It's a movie theme here on SEOmoz this week. After Rebecca's post on real movies, I'm going to talk about an imaginary one. It's a movie that would go straight to DVD, but might nonetheless be compelling for those of us who are search geeks.

It's a battle between monsters - the might of Google pitched against some of the largest brands in the world. Anyone see Godzilla vs. King Kong? This is Amazilla vs. King Goog (well, Amazon et al - think any large online retailer). I wanted to do that as Googzilla vs. King Amazong but then I found a picture of lizards too good to pass up (see below).

I believe there could be a war coming and it's going to be one to watch. What does the search world look like when the carnage is over? I don't know but, in a second I'll present some scenarios. First, the background:
  • Increasingly, Google is encroaching into the markets of the largest web brands. There are companies who get large proportions of their revenue through search (paid and natural) for whom Google is not just a channel, but also only one step away from a competitor. For example, they have the one-box and Google Books for book searches (e.g., for me, a search for John Steinbeck has a one-box with three Google Books listings) and the payment method.
  • The official best practice for on-site tactics found in the webmaster guidelines have strayed (as Rand noted recently) away from just 'think of the users' into doing many things specifically for the search engines (Google in particular).
  • There is starting to be tough talk from Google about tactics that have been in place for years and are innocuous from a user's perspective but which treat the search engines differently, such as Amazon's redirects of internal navigation information in the URL that are cloaked for Googlebot. This came out at SMX Advanced, where Matt Cutts commented and there was a bit of a song and dance about the issue. There is a lot of talk from Google, but currently, I still see Amazon ranking pretty well...
Unintended consequences of actions

Google should be pretty good at thinking through unintended consequences of its actions. Some basic game theory insights (which we know they are good at over at the big G) tell us what to expect with nofollow, for example.

Nofollow has changed the link landscape to such a degree that it is starting to have the opposite effect of the intended one - when there is less incentive to get a link, it becomes ever more editorial. The quality of outbound links from Wikipedia, for example, is now actually pretty high as the incentive to game them has decreased. I would go so far as to say that on average, external nofollow links (i.e., not those you use to point at your privacy policy) might be higher value than un-nofollowed links.

As the quality increases, isn't that a signal you'd want to use in the algorithm? But it's only useful while it's not obvious that it's being used. A dilemma, and not the first example of a situation where Google's interests are not aligned with websites'.

Other unintended consequences they need to watch out for include what happens when they step into being a publisher / content creator and compete with those who use them as a sales channel.

So what happens next?

What happens when they push the giant lizards (and its friends) too far?

There is an old saying, that you if you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank owns you, but that if you owe the bank a billion dollars, you own the bank.

Some large internet brands have the power to take on the might of Google and actually hurt it. For a start, I can't imagine a site like Amazon.com getting booted out of the index. (I'm sure someone is going to bring up BMW and other examples in the comments, but I stand by this assertion. I think it would hand too much advantage to Yahoo! and Microsoft - do you fancy explaining to your non-SEO friends and relatives that they can't find stuff on Amazon through Google?)

Are we going to see some really big brands stand up to Google? Well, Amazon still has their cloaked redirect in place (try visiting this url as a regular user and as googlebot - really - check out that page. That product is AWESOME - and the inspiration for the space Godzilla in the title of the post), and you can see that they're still ranking pretty well. Is it just posturing, or has the lizard slashed the monkey? I like to think they have been asked to remove the cloaking and have said something along the lines of "Actually, we think this is the best for our users - we're keeping it." The thing is that the redirect takes you to the same page (bar minor formatting) and is the page anyone clicking through from Google will see - doesn't seem too bad to me. The extra stuff on the end of the URL for users tells Amazon that the user clicked through from Amazon's internal search (as far as I can tell).

You can see some big brands going down this route as well with the egregious link-selling going on by some of the largest brands in the world. They are sticking it to the big G and saying, "Bring it on." I'm not going to name them, but I have seen huge multi-national brands with blatant, off-topic anchor text homepage links that are not nofollowed and without a doubt are paid-for. Google might have manually stopped those links from passing juice, but they certainly haven't taken any stronger action (leading to an interesting 'caveat emptor' point - but that might be one for another post).

We are all aware that there are blackhat tactics out there, but until recently, Google could comfortably define blackhat in such a way that it was only really practised by non-brand sites (or rogue SEOs on brand sites). Increasingly, we are reaching a stage where almost any brand site is guilty of something that is against the guidelines. In a world where everyone is guilty of something, the people in power can dole out retribution on a whim.

I'm not saying that is happening at the moment, but if I were on the board of a multi-national e-commerce site making hundreds of millions of dollars a year through our natural search channel, you can bet I would be thinking about the risks - and what happens if the big monkey comes any closer.

Crazy outcome - the one in the film

It's the final show-down. The monkey has taken it too far. The lizard is properly cross.

Introduction to monstering

(Thanks to futuristmovies via flickr).

If Google stepped too far into the space of its customers and the people for whom it is two sales channels (paid and natural search), and natural search traffic started dropping, for example because there was always a one-box advertising a Google product, so:
  • Amazon is upset at the book and product advertising
  • Wikipedia is cross with Knol
  • Ebay is disappointed because of gebay (G doesn't own an auction site, do they? Bear with me here)
  • Newspapers are upset by Google News
What happens if they all get together and charge the monkey? For a short period, they:
  • change robots.txt: User-agent: googlebot, disallow: /
  • add an interstitial advert on all pages of Amazon, Wikipedia, Ebay, NY Times, all Yahoo! and Microsoft properties, etc. to say "Google no longer has any of these brands in its search results. We suggest you use Yahoo! or Live"
...and then the world explodes.

Most likely outcome

OK. So the big fight probably won't happen. Unfortunately, I think the most likely short-term outcome is a stand-off, in which big brands approximately toe the line, step over occasionally and are not punished, but don't push it too hard. In this situation, the small webmasters lose - they are scared of what they can and can't do when the guidelines say one thing and they can find Fortune 500 companies doing something else.

I am currently in a quandary about what to suggest to clients when it comes to cloaking, for example. We all know there are white hat uses of cloaking that shouldn't really be a problem to the search engines. But they are technically against the guidelines. I thought that was a real technicality and there was no risk if not done maliciously and the on-page copy was essentially the same, but the comments about Amazon's cloaking have made me think that isn't true.

Under this scenario, one thing to be expected is that we are going to continue to see large brands buying and selling links, and rankings being achieved using bought links with only the occasional slap-down to keep the proletariat in line.

If I were Ebay or Amazon, would I buy links? Well, put it this way, you can bet I'd sponsor an ipod competition or two...

Any resemblance to a real movie plot is entirely coincidental. I have not seen Godzilla vs. King Kong and nor am I likely to.

P.S. Tom pointed me to two interesting links - one from Ciaran on a similar subject and one about Epic 2014/2015 referenced by Ciaran.