Who polices the police

An interesting recent article in BusinessInsider talks about Google's MetaFilter. The search engine giant's algorithm defines who comes to the top and who goes down. For Google's part, it's an level plane field and no party enjoys unfair advantage. If you dont play by the rules (remember Target), Google dings you in the search results. This is perfectly understandable. But what if you play by the rule and one day you wake up to find your business upside down due to some obscure update in a Google search algorithm which has pushed your business down the ranks. That's where Google becomes a complete black box. 

"You want to hide a body, put it in the second page of Google search results". In January of 2013, this reality hit MetaCafe; an internet discussion forum which has the reputation as one of the intelligent discussion site on the web. 

MetaCafe earned bulk of its revenue through Google's Adsense program. The aftershock of this drop in traffic forced MetaCafe to layoff some of its employees. MetaCafe CEO did everything from reducing adds (Google penalizes for too many adds) to re-examining its whole SEO strategy, but neither helped. As a Google partner, he tried to approach Google to get some explanation as to why his site now suddenly dropped ranks. Again no answer or plausible explanation from the search engine giant. 

If it were to be true that MetaCafe did play by the rules and Google update to algorithms somehow penalized MetaCafe, then shouldn't be Google open about it's updates? Or said another way, who polices the police! For now, the answer seems that no one does. You just got to beleave that Google would "do no evil", and your energies will be well spent in propagating your business and not in researching the black box we know as Google!