Another day, another threat. Matt Cutt’s on the warpath again saying that some German SEO groups are abusing paid links that pass pagerank. https://twitter.com/mattcutts

Really? Again? Matt Cutts seems to really like announcing incoming manual penalties on Twitter before they take action.

What is the philosophy behind announcing such threats?

A Power Trip

First, it’s a power trip. It is a way to let people know “Who’s in charge”. Do you really think we would care if it was Bing claiming they were going to penalize paid links? Not really.

But because Google has the search monopoly, they are making up the rules as they go along. It is so bad that sometimes you have to think: “Is this a real law or is this a Google law?”

Because it’s not illegal to create 10000 websites with links pointing to another website. You won’t be taken to court if you do that… BUT it does violate the “Google law” where you are assumed guilty without access to a trial. (And if you consider reconsideration requests a trial… that’s pretty sad. That’s like going into a confessional without knowing what you did wrong. Confessing all your sins and hoping that some unknown person on the other side decides that your faith is saved.)

Fear Of Search Engine Manipulation

Second, it is also a way to strike FEAR into webmasters. Google loves to scare webmasters so that they’ll play by Google’s rules. Unfortunately most of Google’s rules are there to prevent you from manipulating the search engines. That means… that if there’s a rule for it, then it means it WORKS and they are actively trying to stop it (either via algorithm or manually).

Although the fear tactic seems to be working (I can’t count the amount of people that have given up on SEO in the past few years)… it really seems as if you should be working WITH webmasters instead of against them.