Five days ago I reported on a post where a personality in our industry questions the ethics and morals of Google after he posted the private conversation he had with Google's Matt Cutts while at SMX West.
I am not going to go into what he said here, you can read it on my post from last week for the short version or read his long argument at themoralconcept.net. There are plenty of comments on both his site and my story covering it for you to have fun.
On Friday, during a weekly Webmaster Hangout that we try to do every week at 2pm EST. I invited Josh Bachynski, the one calling Google's ethics into question, into the hangout. He came in around 25 minutes into our discussion and from there, he summed up his problems and the debate began.
You can start watching at about 25 minutes in, here is the video:
I am sorry, my mic quality was off today, so you may need to listen carefully.
Sasch, a Google Top Contributor, was really fun to watch debate with Josh. But I had fun just playing devils advocate and trying to exploit the holes, if any, in the logic used to call out Google's ethics as immoral for penalizing sites. Sasch also wrote his own post named Clearing up some misconceptions... related to Josh's arguments.
For me, it was more about can, should, etc Google do this but is it really unethical, immoral, evil and so on.
I find these conversations enjoyable, although not directly related to ranking higher in Google.
Matt Cutts himself has yet to respond to the questions laid out in Josh's post but he did tweet that he liked the hangout:
@joshbachynski I'm on vacation with in-laws this week. I thought https://t.co/D17a272Vaq was great context starting at 24:30.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 2, 2014After reading Josh's post, seeing the video and other comments, what do you think? Are Google penalties unethical and immoral?
