Google please clarify - Is Adfero news a blog?

Written by Lee

Much as though one has to admire Google, I often am left scratching my big baldy head as to the ambiguity of its service from time and time.

Travel Insurance is one of those search terms which seems skewed by all that is wrong with SEO.

Firstly; there’s the big “We’re out to bust paid links” rhetoric from Google, yet I still see the sites that have purchased links in top positions.

It would not take a genius from Google to see which sites currently holding a top 10 position for the term ‘Travel Insurance’ have lined a palm or two with silver or gold to attain their position. The Travel Insurance sector is inundated with companies who have brought links. So is this an acceptable practice for Travel Insurance? Should we all do it?

Now on the first page of Google for ‘Travel Insurance’, we have news feeds from Adfero being displayed as blog posts?

I’m confused, Adfero provide news for sites, I know because a number of our clients use Adfero, and it is an exceptional service. My gripe is not with Adfero. Yes folks, my gripe is with Google. Please Google, I would like to know the answer to the following question……

What constitutes news? What constitutes a blog?

Here’s why I am confused at the mixed message coming from Google, look at the image below; beneath the ten most important and relevant sites (skewed by paid links) lies ‘News Results for travel insurance’ and ‘Blog posts about travel insurance’. Nothing wrong with that you might say.

Here’s my problem with this specific set of results. The blog posts ARE NOT blog posts; the supposed blog posts are nothing more than news feeds written by Adfero on the behalf of Go Travel Insurance. How do I know? Because it says so on the tin; on each of the ‘Blog posts’ sits the following give-away sign, © Adfero. Since when were Adfero bloggers?

I’m confused, not only are some of the sites in the top 10 of Google doing nothing more than buying links to falsify position, it would appear that Google is also allowing sites from the top 10 to hog the blog posts results as well with news feeds!

Google, please appraise this section of your search results. The three ‘Blog posts’ are clearly nothing of the sort, so why are they promoted as blog posts?

I suggest the Google Engineers perform a search for the term ‘Travel Insurance Blog’; the results for this term surprisingly bring in sites that are true blogs.

Travel Insurance Direct has a legitimate blog on their site and Travel Rants is an excellent blog. So why are both of these blogs ignored from Google’s Travel Insurance blog search? Why are they not promoted in the blog search? these sites are blogs, plain and simple!

Website owners have to adhere by Google’s rules; otherwise the big Google beat stick comes out and will swat a site from its index. Some may say this is fair enough; after all, their product, their rules, but I do have the following questions:

Who’s there to come back at Google?
Who’s there to say why are you favouring the large sites?
Who’s there to answer when did a news feed ever become a blog?
Why are sites that have clearly purchased links still ranked highly in the Google index?

Please God (freudian slip), Please Google, when are you going to sort these issues out?

But wait, I can reveal even more indiscretion and favouritism with Google News.

How is it that Google allows some sites featuring Adfero content into its news search (blog search), but not others? What’s the difference? What’s the deal? News, is news, is news! And here’s the thing, news content from Adfero is very similar in style no matter if the subject is different. News from Adfero is well-written and contains factual information.

I’ll give you an example of such discrepancies; Heating Oil buying site Boiler Juice has had related news written for the site by Adfero for a sustained period of time. I know Google news has been made aware of the news content on the site, but with no success. The news is in the preferred Google format and I cannot see for the life of me why heating oil news from the Boiler Juice site is not in Google news when another site buying in Adfero news content is seemingly getting preferential treatment from Google.

All I am after seeing is continuity and a level playing field. It’s simply not the case at this time, and whilst it appears that certain sites are gaining preferential treatment, why continue to take the results of Google seriously when it seemingly appears as though Google only want you to use the sites that Google wants you to use.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 28th, 2007 at 11:49 pm and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.