No replies to this topic

[Michael_Martinez]

Greg Sterling has been covering the Foundem complaints with Google for a long time, but until today I have not been made aware through any of his articles of Foundem's claim that last February Google Websearch "whitelisted" their site due to an intervention from the AdWords Team.

See a brief summary of the claim here. If you search for references to the whitelisting, you'll find plenty of news articles mentioned it -- but none of them were published on Search Engine Land.

There is supposed to be an insurmountable wall between Google organic search and paid search. They supposedly don't interfere with each other.

There is also supposed to be an algorithmic enforcement of Google's quality standards for all Web publishers. NO EXCEPTIONS.

And yet Foundem is claiming that despite their consistent and flagrant violation of Google's Webmaster guidelines they were able to get the AdWords Team to intervene with organic search and whitelist Foundem so that they will no longer labor under a spam penalty -- despite the fact they continue to violate Google's guidelines.

This is not the kind of fair enforcement of Web spam policy I have come to expect from Google. If they are going to whitelist Foundem, they need to whitelist ALL aggregators.

NO EXCEPTIONS.