Is Google Colour Blind?

It is a known fact that many websites are getting away with black hat SEO tactics like buying links, cloaking and spamming, and you would believe that, in a perfect world, Google is really serious about swinging its ban stick at sites that violate the rules.

After all, there are plenty of horrific stories about Google penalizing legitimate sites for various marginal or wrong reasons. Yet, there are miraculous stories like this one about an insurance site not only running black hat tactics under the nose of Google, but also rising to the first page in a short period of time. It really makes you wonder if Google is colour blind?

Being an in-house SEO, I feel like I’m being cheated. We have best practices to follow, we play by the rules, we listen to Google and Matt Cutts like a slave, yet the black hats often get away with all the wrong doings.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no plan to implement any black hat tactics if even I’m given the green lights, because I truly consider black hat as more of a short-term tactic to create bursts of traffic rather than a long term strategy. But what if every SEO out there employs black hat tactics? What would become the once dominated search engine called Google?

If Google is serious about world domination, or if they just want to create a high quality search engine, they should really pay more attention to the obvious offenders and penalize the black sheep rather than the innocent victims.

/rant