It’s already old news but the buzz following it is very intensive. Google’s fellow Amit Singhal, who is in charge of ranking team at Google wrote a post on official google blog about google rankings. What is so special about it? Well Singhal certainly didn’t reveal anything revolutionary, and I must say I didn’t expect anyone from Google to do so. However what did cause some waves was his statement about human intervention at Google.

Basically Amit stated that the main philosophies behind google ranking are:

1) Best locally relevant results served globally.
2) Keep it simple.
3) No manual intervention.

Although most of marketing world could agree with the first two statement, the third was the one that was most discussed on marketing forums, Sphinn, and many other sites. Especially since he stated the following “no manual intervention” but later he said that “we do take action on sites that are in violation of our policies”. That sounds a bit contrary I guess.

My personal view is a strongly belief that Google (and especially adsense folks) do a lot of manual intervention among the sites in their index. I am almost one hundred percent sure of that. However I don’t think that Amit was not telling truth. Rather than saying what Google don’t do, I think he was referring to what he and his team are trying to do, ie what are the philosophies behind their day to day work. Basically everything they lay their hands on - they try to do with those factors on their mind. When you think that way it becomes perfectly logical. I would say that the following is correct:

1) They try to globally serve best locally relevant results.
2) They try to keep all things simple.
3) They try to program their algos in a manner that would require as least manual intervention as possible.

That is much more correct, and I would say right. So don’t be angry on our friend Amit, he just didn’t understand that as Google fellow, a massive community is following each word you say or write trying to find a secret code. Not only that your words are understood literary, they also became some kind of a handbook for so many people. That would be the phenomenon that we are going to talk about in the near future. How much power have the words of the insiders.

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