Law #3 of the 48 Laws of Power
Keep people off-balance and in the
dark by never revealing the purpose behind your actions. If they have no
clue what you are up to, they cannot prepare a defense. Guide them far
enough down the wrong path, envelope them in enough smoke, and by the time they
realize your intentions, it will be too late.
http://www2.tech.purdue.edu/cg/Courses/cgt411/covey/48_laws_of_power.htm
Question for the
Week of September 5th, 2008
Hey guru I’m sure you’ve already checked out Googles new browser
but I’m wondering if you think it will hurt my seo by helping google track my
sites. Does the incognito feature really work?
Thanks
You may be surprised Sam but I probably haven’t played with
Chrome nearly as much as you might think. Still, I do have some comments based
on my unique perspective.
John Andrews is a very smart
individual and a man I consider a friend. He has laser targeted his intellect
at the seo community and is a controversial commentator on all affairs
seo. He is controversial because he possesses a clarity of vision, a command of
language and a style that makes his offerings difficult to argue against, and
this is extremely unique in a world filled with un-intitated, ill-informed, opinionated
with no historical reference or record tidal wave of talking heads.
You can read John's post regarding Google Chrome here at John Andrew's Killer blog
but the pertinent take-away comes from this paragraph:
**********************
This morning my buddy Stefan sent me the
gizmodo link that shows Google’s license for the Windows binary known as
“Chrome”:
you might want to take a closer peek at the end user license agreement you
didn’t pay any attention to when downloading and installing it. Because
according to what you agreed to, Google owns everything you publish and create
while using Chrome.
The offending text from the Google license includes:
By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a
perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to
reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly
display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or
through, the Services…You confirm and warrant to Google that you have
all the rights, power and authority necessary to grant the above license.
*************************************************
While this statement does not address things like track, record, identify, take
action against, use to our specific benefit to control or restrict business
opportunities of any third party, (which we know they already do with other
features such as the toolbar), still, he has taken the time to identify the
pieces of the Google Chrome license that exposes their possible, (and based on
historical reference- likely), intentions.
When you think about the license agreement, how else could a
search engine phrase in legalese, the underlying purpose of any search
facility. There is little to indicate nefarious intent when you consider that
to display your url for a given search query, in over 100 countries using 100
languages, they kinda need your permission to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform,
publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display
on or through the Services.
Then throw in a little adsense with a dash of contextual flavoring and the stew begins to thicken. But, we've all had a laddle full of that brew already.
That said, just because there is, or at least may be, some justrification for the typical Google vaguenesses, that does not alter the fact that you are also giving them permission to store, analyze, demote, label, penalize, ban, ridicule, give their opinion on or attmept to sway public perception in their favor and to the possible detriment to a third party's reputation or business if they so choose for whatevere reason they choose.
Again ------
SAME AS IT EVER WAS
Like it or not, disagree with me or not,and in spite of all the blog posts to the contrary, seo's have given this exact same permission to every search engine there ever was from the first day they published online content and did not expressly forbid any search engine from taking that content with a no-follow/no-index.
Be that as it may, I personally feel uncomfortable at raising a bet with all my cards laying face up on the table. I realize there is really no cheap, easy way to NOT leave any footprints but that still doesn't mean I need to jump up and down naked while screaming look at me and hope nobody looks.
My professional philosophy,(which changed dramatically after the 2002 lawsuit), is that as long
as SK is in the business of placing websites at premium positions of the
organic results of the Google search engine, or to promote any website online
that touches the Google realm of influence on the net, (which is just about
everything), Google is NOT our friend, they are our competitor.
Until such time as we as a company decide on a different
direction, to use tools that exposes our internal intellectual property
and gives a third party free reign to use it any way they choose without
benefit of any legal restrictions or limitations is akin to cutting our
own throats.
As of today, I am making it official SK policy that no employee using SK
property may access the internet to download Google Chrome. This may change
at some point in the future but this policy shall stand until further
notice. Furthermore, the same policy applies to Google Gmail and/or the Google toolbar.
Now, that’s just me and over the next few posts I’ll give a few details of why
I'd make a policy like that. The reasons are likely a little different than you’d
expect. It certainly isn’t as obvious as it sounds.
As for others, let me point out something that I think is important for those who consider themselves
professional online promoters. This is taken from the cnet article here http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10032047-56.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
************************
Because Chrome is open source,
Eckersley suggested that one option would
be for privacy-minded outsiders to create their own suggestion engine that sits
on surfers' own PCs, offering some of the utility that Google provides, without
having to send the data to its servers. He noted that Chrome, itself,
already does this when a surfer uses Chrome in its more stealthy Incognito
mode. In that case, all suggestions are based on a surfer's locally stored
history.
I bolded the pertinent part realizing that not everyone can dissect
an open source app and modify but it just so happens that I have people on
staff who can. If I can, so can others and this may be a viable alternative in
much the same way as seoquake is for some things.
As for the question, “does the incognito feature really work”,
who knows outside of Google but if I was a betting man, I’d bet it works every
bit as good as Google wants it to. Here is what Google said:
The bolded part was to draw attention. The bolded,
italicized, ENLARGED part was added for shudder effect.
But as comforting as that sounds, here is what the Tech guy
for Cnet said:
"We are genuinely really worried about the Omnibox
thing," he said. "It's just one more piece of the complete puzzle of
Google seeing everything that everyone is doing."
I’m the first to admit I’m
paranoid but that doesn’t mean I’m not being watched.
Keep in mind that I’m the guy who
doesn’t believe there is any such thing as search engine spam. Here is what I
said about spam back in 2001.
There is no such thing as search engine spam!
http://www.v7n.com/basic-concepts.php
if you can agree that you or I can not
manipulate search engine results without having access to the source code or at
least an admin panel, then there can be no other conclusion but that search
engines can not be spammed, tricked, mislead, bribed or coerced. All that can
be done is build data that you believe best complies with what it is a specific
program does with specific data and then give it that data. You can submit that
data to a search service but from there, what that search engine program does
with that data is beyond your control. You can control the data you provide but
you can not control what the search engine does with that data once it has it.
That alone eliminates the entire premise of spamming a search engine.
Nothing has happened to change my
opinion in the last 7 years.
So to me, it is not an issue of
doing anything right or wrong. It is an issue of privacy and having the right
to operate my legal business as I see fit and with that right comes the right
to also protect my own intellectual property rights as well as those of my
clients who have entrusted those right to me.
I would expect that Chrome, like
a lot of Google products, offers a lot of features with good quality that you
may find value in. A lot of the things they do makes a lot of things easier,
faster and cheaper. BUT, with each one you can also see it comes at a price.
So I’m not telling you what to do,
I’m only telling you how I see it and what I intend to do.
Peace y’all
G
My mother used to tell me that she
married my father for his money and she was going to stay with him until he got
some!
But she got screwed.