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For many years it was true that SEO = links, but due to the rise of rel=nofollow, fearmongering & social media, organic links have lost much of their relative importance in many verticals.

Links are still valuable in some areas of course, but where the search results are full of listings from Google.com, pushed below the fold from larger AdWords ads and/or heavily skewed by things like brand bias there is much less value in link building in numerous big money markets. After all, few care who ranks #1 if #1 is below the fold!

There’s been quite a few posts by Aaron lately about the things Google is doing wrong, so I figured I’d help Google out and give my boys running the most dominant tech company on Earth a couple of ideas on some things I’d love to do. Who am I? I’m just an anonymous blackhat with too many ideas. You see, I lack the scale and lobbyist army to pull off giant game-changing feats, so rather than just waste a fantasy I think Google could turn them into blackhat realities.

1. Sell illegal drugs. There’s a reason people sell drugs: money, and lots of it. Rather than do the usual narcotics though, I think Google could specialize in flinging massive amounts of pharmaceutical grade contraband…you know, the kind of stuff you need to see three doctors, a pharmacist, and a priest for. And the best part is, if they continually sidestepped large pharma companies by pushing the product via misspellings of the brand name drugs, they could get away with it for like 5 years. No one would ever know! Oh, they did that? Yikes, the DOJ? Ok, moving on.
2. I’ll just chalk that up to them getting pinched for selling a legitimate product, a big brand turf war if you will. If that’s the case, Google should invest in figuring out all the top ecommerce KWs and give the list away to oversees peddlers of counterfeit goods. It isn’t drugs, but that Gucci knock-off at close to Gucci prices sure has a good margin on it when you’re artificially inflating CPC bids with phony quality score demotions. They should get right on that. Man, I am behind the curve again! Don’t worry G-men, I’ll wink and nod while you “aggressively” crack down on these searches that take less than 5 seconds to find.
3. Well, ok. They sold drugs and fake goods already. I suppose they could always profit from their Adwords customers multiple ways by interrupting the landing page destination process a few percentage points of the time and…I GOT IT…they could somehow use their ridiculously ubiquitous toolbar base to provide a “feature” that invites the end user to compare the price of the product the advertiser worked so hard to attract and paid Google directly for. Man these guys are good…er…bad. I’m getting jealous here. This is like Goldman Sachs execs in the extreme north 1% making a ton of money advising a client like Greece (the Adwords customer in this case) and then actively profit in the demise of that client by shorting its bonds (by using Google Related to earn that secondary revenue stream). HAHAHA. Oh man, the only way they could have done that any more beautifully is if the recommended pages were somehow funded by Google Ventures and crammed full of Adsense and Viglink.
4. Speaking of toolbars, I don’t think they are leveraging that toolbar install base enough. Yeah yeah, it is a browser extension or plug-in technically, and is governed by a fairly narrow permissible use TOS. But still, wouldn’t it be cool if they used it to hijack an install process onto various OS? That way they could push out all sorts of malware, spyware, and adware and maybe even circumvent the OS itself to push people into Chrome OS. Holy crap, that’s so awesome – take that Apple!
5. Come on, like Apple is a saint. We were all thinking of doing it. An OS is nothing though; what really turned Apple around as a company is its iPhone. If Google could have gotten advanced knowledge of its development behind a string of NDAs and a maybe a seat on Apple’s board in order to quickly produce a near identical product; that would be something. Oh. My. Schmidt. What’s even classier is refuting a dead man’s words and calling his final dying passion a lie. Siri, get me a lawyer. LOL
6. Eric Schmidt and the crew do make awesome spies; I can’t compete with that. I’m concerned that they aren’t spying enough though. Hey, wouldn’t it be swell if Google used those fancy street map cars that take naked pictures of me in the front yard and do something really special? I’m thinking grab EVERYTHING within signal range; the best way to make sure someone is using Google is to grab their router login, hack the logs, and check. My friends, I am in awe of your blackhatishness. Nmap is pretty cool huh G-men? Did you install some warez bots too while you’re in there?
7. Warez and crackz shouldn’t be scoffed at. Lots of traffic volume from China and Eastern Europe are from people looking for these things. Who cares if its illegal; if the first 6 things listed didn’t stop my law-skirting buddies at Google, I don’t think silly little copyright laws should slow them down.
8. And nothing should slow down the progress of making our kids literate, for a nice cut of the profits of course. The way I see it, Google is good at getting other peoples’ content; what if they just took all the books in the world and copied them? I bet the authors wouldn’t even blink an eye, since they just want their works discovered anyhow. Wahhh, you stole something I worked on for 3 years and put it on the web for “free” until ads are wrapped around it and I’m completely cut out of the process. Wahhh.
9. If the author’s guild didn’t even put a chink in the armor, Google’s Wolfram and Hart trained biz dev team may as well get more aggressive. Clearly no one has the teeth to make them obey any sort of law. Killing search dissenters is probably a little early in the game plan (table that for 2014), so why not just kill business models instead. Coupons? Nuke Groupon by launching your own product that uses Adwords data from Groupon’s campaign to fuel offer intelligence. That isn’t good enough though; what if they took a huge information repository, flat out scraped it, served it up as their own, and then penalized the guys they took it for with a duplicate content penalty. Wow man that’d be hilarious. Well, Matt Cutts did say roughly 40% of the DMCA complaints are phony. That’s probably just the case. ;)
10. DMCA got me thinking. All us SEOs are saying video is the next big wave of spam, so what Google really needs to do is pirate the video web in order to get ahead of the curve. Well then, surf’s up.
11. Killing is probably still out and coveting other people’s oxen seems kind of low margin, so maybe they could just steal some more stuff. Scraping has been done to death, but maybe they could steal software from others, sell it as their own, and hope they don’t notice. Too bad you got caught, but then ‘oracle’ does sort of imply they could see it happening in advance.

 
You know what…Google is doing way better than I ever could, mainly because being a blackhat mostly means doing boring things like buying links, not engaging in the kinds of criminal activities listed above. Kudos my dark arts brethren; you’ve taken this to a level that would leave me behind bars, and yet you STILL have people believing you are the stand against all that is evil. You truly are masters of deception; here, I have new logo for you.

Walmart is getting much more aggressive with their online strategy:

With some 1.4 million employees on its U.S. payroll, Walmart’s world is about as large as the state of Maine. That’s massive by any standard, but when you consider how social media amplifies that number, it’s not simply a huge group but an influential one. No small wonder, then, that the earth’s largest employer is taking greater measures to motivate and mobilize its people — and opening up more opportunities for consumer brands to also reach them along the way.

These brands can not only leverage internal resources to further build off the boost Google offers them, but they can then take that attention and sell it back off to the highest bidder:

It’s not clear how much ad revenue Walmart World has made or whether MyWalmart.com will become a profit center. But the former already takes in millions of dollars annually in ads from vendors seeking an audience with Walmart employees, according to people familiar with the matter.

If Google consolidates markets too aggressively then ultimately they create competition for themselves through vertical ad networks. In some cases (say travel) Google can buy out the market plumbing & then reassert control:

Wertheimer drew some criticism when he explained that “our airline partners were very clear” that they wouldn’t participate in Google Flight Search if online travel agency booking links were included in the core flight-search results.

But Google doesn’t have that same influence over retail & each time they put the big brands front and center the more they reinforce that 3rd party dominance.

In addition to leveraging their workforce, it is also quite easy for these brands to use customer incentives to dominate social media.

Amazon.com is also carrying far more ads these days & they sell ads on 3rd party sites.

The above is another reason why Google is pushing so hard to control the second click. If they can taste the traffic again they add efficiency to their own model while introducing another layer of friction to other retailers.

When users finally manage to leave the Google click circus, Google tries to pull them back into Google with the Google Related toolbar

In the above quoted AdAge article there is some skepticism around how much a company like Walmart can get out of underpaid wage slaves:

“It’s really hard when you’re a person making poverty-level wages, just had your health-care premiums raised 60%, and you can only get part-time hours, to be a good ambassador for the brand, no matter how much you love it,” said Jennifer Stapleton, spokeswoman for Making Change at Walmart.

However I think that skepticism is misplaced, as the less a person has the more thankful they tend to be for the little bits they do have. Most people who have nothing do not realize how systems are engineered to screw them over.

It is only when you have free time to think & are not clouded by arbitrary short-term stress that you can ponder the bigger & more uncomfortable questions in life. As long as you don’t consider those uncomfortable questions it is far easier to push anything, because you don’t know any better.

“The entire web has become full of garbage. The web has become almost a digital Detroit.” – Roger McNamee.

If Walmart’s strategy works then this ultimately will be why Google’s brand-only approach to search will fall flat on its face. If this is successful I would then expect Google to put out some public relations drivel about celebrating the diversity of the web & move away from brand in the next 2 or 3 years.

In the meantime, I expect Google to keep increasing search complexity such that it’s prohibitively expensive to make & market a small independent commercial website. That will force many smaller companies to live inside the Google ecosystem, with Google ranking the Google-hosted pages/products/locations for those companies, so that they can serve ads against them and get a bigger slice of the revenues.

Google’s ad network is far more profitable than even the lowest waged employee, as it doesn’t need to be fed & is designed to be an agnostic & amoral yield optimization tool. And it is effective enough that the biggest retailers are now becoming ad networks.

Average products for average people – with ads everywhere.

Welcome to the WorldWideMart. ;)

We are better off if we ignore what Google is saying and follow one thing: Google wants more money for Google. When we make this assumption, everything Google does makes sense. Deception and doublespeak are logical and expected rather than shocking and upsetting.

When it comes to scale, as pointed out with Groupon, all of these rules go out the window. If you look at the biggest advertisers, replace their account with one with no history and the brand “Geico” with “SEOBook auto insurance” and the campaign will simply not run. You are spam. In some cases larger advertisers are able to run ads which are clearly deceptive and go against guidelines which they actively enforce on smaller advertisers. I have a strong suspicion now that this is in fact institutionalized in Google’s rating process rather than any employee going out of their way to overturn some sort of penalty.

Google will not disrupt a site or advertiser that will negatively impact their own quarterly earnings. When Google does disrupt one, it is because they have a backup in place. That backup may be their own internal project or a competitor of yours who sends 95% of their advertising through Google’s ad platforms. When Google claimed they were going after content farms, and Demand Media’s properties (which are explicitly spam) were spared, the reason was obvious, because it would have visibly impacted their bottom line.

Brand is a deceptive concept. A hairy, smelly drug addict that compulsively molests women is not a sex offender but rather a globally famous rock star. Much the same holds true to many of the biggest brands. As long as a brand spams, that spam is opaque to Google’s customer base and their customers do not bring a negative association with Google’s brand. However, when that same hairy, smelly drug addict is anonymous he is a nuisance which destroys your reputation when you publicly associate yourself with him.

Google is like an oil company which not only dictates the price of oil but also chooses where an oil field will exist. Google is now “too big to fail” as indicated by the recent DOJ investigation which could have resulted in a felony charge for their co-founder, and most certainly would have for a smaller firm without $500m of liquid cash. We should be thankful that visitors are still directed to our websites when they could simply receive excerpts of what they are searching for.

My conclusion: first, I monetize my existing sites with Google’s own products as much as possible. Second: I no longer invest my time or money in new businesses that require Google’s traffic. Google should expect more walled content gardens in their future. Google’s biggest challengers such as Facebook and Apple recognize this, and their platforms are very much walled gardens. That is too bad for the web as we know it today.

As a consumer I want Google to have the best, most trustworthy experience possible. They can fight SEOs and affiliates all day long and it doesn’t bother me. I fully expected the innovative waves that helped the web destroy old media do the same again to itself. But, when Google lies, and do things that in fact damage that consumers experience no longer can I defend Google (when eHow first started popping up in 50% of the searches I did I was shocked; I am absolutely appalled they still show up on page 1 for anything, the articles are obviously written by authors that re-hashed another article in 10 minutes and often factually incorrect on top of it.)

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Andrew Johnson submitted the above (less the image) as a comment here, but we thought it deserved to be its own post on the blog so more people get to see it.