Seth Godin recently wrote a post titled Building 43. The gist of this post was that it’s a bad idea to best against the webspam team at Google. As reader’s of this blog know, I couldn’t agree more.
For Google, the relevance of their search results is a core strategic asset. If Google’s results are perceived to be more relevant by search engine users, they will continue to flock to Google the way they do now. And this equates directly to revenue and stock price. So Google will do everything they reasonably can to maximize their relevance.
And that means fighting spam in all of its forms. Many people don’t like to hear this, but this includes the purchasing of links for the purposes of improving your search engine rankings. This includes schemes to get links by stuffing comments on forums on university web sites. The list of the things that people try to do is a long one.
Point is that all these strategies come with a high degree of risk. If you have a business that you consider an asset, you don’t want to bet against Building 43. For example, if you have investors, if you have employees, or if you ever plan to sell the business someday, you can’t afford to take the risk.
