One of the biggest areas of speculation in search engine optimisation is the question of how Google drops sites from its index, or penalises them via ranking. Many people believe that Google will actively ‘punish’ a company or individual by artificially manipulating their index rating.
However, despite the speculation among SEO professionals - and the recent anti-trust claims by companies who have cried foul at their poor ranking - there has been little evidence to prove these theories.
A recent ‘punishment’ from the Google index has in fact provided evidence – evidence that Google’s ranking decisions aren’t at all personal. In fact, the case suggests that Google actually does base such decision on what will give the best possible results – not what will damage a company or a competitor.
TechDirt reports that the blog of a Google employee, one Jason Morrison, was actually removed from the company’s search engine index. This meant that his site was steadily losing relevancy in search results on the world’s most popular engine – the worst nightmare of anyone in SEO or search engine marketing.
Writing on his blog Morrison relates the story of how he only noticed this error when he discovered that his traffic had steadily decreased over the past few weeks. Using Google’s webmaster tools, he discovered that his site was causing problems for the googlebot crawlers due to an error in his bandwith quota.
The incident may not eliminate the possibility of Google capriciously manipulating its index, but does lend weight to the company’s claim that their ranking system is primarily driven by their search algorithm, rather than any personal opinion at the company.
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