Should Google Penalize Companies for Their Official Brand Names?

Sometimes when a Google engineer decides he is pissed off at a site he or she may penalize the site in a way that the company does not rank in the top 30 results for any search query, including branded navigational queries. Imagine if you search for SeoBook and couldn't find this site? How is that a good user experience for searchers using Google? It is their index, so I think it is fair if Google nukes sites that they dislike for non-brand queries, but when they do it for brand related queries too, they make their search results irrelevant and provide a bad user experience. What makes the situation worse than it needs to be?

• the definition of relevancy changes depending on Google's business interests
• the definition of spam changes depending on Google's business interests
• Google is unpredictable in their hand editing
• if Google does not like a particular market they may hand edit the leading company while leaving competitors ranking at the top of the search results for the competitor's brand. in some cases they penalize the cleanest services while leaving dirtier market players easily accessible
• even if a site is deemed as spam and penalized they can still buy ads on Google, which makes it seem as though it is only spam if Google isn't getting paid

If Google wants to become the default way we access all information can they continue to penalize brands for their official brand names?

Published: September 2, 2007 by [Aaron Wall](/content/user/aaron-wall "View user profile."/index.html) in google