I hope Google doesn't respond to this. It's like asking Google : "I feel my competitors outrank me in results, and I deserve to be higher! Can't you see they are clearly cheating?"
I too am tired of people trying to game the system to their financial advantage. Build a good business and serve your customers well. Stop worrying about "some other guy" who may or may not have bought a link on some high ranking web site. Wrong focus!
Naive and wrong. Not every web based business is Demand Media. Try to be a little more empathetic to good businesses by honest, hardworking people whose sustainability depends on search discovery. Notice that I didn't say google search discovery. It just happens that google is the monopoly search engine, but if they weren't there, people would search with other engines.
Almost all companies are not open about the things they consider their competitive advantage. Google likes to promote themselves as an "open" company, but notice that their openness is almost always to support strategic decisions that commoditize their complements. Their business, the way they make money, is advertising from web search. And they are just as fanatically restrictive about anything they fear jeopardizes that segment's profitability as, say, Apple is restrictive about curating the app store.
I personally know a couple who had a thriving business for several years, then lost their home one season when their google rankings went south. Nothing they could do, they were doing the same things as in the past, but that was it.
What really chaps my hide in particular is that Google doesn't allow folks to track their rankings in anywhere near the accuracy or detail that they need to effectively manage their business. Its rationalizations for doing so are incredibly silly and deceptive: Just build a good website with plenty of content and we'll take care of the rest. What patriarchal and self-serving nonsense. Is there some reason to believe that google is infallible? Or even very close to infallible? Sites continue to successfully use paid links, sites continue to steal content and outrank the sources, and etc. Knowing your site's ranking data is obviously just as important a metric as any other a business might need to help them make decisions. No one says, "Well, just create a good business with great products. You don't need to keep financial books and really watch your cash flow too carefully, it'll just take care of itself." What tosh.
The hell of it is that google is well known for its fanatical approach to decision making through data, even to the point of dumb extremes. Yet, hypocritically, they don't allow business who depend on its monopoly of web search to obtain the data they need.
The concessions they do make, like webmaster tools, are poor and ineffective and feel like they were designed more to serve google's interests than webmasters. Their web search api turns out to be incredibly restrictive. If you talk to them directly to try to arrange something, there are even more unpublished (I believe, at least I couldn't find them anywhere) and incredible restrictions making it inviable for almost anyone. Remands me of that asmartbear.com article the other day where he recommended that, if you really don't want to do something, still offer it, but at such fantastic terms for yourself that you would be glad to do it. Google offers a search api only to say they do.
A hard-hearted response would be, "well, you shouldn't build a business on such an ephemeral platform as search discovery." Really? How about we have a world where there's a little more competition so we don't have to rely on the vagaries of one company? Wouldn't it be a better world if we could rely on the stability of our search platform if we continued to use the same strategies and put in the same effort we had before?
What people need to realize is that if you build a business that depends strongly on Google's platform you are facing the same risk as any business that is built atop another platform (facebook, ios, etc.). You are subject to the whims of the company you are using.
At most you should only do it if (1) you are trying to flip to said company, or (2) you use it as part of an interim strategy and will eventually lower to proportion of that platform's importance to your profit.
What really chaps my hide in particular is that Google doesn't allow folks to track their rankings in anywhere near the accuracy or detail that they need to effectively manage their business
Try Ginzametrics. They're a YC company and work great! (I don't work for them, just use their product)
I too am tired of people trying to game the system to their financial advantage. Build a good business and serve your customers well. Stop worrying about "some other guy" who may or may not have bought a link on some high ranking web site. Wrong focus!