<story><title>How Demand Media Used PR Spin to Have Google Kill Their Competitors</title><url>http://www.seobook.com/google-kills-ehows-competitors</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>moultano</author><text>&amp;#62;&lt;i&gt;Google can&apos;t as easily remove a larger brand from their results.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Google was willing to ban BMW for hidden text.
&lt;a href=&quot;http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=8252259&amp;#38;page=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=8252259&amp;#38;page=1&lt;/a&gt;
Also, the author does not substantiate the claim that ehow benefitted from this tactic.&lt;p&gt;&quot;Self-promotion&quot; means getting &lt;i&gt;customers&lt;/i&gt; to like your site, not tricking search engines into thinking they already do.</text></item><item><author>nostromo</author><text>&amp;#62; Demand Media further benefited from flagrant spammy guideline violations, like 301 redirecting expired domains into deep eHow pages. People I know who have done similar have seen their sites torched in Google. But eHow is different!&lt;p&gt;Hearing this is what makes my blood boil as a small startup.  Small and new brands are walking on eggshells trying to balance self-promotion without pissing off Google.  Meanwhile larger brands regularly practice black- or gray-hat SEO and survive because Google can&apos;t as easily remove a larger brand from their results.  But if you&apos;re small, Google can and will kill you in an instant without recourse.  The ramifications of this are bad for the internet -- it means higher barriers to entry for startups.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>patio11</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Google was willing to ban BMW for hidden text&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;That lasted, what was it, 48 hours?  I have no interest in picking a fight, but for the benefit of other HNers because this really matters for their businesses: there is definitely a point in brand value where the rules change.  A one-man operation who pulled a BMW would get terminated without a second thought and would find it very, very difficult to get their old rankings back.  Google can&apos;t do that to BMW because if BMW can&apos;t rank for auto-related queries in Germany then Google looks stupid.&lt;p&gt;(Public sanction like the BMW thing is more a messaging tactic than anything else.  I mean, case in point, we&apos;re talking about a single identifiable incident prominent enough to be mentioned in the mass media in a foreign country multiple years ago.  Ditto the incident where Google Japan got wrist-slapped for buying reviews.  What&apos;s the French phrase &quot;to encourage the others&quot;?)</text></comment>
<story><title>How Demand Media Used PR Spin to Have Google Kill Their Competitors</title><url>http://www.seobook.com/google-kills-ehows-competitors</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>moultano</author><text>&amp;#62;&lt;i&gt;Google can&apos;t as easily remove a larger brand from their results.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Google was willing to ban BMW for hidden text.
&lt;a href=&quot;http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=8252259&amp;#38;page=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=8252259&amp;#38;page=1&lt;/a&gt;
Also, the author does not substantiate the claim that ehow benefitted from this tactic.&lt;p&gt;&quot;Self-promotion&quot; means getting &lt;i&gt;customers&lt;/i&gt; to like your site, not tricking search engines into thinking they already do.</text></item><item><author>nostromo</author><text>&amp;#62; Demand Media further benefited from flagrant spammy guideline violations, like 301 redirecting expired domains into deep eHow pages. People I know who have done similar have seen their sites torched in Google. But eHow is different!&lt;p&gt;Hearing this is what makes my blood boil as a small startup.  Small and new brands are walking on eggshells trying to balance self-promotion without pissing off Google.  Meanwhile larger brands regularly practice black- or gray-hat SEO and survive because Google can&apos;t as easily remove a larger brand from their results.  But if you&apos;re small, Google can and will kill you in an instant without recourse.  The ramifications of this are bad for the internet -- it means higher barriers to entry for startups.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nostromo</author><text>Well, since you work at Google, I&apos;ll keep walking on egg shells...  Please don&apos;t kill me all powerful Google!  :-P&lt;p&gt;In all seriousness, I liked the Google of 5 years ago that temporarily banned BMW better than the Google of today.  I wish that the rules were applied for big and small brands in exactly the same way -- but it doesn&apos;t seem they are.  When BMW was blacklisted I was impressed -- but this stiff punishment hasn&apos;t seemed to happen for JCPenny or Demand Media in the same way it has been applied to smaller businesses.&lt;p&gt;Another example: these are clearly paid links: &lt;a href=&quot;http://techcrunch.com/2008/10/17/thank-you-techcrunch-sponsors-5/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://techcrunch.com/2008/10/17/thank-you-techcrunch-sponso...&lt;/a&gt; - if small time bloggers try shit like this they get shut down, but this is TechCrunch, so it slides.  I think this shows how there seem to be two sets of rules, one for the established and one for the startup.</text></comment>