blatantly stealing content from other sites and trying to get everyone to see it.”)

To some, the separation of branding makes YouTube distinct and separate from Google search, but that wasn't so much the case when many sites lost their video thumbnails and YouTube saw larger thumbnails on many of their listings in Google. In the above Steven Levy article he wrote: "one of the highest ranked general categories was a desire to know “how to” perform certain tasks. So Google made it easier to surface how-to videos from YouTube and other sources, featuring them more prominently in search."

Altruism vs Disruption for the Sake of it

Whenever Google implements a new feature they can choose to not monetize it so as to claim they are benevolent and doing it for users without commercial interest. But that same unmonetized & for users claim was also used with their shopping search vertical until one day it went paid. Google claimed paid inclusion was evil right up until the day it claimed paid inclusion was a necessity to improve user experience.

There was literally no transition period.

Many of the "informational" knowledge block listings contain affiliate links pointing into Google Play or other sites. Those affiliate ads were only labeled as advertisements after the FTC complained about inconsistent ad labeling in search results.

Health is Wealth

Google recently went big on the knowledge graph by jumping head first into the health vertical:

starting in the next few days, when you ask Google about common health conditions, you’ll start getting relevant medical facts right up front from the Knowledge Graph. We’ll show you typical symptoms and treatments, as well as details on how common the condition is—whether it’s critical, if it’s contagious, what ages it affects, and more. For some conditions you’ll also see high-quality illustrations from licensed medical illustrators. Once you get this basic info from Google, you should find it easier to do more research on other sites around the web, or know what questions to ask your doctor.

Google's links to the Mayo Clinic in their knowledge graph are, once again, a light gray font.

In case you didn't find enough background in Google's announcement article, Greg Sterling shared more of Google's views here. A couple notable quotes from Greg...

Cynics might say that Google is moving into yet another vertical content area and usurping third-party publishers. I don’t believe this is the case. Google isn’t going to be monetizing these queries; it appears to be genuinely motivated by a desire to show higher-quality health information and educate users accordingly.

• Google doesn't need to directly monetize it to impact the economics of the industry. If they shift a greater share of clicks through AdWords then that will increase competition and ad prices in that category while lowering investment in SEO.
• If this is done out of benevolence, it will appear *above* the AdWords ads on the search results — unlike almost every type of onebox or knowledge graph result Google offers.
• If it is fair for him to label everyone who disagrees with his thesis as a cynic then it is of course fair for those "cynics" to label Greg Sterling as a shill.

Google told me that it hopes this initiative will help motivate the improvement of health content across the internet.

By defunding and displacing something they don't improve its quality. Rather they force the associated entities to cut their costs to try to make the numbers work.

If their traffic drops and they don't do more with less, then...

• their margins will fall
• growth slows (or they may even shrink)
• their stock price will tank
• management will get fired & replaced and/or they will get took private by private equity investors and/or they will need to do some "bet the company" moves to find growth elsewhere (and hope Google doesn't enter that parallel area anytime soon)

When the numbers don't work, publishers need to cut back or cut corners.

Things get monetized directly, monetized indirectly, or they disappear.

Some of the more hated aspects of online publishing (headline bait, idiotic correlations out of context, pagination, slideshows, popups, fly in ad units, auto play videos, full page ad wraps, huge ads eating most the above the fold real estate, integration of terrible native ad units promoting junk offers with shocking headline bait, content scraping answer farms, blending unvetted user generated content with house editorial, partnering with content farms to create subdomains on trusted blue chip sites, using Narrative Science or Automated Insights to auto-generate content, etc.) are not done because online publishers want to be jackasses, but because it is hard to make the numbers work in a competitive environment.

Publishers who were facing an "oh crap" moment when seeing print Dollars turn into digital dimes are having round number 2 when they see those digital dimes turn into mobile pennies:

At The New York Times, for instance, more than half its digital audience comes from mobile, yet just 10% of its digital-ad revenue is attributed to these devices.

If we lose some diversity in news it isn't great, though it isn't the end of the world. But what makes health such an important area is it is literally a matter of life & death.

Its importance & the amount of money flowing through the market ensures there is heavy investment in misinforming the general population. The corruption is so bad some people (who should know better) instead fault science.

@johnandrews @aaronwall it must be nice to say, you know what we're keeping that traffic for ourselves, and nobody says a damn thing— Michael Gray (@graywolf) February 10, 2015

... and, only those who hate free speech, capitalism, democracy & the country could possibly have anything negative to say about it. :D

Not to worry though. Any user trust built through the health knowledge graph can be monetized through a variety of other fantastic benevolent offers.

Once again, Google puts the user first.

Search vs Native Ads

Google owns search, but are they a one trick pony?

A couple weeks ago Ben Thompson published an interesting article suggesting Google may follow IBM and Microsoft in peaking, perhaps with native ads becoming more dominant than online search ads.

According to Forrester, in a couple years digital ad spend will overtake TV ad spend. In spite of the rise of sponsored content, native isn't even broken out as a category.

Part of the issue with native advertising is it can be blurry to break out some of it. Some of it is obvious, but falls into multiple categories, like video ads on YouTube. Some of it is obvious, but relatively new & thus lacking in scale. Amazon is extending their payment services & Prime shipping deals to third party sites of brands like AllSaints & listing inventory from those sites on Amazon.com, selling them traffic on a CPC basis. Does that count as native advertising? What about a ticket broker or hotel booking site syndicating their inventory to a meta search site?

And while native is not broken out, Google already offers native ad management features in DoubleClick and has partnered with some of the more well known players like BuzzFeed.

The Penny Gap's Impact on Search

Time intends to test paywalls on all of its major titles next year & they are working with third parties to integrate affiliate ads on sites like People.com.

The second link in the above sentence goes to an article which is behind a paywall. On Twitter I often link to WSJ articles which are behind a paywall. Any important information behind a paywall may quickly spread beyond it, but typically a competing free site which (re)reports on whatever is behind the paywall is shared more, spreads further on social, generates more additional coverage on forums and discussion sites like Hacker News, gets highlighted on aggregators like TechMeme, gets more links, ranks higher, and becomes the default/canonical source of the story.

Part of the rub of the penny gap is the cost of the friction vastly exceeds the financial cost. Those who can flow attention around the payment can typically make more by tracking and monetizing user behavior than they could by charging users incrementally a cent here and a nickel there.

Well known franchises are forced to offer a free version or they eventually cede their market position.

There are sites which do roll up subscriptions to a variety of sites at once, but some of them which had stub articles requiring payment to access like Highbeam Research got torched by Panda. If the barrier to entry to get to the content is too high the engagement metrics are likely to be terrible & a penalty ensues. Even a general registration wall is too high of a barrier to entry for some sites. Google demands whatever content is shown to them be visible to end users & if there is a miss match that is considered cloaking - unless the miss match is due to monetizing by using Google's content locking consumer surveys.

Who gets to the scale needed to have enough consumer demand to be able to charge an ongoing subscription for access to a variety of third party content? There are a handful of players in music (Apple, Spotify, Pandora, etc) & a handful of players in video (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime), but outside of those most paid subscription sites are about finance or niche topics with small scale. And whatever goes behind the paywalls gets seen by almost nobody when compared against to the broader public market at the free pricepoint.

Even if you are in a broad niche industry where a subscription-based model works, it still may be brutally tough to compete against Google. Google's chief business officer joined the board of Spotify, which means Spotify should be safe from Google risk, except...

• In spite of billions of dollars of aggregate royalty payouts by Spotify, Taylor Swift pulled her catalog from Spotify
• shortly after Taylor Swift pulled her catalog from Spotify, YouTube announced their subscription service, which will include Taylor Swift's catalog & will offer a free 6-month trial
• One doesn't need to be a genius to connect the dots.

Google's Impact on Premium Content

I've long argued Google has leveraged piracy to secure favorable media deals (see the second bullet point at the bottom of this infographic). Some might have perceived my take as being cynical, but when Google mentioned their "continued progress on fighting piracy" the first thing they mentioned was more ad units.

There are free options, paid options & the blurry lines in between which Google & YouTube ride while they experiment with business models and monetize the flow of traffic to the paid options.

"Tech companies don’t believe in the unique value of premium content over the long term." - Jessica Lessin

There is a massive misalignment of values which causes many players to have to refine their strategy over and over again. The gray area is never static.

Many businesses only have a 10% or 15% profit margin. An online publishing company which sees 20% of its traffic disappear might thus go from sustainable to bleeding cash overnight. A company which can arbitrarily shift / redirect a large amount of traffic online might describe itself as a "kingmaker."

In Germany some publishers wanted to be paid to be in the Google index. As a result Google stopped showing snippets near their listings. Google also refined their news search integration into the regular search results to include a broader selection of sources including social sites like Reddit. As a result Axel Springer quickly found itself begging for things to go back to the way they were before as their Google search traffic declined 40% and their Google News traffic declined 80%. Axel Springer got their descriptions back, but the "in the news" change remains.

Google's Impact on Weaker Players

If Google could have that dramatic of an impact on Axel Springer, imagine what sort of influence they have on millions of other smaller and weaker online businesses.

One of the craziest examples is Demand Media.

Demand Media's market cap peaked above $1.9 billion. They spun out the domain name portion of the business into a company named Rightside Group, but the content portion of the business is valued at essentially nothing. They have about $40 million in cash & equivalents. Earlier this year they acquired Saatchi Art for $17 million & last year they acquired ecommerce marketplace Society6 for $94 million. After their last quarterly result their stock closed down 16.83% & Thursday they were down another 6.32%, given them a market capitalization of $102 million.

On their most recent conference call, here are some of the things Demand Media executives stated:

• By the end of 2014, we anticipate more than 50.000 articles will be substantially improved by rewrites made rich with great visuals.
• We are well underway with this push for quality and will remove $1.8 million underperforming articles in Q4
• as we strive to create the best experience we can we have removed two ad units with the third unit to be removed completely by January 1st
• (on the above 2 changes) These changes are expected to have a negative impact on revenues and adjusted EBITDA of approximately $15 million on an annualized basis.
• Through Q3 we have invested $1.1 million in content renovation costs and expect approximately another $1 million in Q4 and $2 million to $4 million in the first half of next year.
• if you look at visits or you know the mobile mix is growing which has lower CPM associated with it and then also on desktop we're seeing compression on the pricing line as well.
• we know that sites that have ad density that's too high, not only are they offending audiences in near term, you are penalized with respect to where you show up in search indexes as well.

Google torched eHow in April of 2011. In spite of over 3 years of pain, Demand Media is still letting Google drive their strategy, in some cases spending millions of dollars to undo past investments.

Yet when you look at Google's search results page, they are doing the opposite of the above strategy: more scraping of third party content coupled with more & larger ad units.

“@CyrusShepard: Google's got you covered: pic.twitter.com/ZU2AOl5EGn” Google copies entire web page?— john andrews (@searchsleuth999) October 30, 2014

Originally the source links in the scrape-n-displace program were light gray. They only turned blue after a journalist started working on a story about 10 blue links.

The Blend

The search results can be designed to have some aspects blend in while others stand out. Colors can change periodically to alter response rates in desirable ways.

The banner ad got a bad rap as publishers have fought declining CPMs by adding more advertisements to their pages. When it works, Google's infrastructure still delivers (and tracks) billions of daily banner ads.

Search ads have never had the performance decline banner ads have.

The closest thing Google ever faced on that front was when AdBlock Plus became popular. Since it was blocking search ads, Google banned them & then restored them as they eventually negotiated a deal to pay them to display ads on Google while they continued to block ads on other third party sites.

Search itself *is* the ultimate native advertising platform.

Google is doing away with the local carousel in favor of a 3 pack local listing in categories like hotels. Once a person clicks on one of the hotel listings, Google then inserts an inline knowledge graph listing for that hotel with booking affiliate links inline in the search results, displacing the organic result set below the fold.

Notice in the above graphic how the "website" link uses generic text, is aligned toward the right, and is right next to an image so that it looks like an ad. It is engineered to feel like an ad and be ignored. The actual ads are left aligned and look like regular text links. They have an ad label, but that label is a couple lines up from them & there are multiple horizontal lines between the label and the actual ad units.

Not only does Google have the ability to shift the layout in such a drastic format, but then with whatever remains they also get to determine who they act against & who they don't. While the SEO industry debates the "ethics" of various marketing techniques Google has their eye on the prize & is displacing the entire ecosystem wholesale.

Users were generally unable to distinguish between ads and organic listings *before* Google started mixing the two in their knowledge graph. That is a big part of the reason search ads have never seen the engagement declines banner ads have seen.

Mobile has been redesigned with the same thinking in mind. Google action items (which can eventually be monetized) up top & everything else pushed down the page.

The blurring of "knowledge" and ads allows Google to test entering category after category (like doctor calls from the search results) & forcing advertisers to pay for the various tests while Google collects data.

And as Google is scraping information from third party sites, they can choose to show less information on their own site if doing so creates additional monetization opportunities. As far back as 2009 Google stripped phone numbers off of non-sponsored map listings. And what happened with the recent 3 pack? While 100% of the above the fold results are monetized, ...

"Go back to an original search that turns up the 3 PAC. Its completely devoid of logical information that a searcher would want:

• No phone number
• No address
• No map
• NO LINK to the restaurant website.

Anything that most users would want is deliberately hidden and/or requires more clicks." - Dave Oremland

Google justifies their scrape-n-displace programs by claiming they are put users first. Then they hide some of the information to drive incremental monetization opportunities. Google may eventually re-add some of those basic features which are now hidden, but as part of sponsored local listings.

After all - ads are the solution to everything.

Do branded banner ads in the search results have a low response rate? Or are advertisers unwilling to pay a significant sum for them? If so, Google can end the test and instead shift to include a product carousel in the search results, driving traffic to Google Shopping.

"I see this as yet another money grab by Google. Our clients typically pay 400-500% more for PLA clicks than for clicks on their PPC Brand ads. We will implement exact match brand negatives in Shopping campaigns." - Barb Young

That money grab stuff has virtually no limit.

The Click Casino

Off the start keywords defaulted to broad match. Then campaigns went "enhanced" so advertisers were forced to eat lower quality clicks on mobile devices.

Then there was the blurring exact match targeting into something else, forcing advertisers to buy lower quality variations of searches & making them add tons of negative keywords (and keep eating new garbage re-interpretations of words) in order to run a fine tuned campaign specifically targeted against a term.

In the past some PPC folks cheered obfuscation of organic search, thinking "this will never happen to me."

Oops.

And of course Google not only wants to be the ad auction, but they want to be your SEM platform managing your spend & they are suggesting you can leverage the "power" of automated auction time biding.

Advertisers RAVE about the success of Google's automatic bidding features: "It received one click. That click cost $362.63."

The only thing better than that is banner ads in free mobile tap games targeted at children.

Adding Friction

Above I mentioned how Google arbitrarily banned the AdBlock Plus extension from the Play store. They also repeatedly banned Disconnect Mobile. If you depend on mobile phones for distribution it is hard to get around Google. What's more they also collect performance data, internally launch competing apps, and invest in third party apps. And they control the prices various apps pay for advertising across their broad network.

So maybe you say "ok, I'll skip search & mobile, I'll try to leverage email" but this gets back to the same issue again. In Gmail social or promotional emails get quarantined into a ghetto where they are rarely seen:

"online stores, if they get big enough, can act as chokepoints. And so can Google. ... Google unilaterally misfiled my daily blog into the promotions folder they created, and I have no recourse and no way (other than this post) to explain the error to them" - Seth Godin

Those friction adders have real world consequences. A year ago Groupon blamed Gmail's tabs for causing them to have poor quarterly results. The filtering impact on a start up can be even more extreme. A small shift in exposure can lower the K factor to something below 1 & require the startups to buy exposure rather than generating it virally.

In addition to those other tabs, there are a host of other risks like being labeled as spam or having a security warning. Few sites are as widely read inside the Googleplex as Search Engine Land, yet at one point even their newsletter was showing a warning in Gmail.

Google can also add friction to

• websites using search rankings, vertical search result displacement, hiding local business information (as referenced above), search query suggestions, and/or leveraging their web browser to redirect consumer intent
• video on YouTube by counting ad views as organic views, changing the relevancy metrics, and investing in competing channels & giving them preferential exposure as part of the deal. YouTube gets over half their views on mobile devices with small screens, so any shift on Google's rank preference is going to have a major shift in click distributions.
• mobile apps using default bundling agreements which require manufactures to set Google's apps as defaults
• other business models by banning bundling-based business models too similar to their own (bundling is wrong UNLESS it is Google doing it)
• etc.

The launch of Keyword (not provided) which hid organic search keyword data was friction for the sake of it in organic search. When Google announced HTTPS as a ranking signal, Netmeg wrote: "It's about ad targeting, and who gets to profile you, and who doesn't. Mark my words."

Facebook announced their relaunch of Atlas and Google immediately started cracking down on data access:

In the conversations this week, with companies like Krux, BlueKai and Lotame, Google told data management platform players that they could not use pixels in certain ads. The pixels—embedded within digital ads—help marketers target and understand how many times a given user has seen their messages online.

"Google is only allowing data management platforms to fire pixels on creative assets that they're serving, on impressions they bought, through the Google Display Network," said Mike Moreau, chief solutions officer at Krux. "So they're starting with a very narrow scope."

Around the same time Google was cracking down on data sharing, they began offering features targeting consumers across devices & announced custom affinity audiences which allow advertisers to target audiences who visit any particular website.

Google's special role is not only as an organizer (and obfuscator) of information, but then they get to be the source measuromg how well marketing works via their analytics, which can regularly launch new reports which may causually over-represent their own contribution while under-representing some other channels, profiting from activity bias. The industry default of last click attribution driving search ad spending is one of the key issues which has driven down display ad values over the years.

Investing in Competition

Google not only ranks the ecosystem, but they actively invest in it.

Google tried to buy Yelp. When Facebook took off Google invested in Zynga to get access to data, in spite of a sketchy background. When Google's $6 billion offer for Groupon didn't close the deal, Google quickly partnered with over a dozen Groupon competitors & created new offer ad units in the search results.

Inside of the YouTube ecosystem Google also holds equity stakes in leading publishers like Machinima and Vevo.

There have been a few examples of investments getting special treatment, getting benefit of the doubt, or access to non-public information.

The scary scenario for publishers might sound something like this: "in Baidu Maps you can find a hotel, check room availability, and make a booking, all inside the app." There's no need to leave the search engine.

Take a closer look & that scary version might already be here. Google's same day delivery boss moved to Uber and Google added Uber pickups and price estimates to their mobile Maps app.

Google, of course, also invested in Uber. It would be hard to argue that Uber is anything but successful. Though it is also worth mentioning winning at any cost often creates losses elsewhere:

• their insurance situation sounds fuzzy
• the founder doesn't sound like a nice guy
• they've repeatedly engaged in shady endeavors like flooding a competing network with bogus requests & trying to screw with a competitor's ability to raise funds
• as subprime auto loans have become widespread, Uber has pushed an extreme version of them onto their drivers while cutting their rates - an echo of the utopia of years gone by.

Google invests in disruption as though disruption is its own virtue & they leverage their internal data to drive the investments:

“If you can’t measure and quantify it, how can you hope to start working on a solution?” said Bill Maris, managing partner of Google Ventures. “We have access to the world’s largest data sets you can imagine, our cloud computer infrastructure is the biggest ever. It would be foolish to just go out and make gut investments.”

Combining usage data from their search engine, web browser, app store & mobile OS gives them unparalleled insights into almost any business.

Google is one of the few companies which can make multi-billion dollar investments in low margin areas, just for the data:

Google executives are prodding their engineers to make its public cloud as fast and powerful as the data centers that run its own apps. That push, along with other sales and technology initiatives, aren’t just about grabbing a share of growing cloud revenue. Executives increasingly believe such services could give Google insights about what to build next, what companies to buy and other consumer preferences

Google committed to spending as much as a half billion dollars promoting their shopping express delivery service.

Google's fiber push now includes offering business internet services. Elon Musk is looking into offering satellite internet services - with an ex-Googler.

The End Game

Google now spends more than any other company on federal lobbying in the US. A steady stream of Google executives have filled US government rolls like deputy chief technology officer, chief technology officer, and head of the patent and trademark office. A Google software engineer went so far as suggesting President Obama

• Retire all government employees with full pensions.
• Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry.
• Appoint Eric Schmidt CEO of America.

That Googler may be crazy or a troll, but even if we don't get their nightmare scenario, if the regulators come from a particular company, that company is unlikely to end up hurt by regulations.

President Obama has stated the importance of an open internet: “We cannot allow Internet service providers to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas.”

If there are relevant complaints about Google, who will hear them when Googlers head key government roles?

Larry Page was recently labeled businessperson of the year by Fortune:

It’s a powerful example of how Page pushes the world around him into his vision of the future. “The breadth of things that he is taking on is staggering,” says Ben Horowitz, of Andreessen Horowitz. “We have not seen that kind of business leader since Thomas Edison at GE or David Packard at HP.”

A recent interview of Larry Page in the Financial Times echos the theme of limitless ambition:

• "the world’s most powerful internet company is ready to trade the cash from its search engine monopoly for a slice of the next century’s technological bonanza." ... "As Page sees it, it all comes down to ambition – a commodity of which the world simply doesn’t have a large enough supply."
• “I think people see the disruption but they don’t really see the positive,” says Page. “They don’t see it as a life-changing kind of thing . . . I think the problem has been people don’t feel they are participating in it.”
• “Even if there’s going to be a disruption on people’s jobs, in the short term that’s likely to be made up by the decreasing cost of things we need, which I think is really important and not being talked about.”
• "in a capitalist system, he suggests, the elimination of inefficiency through technology has to be pursued to its logical conclusion."

There are some dark layers which are apparently "incidental side effects" of the techno-utopian desires.

Mental flaws could be reinforced & monetized by hooking people on prescription pharmaceuticals:

It takes very little imagination to foresee how the kitchen mood wall could lead to advertisements for antidepressants that follow you around the Web, or trigger an alert to your employer, or show up on your Facebook page because, according to Robert Scoble and Shel Israel in Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy, Facebook “wants to build a system that anticipates your needs.”

Or perhaps...

Those business savings are crucial to Rifkin’s vision of the Third Industrial Revolution, not simply because they have the potential to bring down the price of consumer goods, but because, for the first time, a central tenet of capitalism—that increased productivity requires increased human labor—will no longer hold. And once productivity is unmoored from labor, he argues, capitalism will not be able to support itself, either ideologically or practically.

That is not to say "all will fail" due to technology. Some will succeed wildly.

Michelle Phan has been able to leverage her popularity on YouTube to launch a makeup subscription service which is at an $84 million per year revenue run rate.

Those at the top of the hierarchy will get an additional boost. Such edge case success stories will be marketed offline to pull more people onto the platform.

Google is promoting Japanese Youtube creators' personal brands in heavy TV, online, and print ads. Trying to recruit more maybe?— Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) November 1, 2014

While a "star based" compensation system makes a few people well off, most people publishing on those platforms won't see any financial benefit from their efforts. Worse yet, a lot of the "viral" success stories are driven by a large ad budget.

Even Google has done research on income inequality in attention economies - and that was before they dialed up their brand bias stuff.

Category after category gets commoditized, platform after platform gets funded by Google, and ultimately employees working on them will long for the days where their wages were held down by illegal collusion rather than the crowdsourcing fate they face:

Workers, in turn, have more mobility and a semblance of greater control over their working lives. But is any of it worth it when we can’t afford health insurance or don’t know how much the next gig might pay, or when it might come? When an app’s terms of service agreement is the closest thing we have to an employment contract? When work orders come through a smartphone and we know that if we don’t respond immediately, we might not get such an opportunity again? When we can’t even talk to another human being about the task at hand and we must work nonstop just to make minimum wage?

Just as people get commoditized, so do other layers of value:

• those who failed to see the value of & invest in domain names cheered as names lost value
• Google philosophically does not believe in customer service, but they feel they should grade others on their customer service and remove businesses which don't respond well to culturally unaware outsourced third world labor.
• Google gets people to upload pirate content to YouTube & then uses the existence of the piracy to sell ads. They can also use YouTube to report on the quality of various ISPs, while also blocking competing search engines and apps from being able to access YouTube.
• PageRank extracts the value of editorial votes, allowing Google to leverage the work of editors to refine their search rankings without requiring people to visit the sites. Mix in the couple years Google spent fearmongering about links and it is not surprising to see the Yahoo Directory shut down.
• Remember the time a Google "contractor" did a manual scrape of Mocality in Kenya, then called up the businesses and lied to them to try to get them onto Google? I'd link to the original Mocality blog post, but Mocality Kenya has shut down.
• Google also scraped reviews (sometimes without attribution) & only failed at it when players large enough to be heard by Government regulators complained. This is why government scrutiny of Google is so important. It is one of the few things they actually respond to.
• The smart home will turn household appliances into lead generation devices.

In SEO for a number of years many people have painted brand as the solution to everything. But consider the hotel search results which are 100% monetized above the fold - even if you have a brand, you still must pay to play. Or consider the Google Shopping ads which are now being tested on branded navigational searches.

Google even obtained a patent for targeting ads aimed at monetizing named entities.

You paid to build the brand. Then you pay Google again - "or else."

One could choose to opt out of Google ad products so as not to pay to arbitrage themselves, but Google is willing to harm their own relevancy to extract revenues.

A search in the UK for the trademark term [cheapflights] is converted into the generic search [cheap flights]. The official site is ranking #2 organically and is the 20th clickable link in the left rail of the search results.

As much as brand is an asset, it also becomes a liability if you have to pay again for every time someone looks for your brand.

Mobile apps may be a way around Google, but again it is worth noting Google owns the operating system and guarantees themselves default placement across a wide array of verticals through bundling contracts with manufacturers. Another thing worth considering with mobile is new notification features tied to the operating systems are unbundling apps & Google has apps like Google Now which tie into many verticals.

As SEOs for a long time we had value in promoting the adoption of Google's ecosystem. As Google attempts to capture more value than they create we may no longer gain by promoting the adoption of their ecosystem, but given their...

• cash hoard
• lobbyists
• ex-employees in key government rolls
• control over video, mobile, apps, maps, email, analytics (along with search)
• broad portfolio of investments

... it is hard to think they've come anywhere close to peaking.

When Google acquired DoubleClick Larry Page wanted to keep the Performics division offering SEM & SEO services just to see what would happen. Other Google executives realized the absurd conflict of interest and potential anti trust issues, so they overrode ambitious Larry: "He wanted to see how those things work. He wanted to experiment."

Webmasters have grown tired of Google's duplicity as the search ecosystem shifts to pay to play, or go away.

@davidiwanow I understand the problem, just not the complaints. Google won. Find another oppty, or pay Google. Simple.— john andrews (@searchsleuth999) November 5, 2014

Google's webmaster guidelines can be viewed as reasonable and consistent or as an anti-competitive tool. As Google eats the ecosystem, those thrown under the bus shift their perspective.

At this point, Google should just come out and be blunt, "any form of promotion that does not involve paying us is against our guidelines."— Rae Hoffman (@sugarrae) November 5, 2014

Within some sectors larger players can repeatedly get scrutiny for the same offense with essentially no response, whereas smaller players operating in that same market are slaughtered because they are small.

Scraping? AOG (unless we do it) Affiliate? Fucking scumbags mainly AOG (unless we get into the space) Thin content? AOG (unless we do it)— Rae Hoffman (@sugarrae) November 5, 2014

Access to lawyers, politicians & media outlets = access to benefit of the doubt.

Lack those & BEST OF LUCK TO YOU ;)

And most of all, I'm tired of having to tell SMBs that Google gives zero fucks when it comes to them— Rae Hoffman (@sugarrae) November 5, 2014

Google's page asking "Do you need an SEO?" uses terms like: scam, illicit and deceptive to help frame the broader market perception of SEO.

If ranking movements appear random & non-linear then it is hard to make sense of continued ongoing investment. The less stable Google makes the search ecosystem, the worse they make SEOs look, as...

• anytime a site ranks better, that anchors the baseline expectation of where rankings should be
• large rank swings create friction in managing client communications
• whenever search traffic falls drastically it creates real world impacts on margins, employment & inventory levels

Matt Cutts stated it is a waste of resources for him to be a personal lightning rod for criticism from black hat SEOs. When Matt mentioned he might not go back to his old role at Google some members of the SEO industry were glad. In response some other SEOs mentioned black hats have nobody to blame but themselves & it is their fault for automating things.

After all, it is not like Google arbitrarily shifts their guidelines overnight and drastically penalizes websites to a disproportionate degree ex-post-facto for the work of former employees, former contractors, mistaken/incorrect presumed intent, third party negative SEO efforts, etc.

Oh ... wait ... let me take that back.

Indeed Google DOES do that, which is where much of the negative sentiment Matt complained about comes from.

Recall when Google went after guest posts, a site which had a single useful guest post on it got a sitewide penalty.

Around that time it was noted Auction.com had thousands of search results for text which was in some of their guest posts.

Enjoying Aaron murdering http://t.co/UadnmwekM7 RT @aaronwall: "about 9,730 results" http://t.co/Sms5L2BFGY— Brian Provost (@brianprovost) April 9, 2014

About a month before the guest post crack down, Auction.com received a $50 million investment from Google Capital.

• Publish a single guest post on your site = Google engineers shoot & ask questions later.
• Publish a duplicated guest post on many websites, with Google investment = Google engineers see it as a safe, sound, measured, reasonable, effective, clean, whitehat strategy.

The point of highlighting that sort of disconnect was not to "out" someone, but rather to highlight the (il)legitimacy of the selective enforcement. After all, ...

@mvandemar @brianprovost if anyone should have the capital needed to "do things the right way, as per G" it should be G & those G invests in— aaron wall (@aaronwall) April 9, 2014

But perhaps Google has decided to change their practices and have a more reasonable approach to the SEO industry.

An encouraging development on this front was when Auction.com was once again covered in Bloomberg. They not only benefited from leveraging Google's data and money, but Google also offered them another assist:

Closely held Auction.com, which is valued at $1.2 billion, based on Google’s stake, also is working with the Internet company to develop mobile and Web applications and improve its search-engine optimization for marketing, Sharga said.

"In a capitalist system, [Larry Page] suggests, the elimination of inefficiency through technology has to be pursued to its logical conclusion." ― Richard Waters

With that in mind, one can be certain Google didn't "miss" the guest posts by Auction.com. Enforcement is selective, as always.

“The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.” ― Vladimir Lenin

Whether you turn left or right, the road leads to the same goal.