Is Google Ethical & Moral For Penalizing Webmasters? One SEO & Ethics PhD Says Absolutely Not.

Josh Bachynski is a name many folks who are involved in the SEO community, attend the conferences, are on Twitter or the forums, have heard of. He has always been a skeptic of Google but recently he was able to speak one-on-one with Google's Matt Cutts and address his problems.

The honors with a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, and (half) a PhD specializing in Ethics and Rational Decision Theory, went ahead and posted much of his private conversation with Matt Cutts on a site he created named themoralconcept.net. It is an incredibly long read but in short, Josh Bachynski aims at proving, at least based on rational theory, how Google is being immoral and unethical by penalizing sites, at least the way they do that.

His three points, although I am sure he has more are:

(1) Google does not have the "moral authority or justification" to penalize sites, specifically with algorithms such as Penguin.

(2) Google is stealing content from webmasters through what they call the Knowledge Graph.

(3) Google penalizing webmasters using humans or as known as manual actions.

Those are his complaints and he makes strong and clear arguments for why there are issues with it.

Now, he then goes on to explain how Matt Cutts responded and ultimately, it made it look like Matt Cutts admitted Google was mostly wrong.

Now, of course, this is Josh's version. This also may be Matt just listening and not responding too much to his questions or issues.

Josh notified Matt after he posted it at:

@mattcutts http://t.co/1PDCQXZh8D - i didnt pull any punches :-) you are a big boy, you can take it. But will you listen is my question...

— josh bachynski (SEO) (@joshbachynski) April 29, 2014

Then Matt confirmed:

@joshbachynski thanks for sending me the link.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) April 30, 2014

Matt also confirmed speaking with Josh at SMX:

@NickLeRoy I did talk with Josh at SMX West.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 1, 2014

The questions is would Matt Cutts agree the conversation went this way exactly? I am not saying Josh is lying, not at all. But sometimes people take one conversation and take two things out of it.

Like I said, Matt may agree with Josh or not.

Anyway, it is worth a read and I'd love to see if/when Matt Cutts responds. I doubt he will but who knows.

Forum discussion at Black Hat World (which has a ton of fun takes on it alone).